It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  It’s Our Turn to Eat

  The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower

  Michela Wrong

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  1 The Big Man

  2 An Unexpected Guest

  3 Starting Afresh

  4 Mucking out the Augean Stables

  5 Dazzled by the Light

  6 Pulling the Serpent’s Tail

  7 The Call of the Tribe

  8 Breaking the Mould

  9 The Making of the Sheng Generation

  10 Everything Depends on the Boss

  11 Gorging Their Fill

  12 A Form of Mourning

  13 In Exile

  14 Spilling the Beans

  15 Backlash

  16 A Plaza Paradise

  17 It’s Not Your Turn

  Epilogue

  List of Key Characters

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Michela Wrong

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  ‘We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.’

  T.E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  John Githongo with the author.

  PROLOGUE

  It was early evening, that time when the traffic jams that clog the Kenyan capital of Nairobi’s arteries for most of the working day reach their apogee.

  Down below, thousands of honking matatu minibuses, drivers hyped on adrenalin and pent-up frustration, were doing their best to get their passengers home. Fighting for space against the lumbering public buses, sagging like old mattresses under the weight of their clientele, the customised Toyotas and Nissans jerked in fits and starts across the crumbling roundabouts, their touts leaning out of half-open doors to wheedle and abuse, pounding on the bonnets of encroaching cars in a manner more bullying than friendly. Choking on the black fumes pumped from hundreds of over-revved, under-serviced engines, blue-uniformed policemen struggled to keep the flow moving.

  On the fifteenth floor of the Ministry of Finance, however, the beeps and angry shouts were barely audible. Most of the messengers, clerks and secretaries, keepers of the ubiquitous departmental Thermos of tea, had abandoned their perches behind the varnished wooden partitions, silence was creeping in to take their place. From this elevation, the world below seemed calm and peaceful, lent tranquillity by the approaching chill of evening. Wheeling in cooling eddies of warm air, kites traced monotonous circles high above, like black smuts whirling over a dying fire. Even higher above them gracefully looped Nairobi’s sinister valkyries, the marabou storks, hardworking scavengers of the nearby slums.

  From up here, the historic landmarks of the city centre, so grubby at street level, looked almost pristine. One side of the ministry gazed south-east, across the rusting, dilapidated entrails of the giant railway depot that was both the city and the country’s original raison d’être: for Nairobi was the spot where British railroad engineers paused to gather their material, manpower and energies before flinging their ironware up and over the escarpment and dizzily down into the Rift Valley, aiming at the giant lake lying at the continent’s alluring heart.

  Beyond stretched the hangars and godowns of the Industrial Area, the capital’s main airport and the savannah expanse of Nairobi’s game park, hemmed in by the dry Ukambani hills, where the odd feather of grey smoke–some peasant clearing land–plumed skyward. The other side of the ministry looked across Harambee Avenue, past the colonnaded Law Courts, towards the clock tower of Parliament Buildings, City Hall and the conference complex named after Jomo Kenyatta, once dubbed a ‘leader unto darkness and death’ by a British official, now honoured as the nation’s founding father. The small dots moving about on the esplanade below were Kenyan sightseers, come to have their pictures taken in front of the late president’s seated statue, which showed him in chieftain’s cap, flywhisk in hand. Beyond the square one could glimpse the lawns of Uhuru Park, where Mwai Kibaki, Kenyatta’s former finance minister, had been inaugurated president eighteen months earlier. From up here, the park seemed the green and pleasant public garden its planners had originally envisaged, rather than what it had become in the intervening years: open-air toilet, haunt of roaming muggers, resting spot for the homeless and exhausted.

  Inside the minister’s office, three men sat locked in intimate conversation: the finance minister himself, a pudgy septuagenarian with a spray of whitening hair; the justice minister, a former human rights campaigner with an acne-scarred complexion and a woman’s pulpy lips; and a third player, a barrel-chested, trunk-necked lumber-jack of a man who looked ready to burst from his suit at any moment. What the three were discussing was so engrossing, they were barely aware of their surroundings.

  And then it happened. The giant suddenly became aware of a metallic whispering…What was that? His stomach lurched as he realised that tinny, tiny sound was coming from his own midriff. He could barely believe it. The recorder he had taped to his stomach, its wire lead and microphone stuck to his breastbone, had somehow switched into ‘play’ mode. The voices of the two men before him were now being relayed back, potentially exposing him as what he was: spy, sneak, mole.

  He coughed loudly, spluttered, coughed again, hoping to drown out the noise. In a booming voice–his voice always boomed, they would find nothing strange in that–he excused himself, lurched out of the ministerial office, and headed swiftly down the gloomy corridor, aiming for the gents’. Inside the cubicle, hands trembling with adrenalin, he adjusted the device. How on earth had that happened? He was tempted for a moment to abandon this particular attempt. Perhaps Fate was telling him not to push his luck any further. But no, might as well be consistent. He had already crossed the line, transgressed in ways that most of his fellow countrymen would have never dreamed possible and many would never forgive. Might as well see the thing through. Routine was important, it lent shape and definition. He put the device back into ‘record’ mode, carefully adjusted his shirt. He splashed some cold water on his face, took a few deep breaths, and walked back into the office.

