It may have been a case of the ultimate idealist meeting the ultimate pragmatist, but John did not recognise the gulf in perspectives. Bonding with Kibaki came disconcertingly easily. A politician with none of Moi’s instinctive understanding for the ordinary wananchi, Kibaki was an unrepentant intellectual snob. Whereas Moi, the former headmaster, was regarded as a leader who ‘knew how to talk to Kenyans with mud between their toes’, Kibaki was more likely to hail them as ‘pumbavu’–fools. He recognised and respected the rigorous quality of thought in the young man, who had strayed into State House at more or less the same age Kibaki himself had ventured into politics. There was also a certain inbuilt familiarity to the relationship. John’s accountant father had campaigned on behalf of Kibaki’s Democratic Party, and while the Kibaki and Githongo families were not exactly intimate, their children had gone to the same schools, they shared the same faith, they belonged to the same patrician milieu.
In any case, affability came naturally to Kibaki, who possessed none of Moi’s gruff abrasiveness. While other men commanded loyalty through the commanding magnetism of their personalities, Kibaki’s style was one of diffuse, woolly bonhomie. He had always shrunk from making enemies, the head-on collision. ‘He’s a very unstuffy guy, very laid back and easy to shoot the breeze with,’ John remembers. The two regularly breakfasted together, and there were also many dinners, just the two of them tête-à-tête. Kibaki felt relaxed enough in John’s company to sit with him in the presidential bedroom, discussing politics, the price of oil, world affairs–never anything personal. In John’s slightly star-struck eyes–who, after all, could spend quite so much time near the nation’s most important man without feeling a little giddy?–the president came to assume the role of alternative father figure, favourite uncle. If John used the respectful ‘Mzee’ (Elder) when addressing the president, Kibaki addressed his anti-corruption chief as ‘Kijana’–‘young man’, a term that almost always comes tinged with paternal affection. ‘I used to think that relationship was very special. I had a huge amount of affection for Kibaki. Then I realised Kibaki was like that with everyone.’ Looking back, John would come to realise that he had allowed himself–as the overly cerebral often do–to be beguiled as much by a symbol as an individual. ‘At that time, everyone was dancing. Everyone was right to dance.’ Encapsulating the hope of a jubilant post-Moi nation, what Kibaki represented was more important than who he actually was.
John had the goodwill of the head of state, the envy of many veteran political players, his own staff and budget. It seemed, on the face of it, a great set-up from which to take on the forces of darkness. But within weeks of Kibaki’s inauguration, the evil genie Moi deposited in State House snickered and lashed out, delivering a blow so devastating, so sudden, that the presidency, it could be argued, never recovered. Kibaki’s presidency was delivered premature, shrivelling before it had a decent chance to take its first real breaths. A crippled and maimed thing, it would be too worried about its own survival to care overmuch about anything else.
The first Kenyans heard of it was an announcement, in late January 2003, that the president had been admitted to Nairobi Hospital to have a blood clot–after-effect of his car accident–removed from his leg. Kibaki would continue to carry out his official functions from hospital, his personal doctor Dan Gikonyo assured the public, as long as he did not get overstressed. He suffered from high blood pressure and had been advised, amongst other things, not to wave his arms around. The statement failed to reassure. ‘I don’t want to cause alarm but I am worried about our president’s health,’ a perceptive Kenyan blogger wrote in February, noting that Kibaki had not addressed the nation for a month, remaining silent even when a minister was killed in an air crash. ‘I have this nagging feeling that State House is not telling all.’ The blogger quoted eyewitness accounts of an incoherent president checking out of hospital and embarking on a strange two-hour meet-the-people drive around Nairobi. ‘Something is wrong, something is terribly wrong,’ he fretted.
Kibaki had, in fact, been felled by a stroke. Any debate about how many terms he hoped to serve was suddenly rendered irrelevant–would he even see one through to the end? When John Githongo went to visit the Old Man in hospital, he was shocked. Whatever criticisms had been voiced of Kibaki in the past, everyone had agreed on his extraordinary intellectual acuity. Now John found him watching television cartoons. He never mentioned his new concern to friends, but the worrying vision of Kenya’s top statesman happily transfixed by children’s programming lingered in his mind: ‘You never completely recover from a stroke like that.’ Once Kibaki checked out of hospital, John started briefing him both orally and in writing, so concerned had he become over his boss’s ability to retain information.
