It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  The realisation of the virtual impunity enjoyed by those with connections to State House was hitting home. It had the giddy impact of a sudden rush of blood to the head, the first sniff of cocaine to the novice drug-taker. No longer ordinary mortals, they had become supermen, invincible, omnipotent. ‘It’s completely intoxicating, mesmerising. I could see it in their eyes,’ remembers John. ‘It’s a point you reach. You simply do it because you can.’

  Kenyan wags, the anti-corruption chief knew, had begun joking that the acronym NARC stood not for ‘National Rainbow Coalition’, but for ‘Nothing Actually Really Changes’. Political commentators were reporting that the president’s coterie had capitalised on his stroke and consequent inattention to get up to all sorts of mischief. Alarmed by a tangible sense of drift in State House, John confided to his diary that it might be time to consider resignation. But he stayed his hand. If he hadn’t believed it was possible to reform a system from within, after all, he would never have accepted the job in the first place.

  Trying to probe the provenance of all this easy cash, John found there was a striking difference in the treatment he now received from Kenya’s National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS), which had been so very helpful when it came to dusting off the skeletons of the former regime. While the service had fallen over itself to provide information on Moi-era sleaze in the early days of the NARC administration, it proved a different matter when it came to the new government’s actions. While superficially friendly, meetings with the Kenyan intelligence services were in fact exercises in futility. ‘Their reports were complete rubbish, totally useless and unhelpful.’ If John was going to do a decent job of policing his own government and not just pursuing the outgoing administration, he gradually realised that he would need to find his own, independent sources.

  He was not on totally unfamiliar territory. During his time at TI, John had occasionally paid for information when compiling reports, so he had had some experience in recruiting sources. His natural propensity for befriending everyone and anyone, his ability to make both office cleaner and VIP feel equally appreciated was, as it happens, the spy recruiter’s most treasured skill. Setting up a mini-intelligence network to rival Boinett’s was never his intention; a policy of desperation, the thing began almost of its own accord.

  From the start he’d operated an open-door policy, making clear to all that anyone–whether civil servant, politician, military officer or private businessman–was free to walk into his office at State House with useful information or to voice concerns. ‘I didn’t need to go looking, people would come to me.’ To those who took up that open invitation, appearing at his doorstep with relayed rumours or suspicious documents that had passed across their desks, John was gently encouraging, gradually building up a relationship of trust. ‘I’d say: “Gosh, you have this. That’s really very interesting. But I think there’s a letter missing here…” And they would go off to find the letter.’ He focused on the departments which held the most power, where the most egregious offences seemed likely to occur: the Office of the President, the finance ministry, the ministry of internal security. Having sowed the seed, he waited to reap his slow harvest. ‘The trick, I found, was never to be in a hurry, never get excited.’

  What makes a law-abiding functionary, hardly the devil-may-care type, lift his or her nose above the daily grind and turn sneak, risking exposure, prosecution and dismissal? It was never for the money, something which was only mentioned late in the process, and usually at John’s insistence. For many of those who would become his de facto informers, a profound and justified sense of betrayal explained the readiness to help. They were Kenyan voters too, after all, and like the mass of the populace, had believed NARC when it had promised a new dawn. Kibaki’s campaign rhetoric had been almost too effective–they had taken the anti-graft message to heart. Now they knew, with a certainty not available to the ordinary Kenyan, that the old games were starting up again. Nothing smarts quite like the dashing of raised hopes. It forces the deluded to regret the best part of their nature: their readiness to believe in a better world. They felt they had been made fools of, and they wanted other Kenyans to know what was going on. ‘Some were very angry,’ remembers John. ‘They’d say to me: “This used to happen under Moi. If you let this get out of hand, we’ve seen what happens. We’re glad you’re here.”’ And it was easy to rationalise the move from dutifully cooperating with the ‘Anti-Corruption Czar’as he was now known, just as they had initially been explicitly instructed to do by the president himself, to slipping that same individual–such a likeable young man–information they knew in their hearts their superiors wanted kept secret. Only a tiny step.

  John reserved his keenest attention for the disappointed and downtrodden, for those whose careers were going nowhere. ‘I’d look for people who were frustrated. The employee who hadn’t been promoted for a long time, the one who never got sent on training workshops, who couldn’t get per diems, was being sexually harassed by the boss or felt that promotion had been denied on purely ethnic grounds.’ For the man who had charmed Nairobi’s donor community, winning the confidence of a grim-faced factotum in a worn nylon suit and broken-down shoes, the pre-retirement functionary who lunched off a cup of sweetened tea, took shelter under a plastic bag when the rain pelted down and went home to meals bulked out with the ubiquitous sukuma wiki–Kenyan greens–came all too easy. Bullied bearers of messages, loyal takers of notes, conscientious file-keepers, these ignored drudges bore astute silent witness to every top-level sleight of hand. It was the technique used by the CIA when it infiltrated Congo’s political circles in the 1960s by paying waiters to relay bar talk, and Rhodesia’s guerrilla movements when they used herdsboys to report on army movements. The perfect informer is the employee so insignificant he or she has become part of the furniture, literally invisible to those in power.

