Latest: Corruption and Money Laundering.

Africa’s presidents are struggling to meet their own ambitious anti-corruption targets.

President Uhuru Kenyatta: frustrated. (Reuters/Stephane Mahe)

Kenya’s president Uhuru Kenyatta was last week roundly criticized by his country men and women after admitting, in startlingly frank terms, his helplessness in fighting against endemic corruption. Kenyatta said he had tried everything in his power including sacking cabinet ministers and others implicated in corruption to no avail.

“Show me any one administration since independence that has taken action on corruption like I have done, the president said. “I have removed everybody. I have done my part, at great expense also, political, by asking these guys to step aside.”

His frustration is a classic tale of failed attempts by different African governments in their relentless struggle to fight the vice that has plagued the continent for decades. His comments came as no surprise, though, as a survey by market research firm, Infotrack, in August this year, ranked his office and that of his deputy the most corrupt state departments in the country.

Like his Kenyan counterpart, Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari has spoken of frustrations in fighting the corruption in Africa’s largest economy, despite the zeal to do so. That frustration and a lack of meaningful tangible results, probably led to government agencies sidestepping legal due process and raiding homes of judges this month in a corruption purge that has been criticized by civil society watchers. Buhari won last year’s election with a campaign focused on rooting out corruption but his ineffectiveness so far has used up his goodwill and is now accused of using the anti-corruption drive to go after political rivals.

The sheer scale of the scandals reported in Nigeria and Kenya have been mind-boggling at times. The former head of Kenya’s anti-corruption commission Philip Kinisu told Reuters in Mar. 2016 that Kenya loses about a third of its annual budget (equivalent to $6 billion) to corruption yearly.

“This is an unfortunate but not an unanticipated state of affairs considering the theatre of the absurd that has been the war against corruption since 2013,” anti-corruption crusader John Githongo, tells Quartz.

Critics like Samuel Kimeu the executive director Transparency International-Kenya, say leaders such as president Kenyatta appear to have lost the political will to fight the vice once and for all.

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