I have just come back from Kenya with my wife, Diana. It was a photographic safari - a holiday with a difference. We could only afford the cost by making budget arrangements over the Internet. So we were not just whisked away from the airport straight into an expensive lodge on a wild game reserve, without seeing how the people live.

I used to believe shanty towns like Soweto were few and far between, and mainly the product of Apartheid in South Africa. We were astonished to find another huge shanty town on the outskirts of Nairobi. It stretched for miles - thousands of ramshackle wooden cabins, most of them not much bigger than garden sheds with families living in them. The towns outside Nairobi are little better. Nakuro, for example, won an award about twenty years ago for being the most beautiful town in East Africa. Now it is a dump, with pavements full of ramshackle stalls, most large buildings in a state of decay and disrepair, and the side streets lined with Soweto-style ramshackle cabins. There is no free refuse disposal service, and little in the way of public sanitation - a breeding place for disease. The slums of Victorian England would have been palaces by comparison.

Unemployment is officially 60%, but this does not take into account casual labourers who don't pay tax. There are no unemployment benefits. So begging and theft are rife, and people are more afraid of the relentless demands of the police for bribes than of the thieves themselves. A young Dutch medical student described appalling scenes of hospitals crammed with people dying of Aids: the state provides no food for the patients, and so families are camped in the wards, looking after their loved ones.

In spite of this appalling situation, there are signs of hope for the future. There is a free press, and, in theory at least, Kenya is a multi-party democracy. Kenyans value education, and adult litteracy is 78%. parents have to pay to send their children to state schools and most do. Children have to learn English and Swahili as foreign languages, and lessons start at 8.00 am and finish after 6.00pm, with few breaks including only an hour for lunch. Most Kenyans we met are fluent English speakers.

We went to All Saints Cathedral for what turned out to be the retirement mass of Archbishop David Gitari. He said he would give three "brief" sermons, and the service lasted for over three hours. The cathedral was packed with many people left standing, while queues formed outside for the next service - all the Africans, however poor, wearing their Sunday best.

The Archbishop is a great, good and very brave man. He is an outspoken critic of the corrupt government of President Moi, and two thirds of his sermons was political. In 1989 he had narrowly survived an assassination attempt. In his view, the doctrine of the Kingdom of God shows us how Jesus was involved in the social, political, economic and spiritual affairs of the world, and it was a disgrace that the war against poverty, ignorance and disease was being lost, and that too many people were dying of curable diseases. He blamed this on President Moi's 24 year old presidency. He condemned official corruption, because it concentrates too much wealth and power into the hands of a very few, while the roads go without repair, the hospitals are bereft of proper facilities and medicine, and police have to supplement their pay through bribery and extortion. There is a general election due in December, and the Archbishop condemned President Moi for appointing his own favoured candidate for the presidency, instead of leaving the choice to his party.

President Moi is retiring in Decemnber, and, according to the newspapers, he is afraid his successor might prosecute him for corruption. That is why he wants a successor who will protect him and his cronies and be controlled by him. The favoured successor's name is Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta, and newspapers refer to this plan scathingly as "the Uhuru Project". There is opposition to this "project" from within the ruling Kanu Party, and the opposition parties have formed an alliance to oppose Kanu.

We have all seen how corrupt African governments deal with serious political opposition: if they can't divide the opposition along tribal lines, they will rig the voting in the cities (how do you register the millions of shanty town residents?), spend vast amounts of public money on promoting their cause in the countryside which the opposition cannot reach, and, ultimately, resort to violence and intimidation.

Kenyans are ashamed that Kenya is reputed to be the world's fourth most corrupt country. They are not begging for aid from abroad, and are not blaming all their country's ills on the old colonial administration. They want the chance to elect a government which will put the country right. The purpose of this article is a plea for every reader with any influence in high places to encourage the governments of the developed world to use their influence to ensure that the forthcoming elections are fully free and fair. Kenyans deserve nothing less.

NB. In December 2003 there was a change of government following the General Election in Kenya, and hopefully the new government is better than the last one.

The corrupt government of President Moi lost the election, but the stories we hear about the new government suggest they may not be very much better