Were gritted his teeth. He had hoped for better–‘Maybe I’m naïve’–but he felt no real surprise. ‘I had come of age learning about the working environment in this country. I knew Kenya was full of one-ethnic companies. I thought, “I’ll live with it.”’ His ambitions remained high. After ten years in the job he had every reason to expect to be made partner. Then professional rivalry began to undermine his reputation for efficiency. ‘If I was registering certain successes, my colleagues wouldn’t want them to reach the boss. But negative things would immediately be brought to his attention.’ Were, who had once been his boss’s second-in-command, noticed that key information was now passing him by. He was being written out of the script. ‘Colleagues would mention things that concerned me directly that they had been discussing separately with my boss, chats which were probably taking place during visits to construction sites.’ At that stage, Were resigned. ‘I saw the whole thing was untenable.’
He didn’t bother to explain why he was going. ‘I never raised it directly with my boss, because I realised he was encouraging it. I just said I needed to progress my career.’ Like many Kenyans caught in such circumstances, he expresses not anger, but resignation at what he knows to be a commonplace experience. ‘There are lots of people in this country who have never sat a job interview or even know what one is. They have been whisked by their tribespeople from school to job. I believe in fighting my own way.’ Friends tell him his problem was not being ‘anchored’ by a network of friendships and family relationships that would have made it impossible to ‘detach’ him from his place of work. But he has no intention of developing these limpet-like muscles. At the consultancy he has now set up, he’s proud of the fact that not a single one of his current projects comes from a fellow Luhya. ‘There are people who feel like me, who do not subscribe to that kind of thinking,’ he insists. ‘I wouldn’t pack a company with my people.’
Were’s experience, and that of my colleagues at the Standard, was the most benign manifestation of the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture. Its other forms were much uglier, and their impact far more damaging. So few Kenyans identified with any overarching national project, their leaders felt free to loot state coffers, camouflaging crude personal enrichment in the prettifying colours of tribal solidarity.
Decade by decade, practices that had flourished under the colonial administration–itself no stranger to high-profile corruption scandals–were fine-tuned and pushed to ever more outlandish lengths. What they all shared were a reliance on the political access and inside knowledge enjoyed by either a minister, an MP, a civil servant or a councillor, and their target: the public funds and national assets on which every Kenyan citizen depended for education, health and the other basic necessities for a decent life.
The command economy of the post-independence years made self-enrichment for the well-connected a fairly simple matter. What could be easier for a minister than to slap an import quota on a key commodity, wait for the street price to soar, and then dump tonnes of the stuff, thoughtfully stockpiled ahead of time by one of his companies, on the market? A 1970–71 parliamentary commission helpfully authorised government employees to run their own businesses while holding down civil service jobs (‘straddling’, as it was called), a ruling its chairman later justified on the grounds that there was no point banning an activity that would persist whatever the law decreed.13 A post in a state-run utility or corporation, which could hike prices ever upwards thanks to its monopoly position, offered untold profit-taking opportunities. Similarly, who was better placed to benefit from foreign exchange controls which created a yawning gap between black market and official rates than an insider with excellent banking and Treasury contacts?
