Kenya has emerged from twenty-four years of rule by Daniel Arap Moi. It was a regime characterised by prevalent corruption.

The elections at the end of December gave a landslide victory to the opposition leader, Mwai Kibaki.

Many promises have been made. Expectations are high. But does the new government have the will, or the means, to tackle the problems so endemic in Kenya? Andrew Harding reported.

ANDREW HARDING:
From the outside, Kenya's Parliament just looks like it always has, calm, uninspiring. But inside, something remarkable is happening. Kenya's very own velvet revolution. Giddy with excitement, a new government is taking control for the very first time. The old ruling party, corrupt and deeply unpopular, has been banished to the opposition benches after four decades in power. The new team, it must be said, contains a few questionable characters who jumped ship from the old government. But most are committed reformers like the environmental activist, Wangari Maathai, a life-long critic of President Moi's regime. Elected by a landslide, the Government is promising to shake-up Kenya, and root out corruption.

KIRAITU MURUNGI:
(Minister for Justice)
There are no sacred cows. In our clean-up exercise, we are not going to discriminate. We deal with the big fish, the small fish, and everybody who is caught by the net.

ANDREW HARDING:
"Unbwogable", today this rap song has become something of a theme tune for Kenya. The word means unstoppable, a reference to the new government, and to an extraordinary change in the public mood. People power has come to Kenya. I don't know how long it will last, but one amazing thing that has already changed since the election, is that people in Nairobi have stopped paying bribes to the traffic police. So no-one is paying bribes any more?

UNNAMED MAN:
We aren't paying.

ANDREW HARDING:
How about you?

UNNAMED MAN 2:
Even me, it's like that.

ANDREW HARDING:
You don't pay any bribes?

MAN 2:
I wouldn't.

ANDREW HARDING:
And you used to?

MAN 2:
Yes, before, I used to, but not now.

ANDREW HARDING:
So what's changed?

MAN 2:
Since we've got a new government, we've stopped giving them money.

UNNAMED MAN 3:
Concerning bribes, that has improved. But they should also improve the lives of the policemen as well. That's very important.

ANDREW HARDING:
Pay them more?

MAN 3:
Yes, pay them better salaries, give them better facilities, better housing, you know, I think that is also important.

UNNAMED WOMAN:
They are not free to receive any bribery because of anything. So it shows that feeling that there should be no corruption at all.

ANDREW HARDING:
So things are really changing?

WOMAN:
Yeah, I feel they are really changing.

ANDREW HARDING:
The changes are already sweeping through the Ministry of Environment. Wangari Maathai is breaking with tradition, deigning to answer calls from the general public.

WANGARI MAATHAI:
This is the hot-line. People are calling on all kinds of issues. We just announced it this morning at 11.00am. People saw it at the 1.00pm news. They are already calling from all over the country to tell us different things that are happening to their environment. It's very interesting.

ANDREW HARDING:
It's all a huge change from the Moi era, when idle officials spent most of their time listening to the radio, waiting to hear if they had been sacked. Dispensing with the usual Mercedes, the new assistant minister took us for a drive.

WANGARI MAATHAI:
Towards the end of the last regime everybody in the country became a victim of the system. Poverty increased, hospitals collapsed, the transport system collapsed. Roads collapsed, the education system collapsed. At that level everybody becomes a victim, so everybody is willing to give this government a chance, and for it to prove that it can be different.

ANDREW HARDING:
And what better way to prove it than to take back land. Here on the edge of Nairobi, stolen by President Moi's cronies.

WANGARI MAATHAI:
This is what we are talking about when we say that people who were politically-well connected in the previous government were able to privatise sections of the forest. This is what we are saying must be delivered back to the Government.

ANDREW HARDING:
So you're going to tear these fences down?

WANGARI MAATHAI:
The owner will have to come and remove it. This morning, we made an announcement that all of this must go, and the land must come back to the forest, so that we can plant trees and replace these indigenous forests.

ANDREW HARDING:
That will be very unpopular with a lot of very rich, powerful people, won't it?

WANGARI MAATHAI:
It will only be unpopular to people who know they got it through corruption. This is stealing of public property.

ANDREW HARDING:
So will things really change now in Kenya? Can one of world's most corrupt countries reinvent itself? If anyone knows the answer to that, it's Yash Pal Ghai, the man in charge of drawing up a new constitution for Kenya. He knows from personal experience quite how rotten the system became under President Moi.

Prof YASH PAL GHAI:
(Chairman, Constitutional Review Commission)
The President fell after some attempt at being generous, in terms of offering me land and so on. I was not interested in that.

ANDREW HARDING:
He was trying to bribe you?

YASH PAL GHAI:
Well, I won't put it that way, he's been very kind to me. Of course, one gets deeply compromised when that happens. It is public land after all, no payments are made for that.

ANDREW HARDING:
Can this new government really heal Kenya, and solve these issues of corruption and justice?

YASH PAL GHAI:
It's hard to say, but I believe the circumstances are propitious. I think that for the Government, if they are generally committed to these objectives, they need strong support from the public. Public awareness of corruption, and the different mechanisms by corruption is achieved, if that's a term one can use, is very wide, very wide. People know exactly what is going on. They are outraged by that, and for the first time, they feel maybe the Government is going to help them fight it.

ANDREW HARDING:
In the meantime, Kenya's new government faces other challenges. In a bold move, it's just announced that all primary education will be free, with immediate effect. At a school on the edge of a Nairobi slum, eager parents queue up to enrol their children.

Mr OHATO:
It's promising. At least people have some hope. You don't have kids at home who are eligible to go to school, so that at the end of day, or at some point, they don't become a problem. They don't become street boys, beggars, you know.

ANDREW HARDING:
But for now, the system has virtually ground to a halt. The school's struggle to cope with the extra demand. The Government may be promising more than it can deliver.

RUTH NAMULUNDU:
(Olympic Primary School)
It is not a number we can easily cope with, but we are trusting the Government will help us.

ANDREW HARDING:
By what? By providing more teachers?

RUTH NAMULUNDU:
By providing more teachers, enough classrooms, furniture, books, toilets.

ANDREW HARDING:
But this is a bit of a bombshell to be dropped on your school, isn't it?

RUTH NAMULUNDU:
It is, and it has been worrying from Monday. But yesterday the minister for local government came around, and promised they are going to build structures within one week, and they're going to see that we get teachers. We are trying to cope.

ANDREW HARDING:
Kenya's problems, the poverty, the corruption, the slums, none of them will disappear overnight. But there is no reason why they can't be fixed, and this new government has got off to a determined start.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.