A foreigner who touched down at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) with scores of books as gifts has opened up about his experience at the busy airport.
In an opinion piece he penned for an American institute, Efosa Ojomo, a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, revealed that he was tempted to offer a bribe to the officer during the ordeal.
It all started in mid-November when Ojomo arrived for the Access to Market conference in Nairobi with 40 books in tow. He revealed that the books were scheduled to be offered as gifts to the attendees of the event.
"As I walked out of the airport with my luggage, I was stopped by a customs official. He informed me that I needed to pay import duties for the books," he claimed.
"I told him I wasn’t selling them and was simply giving them away as gifts. He said it didn’t matter and I still had to pay. I didn’t know any better so I complied. This is where my troubles began."
Ojomo further alleged that he was tired from the nine-hour flight as well as an additional 1-hour sorting out immigration and picking up his luggage and hoped that the customs stage would take a shorter time.
The official handling his case, however, took 30 minutes to fill out the paperwork and calculate the import duties, which totalled Ksh18,402 ($120).
It took another 40 minutes for the officer to get the credit card machine to work so that Ojomo could pay.
"So, after flying for almost nine hours to Nairobi, via London, and spending over an hour going through immigration and waiting for my luggage, I had to spend another hour waiting for the customs official to take roughly $120 from me. This is when the temptation happened," he added.
"I was not only tired and hungry but also felt dirty, the way one feels after a long day of travelling. It is then I reasoned, what might happen if I offered the custom official $50 to let me through? I didn’t ask and waited until he got the machine to work. After I paid, however, the entire experience got me thinking about corruption."
Ojomo, however, resisted the temptation to offer the bribe but lifted the lid on why a majority of Kenyans are compelled to participate in corruption either willingly or not willingly.
In November, the airport's management came under sharp criticism after a record number of foreigners lamented over the harassment at the Customs section at JKIA.
The passengers claimed that the officials infringed on their privacy by searching through their items to ascertain the goods.
Pilots were also not spared in the search, including Captain Fredrick Malu, who questioned why customs officials ransacked his bags over a Ksh10,000 item - which did not meet the threshold.
Following the uproar, Tourism CS Alfred Mutua toured JKIA and assured the public that necessary measures were enforced to restore order and sanity at the airport.
According to East African tax regulations, goods valued up to Ksh75,000 (USD500) for each traveler are exempted from import tax as long as the luggage is accompanied and declared to the Customs Officer.