The structural adjustment programmes pushed on Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which loosened the Kenyan government’s stranglehold by making aid conditional on privatising bloated parastatals, dropping currency controls and opening markets to international trade, complicated things, but the ‘eaters’ quickly vaulted that hurdle. The privatisation process itself, it turned out, provided all kinds of openings for the entrepreneurial fraudster, including ruthless asset-stripping. It was funny how often the politically-connected banks in which state corporations chose to deposit their proceeds collapsed, swallowing up public funds as they expired. And so many other routes remained open. Import goods duty-free as famine relief, or claim they are in transit, then sell them locally, undercutting the competition. Take out a state loan you never intend to repay. Bid for a government tender your contacts at the ministry tell you is about to come up, then get them to ensure that your ridiculously inflated offer is the one approved. It doesn’t matter if your firm can’t deliver: the invoice will join Kenya’s huge stock of ‘pending bills’, carried over from one government to another, and eventually settled with the issue of tradeable treasury bonds, no questions asked.14
By the early 1990s, Western executives flying in with plans to invest in Kenya quickly realised that their companies would never thrive in the country’s supposedly free-market environment unless a slice of equity was discreetly handed over to a firm owned by a Moi relative, trusted henchman or favoured minister. Frank Vogl, who runs a communications firm in Washington, caught the flavour when he was approached to set up a presidential press unit. Summoned by Kenya’s finance minister to discuss the idea, he flew to Nairobi and went to the minister’s offices. ‘It was so full I could barely squeeze in the door. The entire reception area was jammed with about twenty or thirty people, who were all trying to reach the secretary sitting at reception. I finally managed to catch her attention and said: “I have a 10 o’clock appointment with the minister.” “So does everyone else,” she said. “You’ll have to wait your turn.” These were all businessmen waiting to have their one-on-ones with the minister–and you can imagine just what was going on during those conversations. It was no longer a secret by then: if you wanted to do business in Kenya, you had to do a deal with the top man concerned.’
And spanning every regime was land-grabbing, which pushed so many African buttons. Swathes of supposedly protected game parks, plots already owned by state-run corporations and municipal bodies, prime sites on the coast, chunks of gazetted virgin forest lusted after by timber merchants, were snatched, fenced off and sold on again. The practice was so widespread that even the leaders of Kenya’s churches, mosques and temples–society’s supposed moral arbiters–joined in. The grabbers did not hesitate to seize plots set aside for national monuments or already used as cemeteries, simply throwing the bodies onto the street. The phenomenon peaked before every election, as the president of the day thanked his cronies in advance for their support. Inquiries would reveal some 300,000 hectares of prime land to have been seized since independence, with only 1.7 per cent of the original 3 per cent of national territory gazetted as forest remaining–jeopardising a thirsty nation’s very water table.
But ‘eating’ surely touched its nadir with the Goldenberg scandal, the Moi presidency’s crowning disgrace. Dreamt up by Kamlesh Pattni, a Kenyan Asian with a lick of glossy black hair and the over-confidence of a twenty-six-year-old millionaire, this three-year scheme was once again a reflection of its times.15 Launched in 1991, it tapped into the government’s hunger for foreign exchange, threatened by aid cuts from Western donors determined to see multi-party elections in Kenya. Pattni’s firm, Goldenberg International Ltd, started by claiming–under a government compensation scheme meant to encourage trade–for exports of gold and diamonds Kenya did not produce and the firm never actually carried out. Approved by Central Bank staff, Pattni’s fraudulent export forms–the infamous ‘CD3’s–only marked the start of this multi-layered scam. Setting up his own bank, he used the leverage granted by his finance ministry contacts to mop up available foreign exchange under a pre-shipment finance scheme. He bought billions of shillings in treasury bills on credit and cashed them in as though they had been paid for, and borrowed money from a range of c
omplicit ‘political banks’ to place on overnight deposit.
The various schemes not only enriched senior officials, they provided slush funds for what the ruling party knew would be fiercely contested elections. Pattni ploughed his profits into the construction of the Grand Regency, a five-star hotel in central Nairobi as gilded and ornate as Cleopatra’s boudoir. The ordinary Kenyan, for his part, lost anywhere between $600 million and $4 billion as his country’s foreign exchange reserves, rather than being boosted, were systematically hoovered up by the well-connected. Goldenberg pushed the country’s inflation into double digits, caused the collapse of the Kenya shilling and a credit squeeze so severe it led to business closures and mass sackings, and left the government unable to pay for oil imports and basic health and education. The resulting recession was still being felt fifteen years later.
