It doesn't take much historical insight to know that a corrupt Kenya will, in the end, be a failing Kenya

Last week I was invited to a get-together between President Mwai Kibaki and foreign entrepreneurs who invest - or hope to invest - in Kenya, organised by the Commonwealth Business Council. These are usually events at which new African governments (Kibaki is less than three years in the saddle) declare an end to the bureaucratic nightmares and official scams of the past and announce that their countries are open for business.

Kibaki attempted to do just that. Sadly, the man once regarded as Kenya's finest economist makes for an unconvincing cheerleader these days. Since a near-fatal car crash and a series of strokes, the 73-year-old leader has lost much of his intellectual acuity. As he meandered through a rambling speech, struggling to remember even the names of Kenya's geographical neighbours, I found myself cringing in sympathetic embarrassment. But as I left Marlborough House, it occurred to me that the individuals who had really embarrassed themselves that day were not Kibaki and his phalanx of ministers, but the foreign businessmen who had played such oleaginous court to them.

You see, anyone who knows anything about Kenya knows that, far from breaking with past sleaze, the new regime has so brazenly copied the techniques perfected under the retired president, Daniel arap Moi, that appalled western ambassadors have publicly denounced the level of official graft. They know that Britain's Home Office recently deemed the Kenyan transport minister, Chris Murungaru, so unsavoury that it revoked his visa. They know that Kibaki's anti-corruption tsar John Githongo so despaired of making headway he fled into exile. Did a single one of the businessmen present raise these delicate issues in the question-and-answer session with Kibaki? Did they, hell.

I can imagine what some of these men might have said, had I reproached them for their fawning (it was "Your Excellency" with every breath). "We leave the moralising about human rights and graft to you journalists. We're hard-headed entrepreneurs; our business is making money. In the process, we create jobs and wealth. It's simply not our concern whether the countries we operate in are democracies or dictatorships, clean or corrupt."

It's a line I heard repeatedly, if pronounced with varying degrees of bluntness, covering Africa for the Financial Times. The trouble is, it's total rubbish, and anyone who spouts it, so proud of his hard-headed pragmatism, is suffering from a naivety as sweeping, in its own way, as that which afflicts the gap-year student who believes digging latrines will benefit Africa's poor.

I have no antipathy towards private enterprise. Given the failure of state-owned bodies in Africa, something has to fill the vacuum created, and I'd rather see country X's water industry in the hands of a moderately competent private company than its poor going without running water at all, which is what happens at the moment. Those railing about the privatisation conditions being placed on western aid should ask themselves why it is that every African despot has fought to maintain state control of the economy. Believe me, this is not the intellectual company you want to keep.

Yet there are times when even I find myself musing about driving a steel-tipped boot into the pinstriped behinds. Because experience shows that in the long term - and most businessmen need to think long term, given that factories and flower farms take years to set up, trade networks decades to establish - dictatorships and graft-ridden patronage systems destroy economies, while transparent democracies do not.

There were plenty of smart-arse businessmen who thought they could work the system in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Zaire. For a time a few did, paying the necessary bribes to win their contracts, schmoozing murderous leaders, closing their eyes to the tear gas and screams on the streets. But as the years passed and the corrupt African elites they had befriended pillaged local industries without restraint, taking but never giving back, each country's respective golden goose grew scraggy and died. It will take billions of dollars now to revive those rusting industries.

The cynical approach, supposedly a pragmatic response, ended up being a short-term, self-defeating calculation. When the judges have been bought off by the president, who will defend the validity of your contract in court? How do you run a factory when there's a power cut every shift and the roads are so potholed your goods can't get to market? And how do you stop your imports disappearing at the docks when the port manager has done a deal with a minister and he threatens to deport you if you complain?

The businessmen who attend meetings with the likes of Kibaki should be asking tough questions not because they are great humanitarians, but because it is in their own interest to do so. It doesn't take much historical insight to know that a corrupt Kenya will, in the end, be a failing Kenya. The Moi years, during which the economy went into a nosedive, proved that point. How puzzling, then, that the men glad-handing Kibaki this past week haven't yet learned the lesson.

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