  And there was another motivation for these moles in the making: the sheer excitement John represented in otherwise humdrum lives. ‘To the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive,’ John le Carré wrote in The Little Drummer Girl. ‘Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.’ For those whose cramped lives were hemmed in by their rank, their insignificance spelt out in gradings, job titles and pay structures, there was an extraordinary thrill to be had in the knowledge of being inside the loop, invisibly pulling the strings of those who made their working lives such a chore. ‘I may look like nobody, yet I know more than you,’ they whispered to themselves, hugging that secret knowledge–simultaneously revenge and compensation prize–to their chests as the loud men in suits, gold Rolexes peeping below their cuffs, threw their weight around. ‘If I want, I can fuck with you.’

  As the communications got more sensitive, it became dangerous to be seen in John’s company. Many of his sources confined themselves to text messages, or calls to his many mobiles. He owned over a dozen, their chargers overwhelming every power point in his Lavington home. He worked them as an experienced conductor leads an orchestra, each player given his or her proper place in the musical score. Numbers were distributed in categories, so that he knew who was likely to be calling before he lifted the handset. He came to know which informants would ring at which time–if it was 6 o’clock in the morning then it must be so-and-so, calling before going to work–who would make contact once a week, who wanted a daily chat and who would only surface sporadically with something really important.

  Picking up the documents was the tricky part. They met in bars at 2 o’clock in the morning, in the forecourts of deserted petrol stations, in private homes–always at night. When John resorted to couriers, they were individuals he knew and trusted, and instructions were kept to a minimum. ‘If you go to this shop, you will find a certain document waiting for you there.’ If the matter was really sensitive, he would wait for the civil servant to take annual leave, drive to his upcountry shamba, and pick up the document in person.

  Only John knew the names of h
is informants, which were never written down. To protect them, their payments–recorded in a special book stored in his State House office safe–were listed under code names: A2, B1, D3…By the end, John was running a small stable of around twenty informants, their fees ranging from 50,000 to a hefty 200,000 shillings ($2,560) a month. It was a job that played to his talents, this man with a natural bent towards intrigue and an appetite for gossip. But it was not one he enjoyed; it made him feel shifty, tainted. ‘I was spying on my own colleagues, which didn’t feel like an honourable thing to do.’ He was angrily aware that had Kenyan intelligence been delivering, none of it would have been necessary. But as the reports came in, it was ever clearer that he had done the right thing in striking out alone. ‘Someone would tell me something. I’d ask the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate and the same thing would come up. Then the attorney general would investigate, and the same thing would come up again. So I would ask myself: how come only Kenya’s four-billion-shilling-a-year intelligence service can’t get this right? The intelligence service was part of the architecture of corruption, and I had no confidence in it.’

  Since early March 2004, John’s informants had been talking to him about the Anglo Leasing contract. Two businessmen with spotty reputations–Deepak Kamani, whose Kenyan Asian family had been linked with the Mahindra jeep débâcle, and Jimmy Wanjigi, son of a former cabinet minister–were being cited in connection with the deal. But the other names mentioned were worryingly highly placed. Top of the list came vice president Moody Awori, minister for home affairs, and Chris Murungaru, minister of internal security in the Office of the President. Two permanent secretaries’ names were cited–Dave Mwangi at the ministry for internal security, and Joseph Magari at the ministry of finance–as was that of another top civil servant: Alfred Getonga, Kibaki’s personal assistant. Many of those named were the very men who had stepped forward after the president’s stroke, effectively running the country during his illness. The roll-call went to the core of the Mount Kenya Mafia.

  What was worse, John’s sources were telling him something that Maoka Maore did not know. Anglo Leasing and Finance was no more than an address in Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool, an empty title; and since there was nothing behind that name, it seemed reasonable to assume that Kenya would never receive the tamper-proof, fraud-resistant passport printing systems Anglo Leasing had just been contracted, at inflated expense, to supply.

  Before Maore addressed parliament, John had tried raising the matter with Moody Awori, in whose docket immigration, and anything to do with passports, fell. ‘Uncle Moody’, a politician from western Kenya with a liking for flowing robes and wide hats, enjoyed the image of a kindly elder statesman. But he proved distinctly evasive, telling John he made a point of not knowing anything about such things. ‘Sticking his head in the sand,’ John noted in his diary.

  Anglo Leasing was not the only procurement deal John’s informants had mentioned as suspicious. Another contract involved the construction in Spain of a frigate for the Kenyan Navy. Several companies had provided quotes, but the contract went to another outsider: a Cypriot of Sri Lankan birth called Anura Perera who had done a great deal of business with the Moi regime. Perera’s tender had been far higher than any of the other companies’, but he had nonetheless won the bid. The issue did not make a big impression on John until a week later, when the finance minister David Mwiraria pulled him aside at a conference to warn him that Murungaru was asking whether John had authorised an investigation into Perera’s bank account. ‘Mwiraria whispered to me that Perera was a strong supporter of the president and had backed him for over ten years and had even paid the president’s medical bills incurred in London following his road accident in 2002,’ he noted.