Goldenberg captured the very essence of Kenyan corruption. For if only a tiny elite got obscenely rich on the back of it, the sleek Pattni carefully shored up his enterprise with a liberal distribution of gifts: a form of insurance. The astonishing extent of wider Kenyan society’s complicity would only be exposed in 2004 when investigators published a list of those alleged to have benefited from Pattni’s largesse. Gado, the Nation’s brilliant cartoonist, captured the moment with one of his sketches. ‘Anybody who has not received Goldenberg money, please raise your hand,’ runs the caption. Below, a variegated cross-section of Kenyan society stares at the reader, boggle-eyed, uncomfortable, shifty: a bewigged lawyer, a Muslim preacher, a portly mzungu, a stout matron, a notebook-wielding journalist, a uniformed nurse, a scruffy panhandler. No one moves. All, at one point, have benefited from Goldenberg. The ‘list of shame’, as it was dubbed, ran to 1,115 entries.
5
Dazzled by the Light
‘Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power. Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.’
JOHN GITHONGO, Executive magazine, 1994
Working alongside the director of public prosecutions and a brand-new ministry of justice–an institution phased out under Moi–John Githongo had the job of digging down through this purulent history, sorting through the layers of sleaze.
The judiciary, which had become stuffed over the years with bribable magistrates ready to do Moi’s bidding, must be purged: scores would eventually be publicly denounced, dismissed or encouraged to retire. Ministry departments needed to be cleansed of a generation of bent senior procurement officers who had for decades used public procurement as a source of illicit wealth, stealing, one study estimated, $6.4 billion between 1991 and 1997.16 An inquiry, the Bosire Commission, was launched to probe the Goldenberg scandal. Another, the Ndung’u Commission, probed the land-grabbing phenomenon. Yet another was established to investigate the scandal of pending bills. In a grand gesture of good faith, Kenya also became the first country in the world to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption.
Then there were the two pieces of legislation Kibaki had announced on the lawns of State House soon after his inauguration: the Public Officer Ethics Act, which spelt out a code of conduct for public officers and obliged them to declare their wealth; and the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, which created the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), a doughty successor to the anti-corruption authority set up but rapidly neutered under Moi.
John helped ensure that the directorship of the new institution, which he eventually hoped to see given prosecutorial powers, went to Justice Aaron Ringera, whom he had befriended during his time at TI-Kenya on a long-haul flight to a World Bank meeting. Convinced that this former solicitor general was the perfect candidate for the job, he went in person to lobby the various political party leaders–not all of whom shared his enthusiasm for Ringera–to support the appointment. ‘I put my reputation on the line, without hesitation or equivocation. I had complete faith in Ringera.’ John was also partly responsible for the KACC director being granted one of Kenya’s most generous civil service pay awards. The bigger the salary, the easier it would be for the holder of this key institution to resist temptation, he told the sceptics.
In NARC’s flurry of law-making, one thing, however, was made clear. These inquiries would not go to the very top of the chain. Moi’s lieutenants might be vulnerable to prosecution, but the former president himself would remain beyond pursuit. The new administration justified this stance on the grounds that ordinary Kenyans, grateful for Moi’s tactful withdrawal from the political scene, would be revolted by the sight of a venerable elder being hounded through the courts. It was an argument John endorsed. He should have been more alert to the gesture’s underlying message. Even in the new-look, squeaky-clean, corruption-phobic Kenya, the really big players could expect to get off scot free, while the smaller fry would be held to account.
As he put in his endless working days, friends from the old days noticed with concern that John, originally taken on as a consultant, now spoke in terms of ‘we’ when referring to State House. It was ‘our government’, ‘our administration’, and when cynics expressed scepticism, he grew annoyed, for it meant doubting John himself. Having decided that NARC represented Kenya’s best chance to tackle a deep-rooted blight, he had deliberately failed to install a safety net. Some saw this as a step further than was wise, or was warranted by his job description. ‘He was using the language of government, when he should have seen himself as someone who had been seconded to government,’ says anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati. ‘He should have retained an intellectual distance, seen himself as an adviser, a specialist.’