  He scoured his two colleagues’ faces for signs of suspicion. If they had noticed what had happened, he could expect to be arrested that night, his office sealed, staff sent away, files seized, house raided. But the two men hardly looked up. His pounding heartbeat became more sedate. Either they were Kenya’s most consummate actors, or they had barely noticed that he had left the room, let alone picked up the whisper emanating from his chest. Cautiously, he resumed his seat. Leaned forward to include himself in the conversation. The recorder was running again. That night he would do what had become a daily chore, summarising the evening’s conversation in one of his black Moleskine notebooks, downloading the disc’s contents onto his computer, emailing the file in codified form to a friend abroad. Another piece of evidence collected and logged, his insurance against the coming storm. It would all mount up.

  Outside, Uhuru Park, Harambee Avenue and the Kenyatta International Conference Centre had all been swallowed up by the darkening sky. Sunset does not last long this close to the equator. The once-busy streets were barely illuminated by the few functioning street lamps, whose dull glow drove the insects crazy but scarcely penetrated the deep African night. They now look
ed empty and dangerous, delivered over to the city’s rapists and thieves. Distant traffic, working its way through the suburbs and outlying slums, gave off a quiet, murmuring rumble. It smelt as though rain was on its way.

  1

  The Big Man

  ‘It was an amazing thing, for one moment in a hundred years, to all feel the same way. And to feel that it was good.’

  Kenyan writer BINYAVANGA WAINANA

  A brown clod of earth, trailing tufts of grass like a green scalp, suddenly soared through the air and landed on the stage, thrown by someone high on the surrounding slopes. Then another one sailed overhead, this time falling short and hitting the journalists packed against the podium. Then came some sticks, a hail of small stones. The first rows of the crowd hunched their shoulders and hoped it would get no worse: there were plenty of kids up there from Kibera slum, the sprawl of rusty shacks that stretched like an itchy brown sore across the modern city landscape, and they had a nasty habit of using their own excrement as missiles. The mood in the open-air stadium in Uhuru Park on 30 December 2002, a year and a half before that strange meeting in the finance ministry, was on the brink of turning ugly. Mostly male, mostly young, the audience was getting bored with waiting.

  For much of the morning the mood had been cheerful. The thousands of Kenyans who had begun streaming into the amphitheatre at 7 a.m. for the presidential inauguration–the first change of leadership via the ballot box since independence–had every reason to pat themselves on the back. With the simplest of acts, they had pulled off what felt like a miracle. They had queued patiently for hours in the sun, cast their ballots and in the process turned their backs on the retiring Daniel arap Moi, twenty-four years at the helm, the president credited with reducing East Africa’s most prosperous economy to ‘nchi ya kitu kidogo’: ‘land of the “little something”’, homeland of the bribe. Campaigning on an issue that infuriated the public–the corruption souring every aspect of their lives–the opposition had united under the banner of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) and stomped to victory. It had told the electorate it was ‘unbwogable’–uncrushable–and this had proved no idle boast, for it had broken the ruling KANU party’s thirty-nine-year grip on power.

  It seemed as though Kenya’s political parties had finally matured, realising that so long as they allowed tribal differences to dominate, with each ethnic group mustering behind its own presidential candidate, Moi would win. In contrast with so many of his African counterparts, the loser–Moi’s handpicked protégé Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the nation’s founding father–had gracefully accepted the results. In the slum estates the night before, many had braced themselves for a military takeover, reasoning that Moi’s security services would surely not meekly accept the people’s verdict. They had been proved wrong, and the fact that power was about to change hands peacefully in an African nation, rather than at the barrel of a gun, was hailed by the Western press as a tribute to both the rule of law and a politically mature public’s self-control. The partying had gone on into the early hours, with Tusker beer washing down roasted chicken. When it became clear which way the vote was going, residents had rounded up all the local cockerels and slaughtered the ‘jogoo’, hated symbol of the once-proud KANU, which Moi had promised would rule the country for a hundred years. This morning they were turning up to bear living witness to their own historic handiwork.

  Up on the dais, an array of African presidents and generals in gold brocade and ribbons sat fanning themselves. Next to them sweltered the diplomats, ham-pink under their panamas. Kenyan VIPs, finding no seats available, sat uncomplaining on the floor, their wives’ glossy wraps trailing in the dust. As the timetable slipped by two, then three, four, five hours, the amphitheatre steadily filled. An incongruous aroma of Sunday lunch wafted through the air as thousands of feet crushed the wild garlic growing on the slopes. Nearby trees sagged under the weight of street boys seeking a bird’s eye view. An urchin on the rooftop of the podium wiggled his ragged arse to the music from the military band, which, like all the armed forces present, was beginning to lose its nerve. They had rehearsed exhaustively for this event, but had never anticipated these kind of numbers: 300,000? 500,000? Who could count that sea of brown heads? At the start, police horses had plunged and reared as the General Service Unit (GSU), Kenya’s dreaded paramilitary elite, attempted to clear the area in front of the dais. They had pushed the crowd back, only for policemen posted on the fringes to push it forward. But as the throng grew, and grew, and grew, the men from the GSU dismounted and quietly joined the onlookers, aware that the best they could hope for now was avoiding a stampede.