Journalists who covered NARC’s 2002 election campaign say there have been two Kibakis: the pre-stroke Kibaki, engaged, focused, acute; and the post-stroke Kibaki, vague, distracted, struggling to maintain a coherent chain of thought. From a man in command he had become a man going through the motions, as if in a dream. The British high commissioner, Edward Clay, immediately noticed a change. Just as Britain, traditionally a major donor, was hoping to re-engage with Kenya, it became impossible to win an audience with the president. Development minister Clare Short left the country without seeing the head of state. And Clay noticed that Kibaki struggled during his regular meetings with the diplomatic corps. ‘He had a genuine problem carrying on a train of thought from one meeting to another, particularly if there wasn’t a witness. Some days were better than others. I didn’t think he was himself again until early 2004.’
It was noticeable that when Kibaki was delivering a speech he no longer extemporised or made eye contact with his public, keeping his eyes glued to the autocue. He knew that if he lifted his gaze he might never find his place again. There were reports of him sleeping through cabinet meetings, of aides having to repeatedly brief him on the same subject. At an investors’ meeting I attended in London two and a half years after his collapse, by which time many were remarking on the extent of his recovery, Kibaki still gave the impression–characteristic of stroke victims–of being a little tipsy. His delivery was slightly slurred, his enunciation ponderous, and when answering questions he meandered and contradicted himself. The entire audience seemed to be willing him on, praying he would make it through to the end without some monstrous faux pas. Like the latter-day Ronald Reagan in the grips of early Alzheimer’s, he came across as an urbane, delightfully charming old duffer, but not a man anyone would want running a country.
Confronted by a calamity no one had anticipated so early on, Kibaki’s closest aides reeled and then rallied. If the Old Man was temporarily incapacitated, then they would have to run the country until he regained his faculties, just as the Kremlin’s stalwarts had done whenever their geriatric Soviet leaders turned senile. The kernel of this group consisted of Chris Murungaru, the burly former pharmacist appointed minister for internal security; David Mwiraria, finance minister and Kibaki’s longtime confidant; Kiraitu Murungi, justice minister; State House comptroller Matere Keriri; and personal assistant Alfred Getonga. The one factor all these players had in common was their ethnicity–they were all either Kikuyu, like Kibaki, or members of the closely related Embu and Meru tribes, who the Kikuyu regard as cousins. In naming his cabinet, Kibaki had presented himself as a leader of national unity, careful to distribute all but the key ministries across the ethnic spectrum. But in his hour of need, like any sick man, he reached for what was familiar and safe, and that meant sticking with the tribe. The popular press, noticing the trend, soon coined a phrase for this circle, the real power behind the throne. ‘The Mount Kenya Mafia’, it called them, a reference to the mountain that dominates Central Province. The phrase was to prove more apposite than anyone could have guessed at the time.
The group’s influence was swiftly felt in a vital area. A new constitution had been one of the key promises NARC had made to an electorate exasperated at the way in which Kenya�
�s colonial-era document had been repeatedly amended to place ever greater power in the president’s hands. Kibaki had also, it emerged, secretly signed a memorandum of understanding with his NARC partners promising, amongst other things, that fiery Luo leader Raila Odinga would be given the post of executive prime minister under a future dispensation. Incapacitated by his car accident, Kibaki had depended on Raila to do his heavy lifting during the election campaign, and the younger man had done so indefatigably. The prime minister’s post was to have been his reward. It was a promise that implied a radical trimming of powers in favour of a tribe that Kibaki’s Kikuyu community had, since the days of Jomo Kenyatta and Raila’s late father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, regarded as its greatest rival. After decades of marginalisation, during which they had seen their leaders assassinated, jailed and exiled, the thwarted Luos were itching to come in from the cold.