  This was not exactly encouraging news for the man whose job was to liaise with the president in the fight against sleaze. It was with a distinctly uneasy mind that John briefed the president the day after Maore’s parliamentary performance. Anglo Leasing, he warned his boss, was likely to prove the first big case of graft within the NARC administration. Given the level of unhappiness created by the botched constitutional review process, which left NARC vulnerable to charges of ethnic favouritism, it was vital the government demonstrate that it was devoting as much energy to pursuing graft within its own ranks as it had to exposing sleaze under Moi. Kibaki seemed unsurprised by both the scam and the names being mentioned, but agreed the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACC) should be activated. The structures to which NARC had pinned its anti-sleaze credentials were about to be put to the test.

  The president had little choice, for parliament was now on the case, KANU MPs licking their lips at the scent of NARC blood. The head of the National Security Committee, David Mwenje, arrived in John’s office and announced that he intended to summon various politicians and officials to give evidence. He was carrying a stash of documents, whose contents–relayed by John’s spy network–were already familiar to the anti-corruption chief. Someone had been leaking with abandon.

  Having set the ball rolling, John left with Mwiraria and Kiraitu for London, where he had an appointment at the offices of Kroll, the risk-consultancy group investigating Goldenberg on the Kenyan government’s behalf. While the three Kenyans were there, John took the opportunity to ask for British records to be checked for evidence of Anglo Leasing. The checks, conducted on the spot, confirmed what John’s sources had said: Anglo Leasing was not a legal entity. Aside from an address in Liverpool, there was, in fact, a baffling absence of information about the mysterious company which had had so many dealings with the Kenyan government. The blatancy of the scam seemed to embolden justice minister Kiraitu, who was in take-no-prisoners mode on the plane returning to Nairobi. ‘The time has come for big heads to roll,’ he declared. John was delighted. ‘If we act firmly on this, the rest of our term will be a free ride politically. We will occupy the moral high ground,’ he told his colleague. Stamping out graft was not only the right thing to do, it made political and electoral sense.

  The return to Kenya was like a cold shower. Fired up, John couldn’t wait to clear airport immigration to get things moving. He rang the head of the KACC from the VIP lounge at Jomo Kenyatta. The news was grim: the head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura, was refusing to cooperate with investigators until parliament had completed its own inquiry. Buoyed by his defiant stance, the permanent secretaries at Finance and Home Affairs were also stonewalling, with the former refusing to give the KACC a copy of the original Anglo Leasing contract. Chris Murungaru, minister for internal security, was also cutting up rough.

  But a 2 May exchange with the president reinvigorated John. Kibaki, in fighting spirit, said he knew that Alfred Getonga, Murungaru and Jimmy Wanjigi were all involved in Anglo Leasing. The money was probably already ‘eaten’, he acknowledged, but John must press ahead as fast as he could. ‘Proceed without mercy,’ Kibaki ordered. His anger at the gathering revelations certainly seemed to confirm the scenario of a high-minded leader betrayed by shifty aides, a scenario John was more than happy to embrace. With Kibaki apparently backing him to the hilt, John redoubled his efforts. All further payments to Anglo Leasing, he wrote to Magari, must be stopped.

  John had not expected his zeal to endear him to his ministerial colleagues, given the extent of the network his informers had sketched. It was just as well. On 4 May, vice president Moody Awori invited him for a lunch of stew and chapattis at the vice president’s villa in Lavington, where they were joined by Kiraitu and Murungaru. Once the guests had arrived, ‘Uncle Moody’s’ genial expression suddenly vanished and he turned on John. ‘Now, what’s all this about?’ There was no need to investigate Anglo Leasing further, he insisted–he had already explained the matter in a statement to parliament. When John disagreed, a tense discussion ensued. Recording the encounter in his diary, John had a surreal sense of priorities being inverted. Anglo Leasing, for these men, was not the issue. He was the ‘problem’ they had all gathered to resolve.
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br />   Perhaps the element of the lunch that pained him most was the new stance adopted by Kiraitu. John knew enough about the Harvard-educated minister’s background to hold him in considerable respect. Kiraitu had been one of a group of pro-opposition lawyers who had braved the wrath of the Moi regime in the 1980s, fighting for multi-partyism, defending political detainees. A member of what the media had dubbed the Young Turks, he had been harassed, monitored and followed before finally going into exile in the United States. There was something about Kiraitu’s face, with its soft and fleshy lips–lips that would have been alluring on a woman but looked slightly repellent on a man–that suggested weakness, and in many of his public statements he had revealed a startling crudeness. His long friendship with Chris Murungaru, whose name surfaced with monotonous regularity every time Anglo Leasing was mentioned, was also a source of concern. But Kiraitu still stood for much that John believed. What had happened to the enthusiasm he had shown on the flight home from London?