Last week the names of two Englishmen reverberated around the Muthaiga Country Club. Although the talk these days in this colonial anachronism is of wildlife conservation and opposition politics, the club is just as exclusive as it was 50 years ago when it was rocked by the scandal surrounding the murder of Lord Atholl, a case still remembered as "White Mischief".

"It's like the Prague Spring, like the assassination of Martin Luther King," said ecologist Mr Michael Rainy, an American who has lived in Kenya for over 30 years. The Englishmen being toasted are Mr John Ward and Insp John Troon, whose persistence in uncovering the truth behind two separate murders threatens to topple the current regime by exposing corruption at the heart of government.

The only obvious link between the deaths of tourist Julie Ward in 1988, and that of Foreign Minister Robert Ouko in 1990, is that the state pathologist decided both were suicides: suicide victims who both managed to dismember themselves before setting themselves alight.

Mr Ward, a hotelier from East Anglia, is reputed to have spent £500,000 in his search for his daughter's killers. Earlier this week, Mr Simon Ole Makallah, former senior warden of the Maasai Mara National Park - the man who led Mr Ward to her abandoned vehicle and the discovery of what was left of his daughter's body - was arrested for her murder.

The "suicide" of Robert Ouko was equally unlikely. The remains of his bound and charred body were found near his remote farmhouse six hours drive from Nairobi. A popular and able politician, he was abducted and murdered within a few days of returning empty-handed from a fundraising visit to Britain and the US.

The particular project at issue - a 64storey skyscraper, brainchild of media tycoon Mr Robert Maxwell - was already controversial as it was sited in a small park in downtown Nairobi. Not only was it prestigious - it would have been the tallest building in Africa - but, according to Mr Smith Hempstone, US Ambassador to Kenya between 1989 and 1993, it stood to make a lot of people very rich.

Indeed, in Rogue Ambassador, his account of these events, Mr Hempstone, formerly an Africa-based foreign correspondent, names Energy Minister Mr Nicholas Biwatt as the man who pulled the trigger on Ouko.

Rogue Ambassador is banned in Kenya.

As two other high-profile political murders in 1968 and 1975 (while Jomo Kenyatta was still alive) had proved internationally damaging, President Daniel arap Moi brought in New Scotland Yard to ensure transparency. "I want no stone left unturned," he said at the time.

Yet Insp John Troon who led the investigation into Ouko's death left Kenya with the job unfinished. "I left Kenya reluctantly," he said in a rare interview this week in Kenya's foremost newspaper, the Nation. "I have never been approached by any representatives of the Kenyan government to state the reasons why I did not complete those investigations and the reasons for leaving Kenya prematurely. Suffice it to say that I am not surprised by this lack of interest."

His comments came in the light of a book written by Mr Jonah Anguka, the then district commissioner for the area where Ouko lived, who was himself accused of the murder and fled to the US. Entitled Absolute Power, it draws heavily on Insp Troon's never published report.

"All Kenyans should read this book," said Insp Troon. "The principal participants are still at liberty with what appears to be the full connivance of certain individuals in authority, the same authorities who used corrupt and incompetent Kenyan law enforcement officers to promulgate a campaign of frustration and interference with legitimate and lawful investigations undertaken by me to try and ascertain the truth."

Corruption is endemic in Kenya, from the strips of metal teeth which turn the roads around Nairobi into slaloms - road blocks ostensibly to check on overloaded lorries but providing instant income to traffic cops - to the roads themselves. The highway from Mombasa, Kenya's chief port, is today little more than a dirt track. An offer to construct a proper road by a multinational petrol company in return for the fuel franchise was turned down because, it is claimed, cabinet members were investors in rival petrol companies.

While the Cold War was at its height, the West turned a blind eye to such feather-bedding: it was the price it paid for Kenya's continued allegiance.

Now things are different, a point emphasised by President Clinton's bypassing of Kenya in his pan-African expedition in March. Instead, President Moi was obliged to travel to Uganda to plead his case, which resulted in last week's visit to Nairobi of President Clinton's money man, the secretary of the US Treasury, Mr Robert Rubin, whose message was unequivocal: clean up your act, and then we'll talk.

And President Moi has no choice. On the surface, Nairobi appears to be thriving. The "Jua Kali" economy ("hot sun" - roadside industries) is doing well. Foreign money, particularly courtesy of the Aga Khan, is still coming in. Yet the infrastructure is crumbling. The Kenya cow has been milked dry by high-level corruption.

It's no wonder the police are on the take when they're not being paid. Before the last election, teachers were promised a salary rise of 200 per cent. Now they're on strike. This week's enterprising solution to the problem - to retire all teachers at the age of 50 - did not go down well given that the politicians who came up with it are themselves of pensionable age.

Mass market tourism is down 50 percent as a result of the so-called ethnic disturbances on the coast last summer. However, these Muslim-versus-indiginous-African atrocities were in reality a nightmarish example of political gerrymandering as imported thugs attacked an up-country tribe before the election in an area that was crucial to the ruling party's continued dominance.

Official political opposition is something new in Kenya and as the majority of opposition parties are tribally based, any serious threat to Kanu, the ruling party since independence in 1963, is unlikely. The cross-tribal nature of Kanu has ensured its supremacy in a country of over 70 tribes, 40 different languages and 20 language families - and that's not counting the Europeans or Asians.

Earlier this week, in an effort to encourage general belt-tightening, President Moi announced that he was taking a 50 per cent pay cut. No one was impressed.

As political commentator Robert Shaw wrote in the Nation: "Such an offer would only have true meaning if other measures to reduce expenditure in the office of the President were also carried out."

Such as reducing the vast presidential fleet of cars, the presidential jet or even "taking a leaf from the British royal family and offering to pay tax".

Not to mention state projects President Moi has directly or indirectly benefitted from, suggests Shaw. "Joining the government," he writes, "is seen by many as hitching onto a lucrative patronage gravy train."

A few weeks ago, when President Moi suddenly sacked Mr David Western, director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service since Mr Richard Leakey's resignation (the world-renowned anthropologist and conservationist is now a Kenyan MP) and then, equally suddenly, reinstated him, it was seen as a sign that the old man was losing his grip.

President for 20 years and vice-president for 14 years before that under Kenyatta, President Moi is now well into his 70s. There is no obvious heir apparent but he refuses to name a vice-president on the grounds, he says, that to do so would only cause intertribal conflict. What he doesn't say, but which everybody in Nairobi understands, from the former white hunters at the Muthaiga Club to the drivers outside Jomo Kenyatta Airport, is that it would also be like drawing a target on the chosen one's forehead.

What is clear from the revelations of the past few days is that the smell of corruption can no longer be ignored if Kenya - with or without President Moi at the helm - is to survive.

Mr Ward has always been convinced that Makallah was responsible for his daughter's murder. But why was she killed? Mr Rainy, who was working in the Mara at the time, says that haphazard abduction and rape is an unlikely motive.

Much more likely is that somehow she stumbled on to a high-level smuggling operation across the Tanzanian border - rhino horn, ivory or diamonds - only a few miles from the camp where she was last seen.

Mr Ward is not interested. He's done what he set out to do and says he has no intention of going further down that path. He will leave that to others.