But now, with Kibaki looking like the weak old man he was, all promises were off. The Mount Kenya Mafia felt too vulnerable for magnanimity. The very same men who had, as members of the opposition, tirelessly denounced a document that skewed the playing field in Moi’s favour, suddenly found there was much to be said for this tilted arrangement. A national conference convened to hammer out the modern arrangement Kenya needed ground to a halt, as Kibaki’s key ministers proposed changes that would, if anything, concentrate even more power in their man’s hands. The Kibaki delegation would eventually storm out of the talks at the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village, and unveil a draft constitution which bore little relation to what had originally been proposed. The setting aside of ethnic rivalries, hailed as marking the Kenyan political class’s coming of age, had outlived the elections only by a paltry couple of months. No sooner had the Mount Kenya Mafia climbed the ladder than they were kicking frantically away at it to ensure no one came up behind.
In State House, the process of ethnic polarisation was palpable. Since starting his new job, John had made a conscious effort during working hours to use Kiswahili–the national language–not Gikuyu, as would feel natural with tribal kinsmen. He knew how easily non-Kikuyu colleagues could be made to feel boxed out. The Mount Kenya Mafia showed no such restraint, finding his self-discipline quaintly amusing. ‘We know you have a problem with this, John,’ they would laugh, lapsing into a throaty barrage of Gikuyu. John would shake his head at the message conveyed. ‘I used to warn them: “This talk will fix us.”’ He noticed how mono-ethnic State House had become. ‘When meetings took place, they would all be people from the same area. All the key jobs were held by home boys.’ The old tribal rivalry had returned–or rather, John realised, it had never actually gone away. ‘With the collapse of Bomas I realised we had never been serious about power sharing. Kiraitu Murungi, the very man who had written about the problem of ethnicity, was the first to use the term “these Jaluos” in my presence.’
At a formal dinner in London several years later, I found myself discussing with John and a British peer of the realm, in light-hearted vein, what were the little signs that betrayed the fact that once-reformist African governments had lost their way. ‘My measure is the time a person who’s agreed to an appointment keeps you waiting,’ said the Lord. ‘If it’s half an hour or under, things are still on track; more than half an hour and the place is in trouble.’
I quoted a journalist friend who maintained that the give-away was the moment a president added an extra segment to his name–‘Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, ‘Daniel Torotich arap Moi’–but added that I regarded the size of the presidential motorcade as the tell-tale indication that the rot had set in.
John had been silent till then. Now he suddenly spoke up. ‘How about the time it takes for the man in charge to get a gold Rolex?’
‘But surely Kibaki already had a gold Rolex?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Yes, but this was a brand-new one. Very slim, with a black face and diamonds round the edge. It was so new it hadn’t yet been measured to size, and it dangled off his wrist. That’s why I noticed it, because it didn’t fit.’
‘So, then, how long did it take?’
‘Just three months,’ John said, with a grim shake of the head. ‘Just three months.’
6
Pulling the Serpent’s Tail
‘KANU handed us a skunk and we took it home as a pet.’
JOHN GITHONGO17
In April 2004, Kenyan MP Maoka Maore received a mysterious phone call telling him that if he visited a fellow MP from the tea-producing area of Limuru, he might find some interesting paperwork there.
Maore would subsequently discover that at least five other MPs were already in possession of the same documents, which someone–almost certainly a disgruntled corporate executive–was energetically leaking. Fearful of the implications, none had acted. But Maore, a cheerful scallywag with a taste for the limelight, was made of more daring stuff. Proud of the role he had played in a 1994 exposé of kickbacks paid during the construction of an airport in Moi’s home town, he boasted that his name struck fear in government circles. Expose one scandal, he had discovered, and all sorts of people will approach you with incendiary information about others.
The tip-off whetted his appetite. Rumours had been swirling around the Kibaki government for months, involving the procurement of AK47s, handcuffs and police cars. An administration which had vowed to crack down on graft had itself, it was said, begun ‘eating’. Once he got his hands on the papers, he immediately tabled them in parliament, not entirely certain himself what they revealed.