Others viewed it as typical of a man who had to believe passionately in his allotted task to function at all. ‘He went into it with a lot more idealism than I thought warranted. But John is a conviction person, it’s a personality type,’ says David Ndii. ‘With him, it’s all about the heart. When John trusted someone, he did it completely. And when he was disappointed, he flipped completely. He has this pendulum thing.’ Beguiled by the sheer physical solidity of the man, his elders missed this emotional volatility. It made John a far more unpredictable player than those who had appointed him realised. ‘He probably didn’t have the right character for the job,’ says Ndii. ‘Government is all about perseverance. John was disposed to the melodramatic.’ The balked romantic can prove surprisingly vindictive, turning avenging angel where others might simply withdraw into a sulk.
As a journalist, John had railed against two weaknesses he saw as intrinsic to his continent’s predicament: the extraordinary deference African societies traditionally show their elders, and their meek passivity when confronted by rulers ready to use violence to remain at the helm. Moi, famously, had instructed his ministers to ‘sing like parrots’. ‘You ought to sing the song I sing,’ the president had told his cabinet. ‘If I put a full stop, you should also put a full stop. That way the country will move forward.’ The crudeness of the order, the exhortation to abandon all critical thought, argued John, exposed a humiliating respect for power for its own sake. Yet now that he was within the citadel, both insights momentarily eluded him. ‘There was a reverential tone in John’s voice when he talked about Kibaki,’ remembers Rasna Warah, a columnist for the Nation and an old acquaintance. ‘It would be “the president thinks this”, “the president wants that”, never just “Kibaki”. It was a tone of total awe, as though the man had become a living saint.’
If he had fallen prey to Strong Man syndrome, John was not the only smitten one. Bubbling with hope, the entire country needed, for a moment in history, to forget what it knew about Kibaki and his chums. Nations must indulge in periods of selective amnesia if they are ever to progress. History suggests that sclerotic systems are not transformed by untainted outsiders, but by those within, and usually by those who have been within the system so long they are associated with its worst abuses, rising thereby to the positions of power that make it possible to bring about change. Mikhail Gorbachev was such a figure in the Sov
iet Union–a seemingly loyal party stalwart who turned radical once he had the means to see his novel vision through.
On the surface, there was little reason to view Kibaki, who had played the Kenyan system to the hilt as both vice president and finance minister, as a likely champion of reform. The first African to graduate from the London School of Economics, a former lecturer at what became Uganda’s respected Makerere University, one of the drafters of independent Kenya’s constitution, Kibaki was routinely described as ‘brilliant’. But his glory days lay firmly behind him. Having swallowed one political humiliation after another under Moi, his preference for the unconfrontational role of Mr Nice Guy had won him the scornful sobriquet of ‘General Coward’ from political rivals, who quipped that Kibaki had never seen a fence he couldn’t sit on. Well-heeled, well-oiled, Kibaki’s image as a prosperous has-been was so entrenched by the mid-1990s that it never occurred to Western journalists like myself to request an interview. Why bother? The nominal head of the opposition was reported to be a sozzled regular at the Muthaiga Golf Club, interested in little more than the size of his handicap. While he regularly drove to parliament, he rarely performed inside the chamber, preferring, it was said, a long snooze at his desk. Yet suddenly this deeply disappointing politician was recast in the role of national saviour by a coterie that, believing it held the moral high ground, thought nothing was now impossible. ‘Go home, tend to your goats and watch us govern this country,’ justice minister Kiraitu Murungi told Moi, courting hubris with every patronising word.
‘They got lost in their own rhetoric,’ says Ndii, with a shrug. ‘Because they had the instruments of state, they thought they could change the world. It wasn’t just John, all of them thought they were going to fix everything. Me, I was not a believer.’ Mwalimu Mati also shakes his head over what looks, in retrospect, like the most bizarre of collective delusions. ‘It was a type of mass hallucination. People went a bit crazy. No one stopped to consider how Kibaki had made his own fortune. We should be suspicious of finance ministers, especially from the past.’
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