  Gathered at the front, we journalists had long ago lost our carefully chosen perches and jealously cherished camera angles, swallowed up by the crowd pressing hard at our backs. Pinned against my neighbours, I could feel small hands, fleeting as lizards, fluttering lightly through my pockets in search of money, mobile, wallet. With a heave, I scrambled onto a creaking table where a dozen sweaty photographers and reporters teetered, bitching fretfully at one another–‘Don’t move!’ ‘Hey, head down, you’re blocking my shot!’ ‘Stop pushing!’–a touch of hysteria–‘STOP PUSHING!’ The ceremony was now running six hours late. Rather than whipping up the audience, newly elected MPs were appealing for calm from the stage. A Kenyan reporter next to me rolled the whites of her eyes skywards, gracefully fainted and was passed out over people’s heads in the crucifix position, like a fan at a rock concert. I wondered how long it would be before I followed her. People were keeling over left, right and centre, ambulance crews plunging bravely into the throng to remove the wilting bodies.

  Finally, amid cheeky cries of ‘Speed up! Speed up!’, accompanied by ‘fast-forward’ gestures from the crowd, the ceremony started. An aide walked on bearing a gold-embroidered leather pouffe. This, it turned out, was the Presidential Pouffe, there to prop up the plastered leg of winner Mwai Kibaki, who had survived the years in opposition only to be nearly killed in a campaign car crash. Next came Kibaki himself, his wheelchair carried by eight straining men. The ramp they laboured up had been the topic of a debate which exposed the establishment’s nervousness. Frightened of being implicated, at even the most pragmatic level, in this near-inconceivable changing of the guard, jittery officials from the ministry of public works had refused to build the cement slope required, forcing an exasperated army commander to contract the work out to a private firm.

  Kibaki was followed by the outgoing Moi, ornate ivory baton clutched in one hand, trademark rosebud in the lapel of a slate-grey suit, face expressionless. Later, it was said the generals had gone to Moi when it became clear which way the election was going and offered to stage a coup. In his prime, his hold on the nation had been so tight, cynics had quipped, ‘L’état, c’est Moi.’ But the Old Man had waved the generals wearily away, aware such times were past, Kenya was no longer destined to follow such clichéd African lines.

  Eyes yellow and unreadable, Moi took his salute and delivered his last presidential speech without a hint of bitterness, hailing the rival by his side as ‘a man of integrity’. This former schoolteacher’s presidency had been an exercise in formalism, and he was determined to fulfil this last, painful role impeccably. But the mob showed no mercy–those watching the ends of Africa’s dinosaur leaders never do. What fun, after a quarter-century of respectful forelock-tugging, to be able to let rip. ‘Bye bye,’ they jeered. ‘Go away.’ Others sang: ‘Everything is possible without Moi,’ a pastiche of the ‘Everything is possible with faith’ gospel sung in church. In the crowd, someone brandished a sign: ‘KIBAKI IS OUR MOSES’.

  Then it was Kibaki’s turn. It was a moment for magnanimity–peaceful handovers, as everyone present that day knew, should never be taken for granted in Africa. And the seventy-one-year-old former finance minister, an upper-class sophisticate known for the amount of time he spent on the golf course, his lazy geniality, was not built in the vengeful, rabble-rousing mould. So the concentrated anger of his speech ha
d those sitting behind Kibaki blinking in surprise. It offered a sudden glimpse of something raw and keen: a fury that had silently brewed under the suave façade during years of belittlement. Never deigning to mention the man sitting by his side, his former boss, Kibaki dismissed Moi’s legacy as worthless. ‘I am inheriting a country that has been badly ravaged by years of misrule and ineptitude,’ he told the crowd. He warned future members of his government and public officers that he would respect no ‘sacred cows’ in his drive to eliminate sleaze. ‘The era of “anything goes” is gone forever. Government will no longer be run on the whims of individuals.’ Then he pronounced the soundbite that would haunt his time in office, destined to be constantly replayed on Kenyan television and radio, acquiring a different meaning every time. ‘Corruption,’ he said, ‘will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.’ Whenever I hear it today, I notice a tiny detail that passed me by as I stood in that sweaty scrum, smeared notebook in hand, mentally drafting the day’s article: Kibaki, always a laboured speaker, slightly fumbles the word ‘cease’. Lisped, it comes out sounding very much like ‘thief’.

  The speeches over, the various presidents headed for their motorcades as the security services heaved sighs of relief. The inauguration had been an organisational débâcle, but tragedy had somehow been skirted, as was the Kenyan way. For Moi, one last indignity was reserved. When his limousine drew away, snubbing a long-delayed State House lunch in favour of the helicopter that would whisk him away from the hostile capital and to his upcountry farm, it was stoned by the crowd.