The first document was a copy of a 2002 tender opened up by the previous government to supply Kenya with a computerised passport printing and lamination system. Nothing strange there–in the wake of Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Washington had been pressing Kenya, seen as a soft target for Islamic extremists filtering in from Somalia, to upgrade its passport system and better monitor its borders. The highest bid for that tender had been made by De La Rue, a British company, while the lowest came from Face Technologies, an American firm. What was strange, if the second document Maore tabled was to be believed, was that the tender had gone to neither. A payment voucher showed a Central Bank downpayment to a British rival called Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Limited.
This contract, which had never been put out to competitive tender, was a bloated, murky thing. For one thing, it was worth $34 million, nearly three and a half times as much as the lowest bid made back in 2002, which the government would ordinarily be expected to accept. What was more, the company awarded the contract, Maore reminded colleagues in the House, hardly boasted a savoury reputation. Six years earlier, under the former KANU government, Anglo Leasing had been blacklisted for supplying Kenya’s police force with over-priced Mahindra jeeps–‘a cross-breed between a tortoise and a snail’, in the words of a local newspaper–which broke down so regularly the police became a laughing stock. It looked as if officials at the ministry of home affairs had approved a contract inflated to the tune of at least $20 million. The whole deal gave off a sour, suspicious smell.
As far as the public was concerned, Maore’s parliamentary question marked the start of the Anglo Leasing affair, the Kenyan equivalent of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex. Today Maore marvels at what followed from his moment of chutzpah. ‘It was like a dream in which you pull the tail of a snake, you keep pulling, and you find that it just goes on and on forever.’ For John Githongo, however, Maore’s action brought into the open an issue he had been probing for six long, anxious weeks, but naïvely believed he had brought under control. ‘I thought I had it contained. We’d been trying to quietly fix the problem behind the scenes. Then, suddenly, the cat was out of the bag.’ He would later come to feel a certain gratitude to Maore for exposing a matter which would prove too big for a mere permanent secretary. But at the time, convinced this was a minor affair that could be dealt with discreetly, the MP’s intervention was just another problem to add to his growing
number of headaches.
John, too, had been hearing rumours of new graft, of dodgy procurement contracts and lavish spending by members of the NARC administration, who had been buying up large villas in Nairobi’s most attractive suburbs. His colleagues, he registered with growing alarm, were changing as the temptations of high office came their way. Many had spent the 1990s in the badly-paid world of political activism, setting up NGOs, braving the GSU batons, enduring police harassment. While they had pursued the cause of multi-party democracy, they had watched less idealistic friends, focused on businesses and careers, overtake them, moving from scruffy areas like South C to the pristine gated communities of Runda and Muthaiga. Now came the chance to narrow that gap after the years of self-denial. ‘I had friends who bought three separate properties at once. They were handing their wives $100,000 in spending money,’ remembers John.
At TI-Kenya, Mwalimu Mati also noticed the flowering arrogance of an administration that had started out eager to collaborate with former colleagues in the human rights world. With the launch of various inquiries into graft out of the way, NARC saw itself as beyond consultation. ‘At the end of the various commissions and task forces, civil society stopped being involved. The reports were being given to the minister and president and dying a death. In the first six months to one year, people started making excuses. And then it was: “Butt out, we’re the government.”’ The same men competed with one another to see who could secure the biggest office, the most ostentatious car. The Kiswahili term for the moneyed elite is ‘wabenzi’–a reference to the Mercedes Benz beloved of VIPs the world over–and NARC officials wasted no time in confirming its literal accuracy. In their first twenty months in office, government officials spent at least $12 million (878 million shillings) on luxury cars, a survey by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) and Transparency International revealed. The sums spent on E-class Mercedes Benzes, top-of-the-range Land Cruisers, Mitsubishi Pajeros and Range Rovers could have provided 147,000 HIV-positive Kenyans with anti-retroviral treatment for a year. ‘There was something of the Scarlett O’Haras to the Kibaki government at that time,’ chuckles a Kenyan Asian businessman friend. ‘They were gathering their flouncy petticoats around them and declaring: “As God is our witness, we’ll never go hungry again!”’
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