It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  But the following morning he found Stanley Murage waiting for him in his State House office, insisting that John’s demotion was not what it appeared. A member of the Mount Kenya Mafia, Murage claimed, had surreptitiously inserted John’s name into the presidential speech. It was vital that he see Kibaki immediately. The tête-à-tête that followed was one of the most surreal of John’s life.

  When he told the president he had ordered his staff to start packing, Kibaki looked sincerely shocked.

  Why he demanded, was John doing that? John replied that he had been transferred to the ministry of justice.

  Who, Kibaki asked, had ordered that?

  The ground felt as though it was shifting under John’s feet. The order, he stammered, had come from His Excellency. He himself had watched Kibaki read the announcement out on live television.

  Not possible, insisted the president. Looking genuinely upset, he summoned his justice minister to provide an explanation.

  John stared at Kibaki, flabbergasted. He had thought the president virtually recovered from his stroke. Was it possible that the old man had been far more seriously affected than anyone had realised? He was not surprised that Kibaki did not write his own speeches. But was it really possible that he did not even take in the words that passed his lips? Or was this just a charade? Was General Coward playing his old game of trying to please everyone all of the time? Had the diplomatic and civic society reaction to John’s removal been more negative than anticipated, prompting a rowback? Was a president immune to embarrassment actually using an infirmity to cover up a U-turn, preferring to be labelled senile than to seem soft on sleaze in foreign donors’ eyes?

  John would never know the answer. The entire baffling episode would, in retrospect, come to seem like a distillation of the nebulous, shape-shifting Kibaki presidency, where blame was passed from one player to another until the exhausted enquirer lost interest in the quest.

  John could only wonder, and enjoy the spectacle of Kiraitu, so smug the day before, being humiliated in his turn as an irate Kibaki informed him there would be no change. The following day, the old routine nominally re-established itself, with John briefing the president on who he believed were the key players in Anglo Leasing, and Kibaki urging further investigations, on the naval frigate contract in particular. But the trust had gone. Quietly, John began putting feelers out to friends in the NGO and Western academic worlds, delicately exploring what avenues would be open to him should he jump ship. Many of his informants quietly went to ground following this episode, and some never resurfaced. For them, the post of anti-corruption czar had lost its aura of invincibility. They registered something John did not want to acknowledge. Looking back, he would come to date his abortive demotion, The Presidential Announcement That Never Was, as the moment any hope of a genuine crackdown on graft quietly died. His office remained in State House, and the friendly chats with the Mzee continued, but something in their relationship had changed for ever.

  John had fallen victim to one of the continent’s oft-rehearsed myths. Reporting Africa, I’ve always been puzzled by the readiness otherwise intelligent diplomats, businessmen and technocrats show in embracing the ‘Blame the Entourage’ line of argument. ‘The Old Man himself is OK,’ runs this refrain, echoed at various times from Guinea to Ivory Coast, Zaire to Gabon, Tanzania to Zambia. ‘Deeply principled, a devout Muslim/Protestant/Catholic, he observes, in his own life, a strict moral code. It’s his aides/wife/sons who are the problem. They’re like leeches. If only he’d realise what they are doing in his name and put a stop to it. But of course he adores them. It’s his one weakness. Such a shame.’ The argument has always struck me as a form of naïvety so extreme it verges on intellectual dishonesty. In countries where presidents have done their best to centralise power, altering constitutions, winning over the army and emasculating the judiciary, the notion that key decisions can be taken without their approval is laughable. If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.

  Despite his journalistic scepticism, his written musings on this very subject, John had swallowed the line. After seeing Kibaki in his hospital bed watching TV cartoons, he had convinced himself that if State House was running off the rails, the blame rested with a coterie which had taken advantage of an upstanding man whose wits were temporarily scrambled. The six months following Kibaki’s hospitalisation, he initially told himself, had been a lacuna during which all sorts of underhand activity had flourished uncontrolled. ‘I would think, “He’s in it,” but then, of course, he had been ill…’ In fact, John was now forced to admit, the opposite was true. Dining regularly with the president, he could track his steadily improving mental health as accurately as anyone bar Kibaki’s doctor. ‘I was eating with him and I had a very good read on things. He was improving steadily, he could talk about something today and discuss it accurately tomorrow. I would sit back quietly at home, look at it rationally and say: “Actually, the fitter he gets, the worse this problem has become, the more confident the crooks are.”’

  11

  Gorging Their Fill

  ‘He’s a menace to the donors, he’s the taxpayers’ despair, For the Treasury is empty–but Macavity’s not there.’

  British high commissioner EDWARD CLAY’s bastardised version of ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat’

  John’s struggles were not going unobserved outside the confines of State House. Watching from the sidelines were the media, civil society and Western donors. This last group had a particularly keen interest in NARC’s performance on corruption. Having piled into the country with promises of aid when Moi quit the scene, they needed reassurance that it was not sliding back into the bad old ways.

  Kenya is one of a raft of African nations locked in a symbiotic–perhaps ‘mutually parasitic’ is a more accurate term–relationship with the developed world and the lending institutions set up at the Bretton Woods conference in the wake of the Second World War to combat global poverty. Post-independence, its agricultural sector received British support, but it was with the oil shocks of the 1970s and the collapse of commodity prices that Kenya’s economy really began to depend heavily on loans, grants and investment from an industrialised world ready, as the Cold War locked Africa in its icy grip, to provide ‘no questions asked’ funding to any government rebuffing the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc.

  Seen as too important to be allowed to fail, Kenya became the first sub-Saharan country in the 1980s to receive structural adjustment funding from the IMF. Between 1970 and 2006, this modest African country received a total of $US17.26 billion from its foreign allies, roughly one and a quarter times what the Americans spent on the Marshall Plan, designed to rescue the whole of war-ravaged Europe. At its height in the early 1990s, aid from both the multinational lending institutions and donor nations which followed their lead accounted for 45 per cent of the Kenyan government budget. Under Kibaki, that shrank to less than 5 per cent, thanks to improved tax collection, but the total–$768 million in 2005–remained hefty by any standards.

  The relationship between giver and receiver has rarely been free from strain. In the early years, donors carefully steered clear of what were known as ‘governance issues’, a polite euphemism for ‘graft’. Raising the issue in the prickly era when memories of colonial injustices were still sharp was deemed intolerable interference in a nation’s sovereign affairs. The World Bank and the IMF’s raison d’être, their members argued, was to fight poverty, not corruption–which was a political, not an economic issue. The cynical realities of the Cold War required loyalty payments, and if those had to be made to military dictators and autocrats with blood on their hands in the knowledge that little would reach the poor, so be it. But with the passage of time came the growing realisation that financial transparency, hum
an rights and institutional checks and balances mattered more to the quest for prosperity than had previously been recognised. Africa’s insatiable Big Men were in danger of killing their own economies, and as crisis bit, their pillaging began to hurt more than it once had.

  Kenya perfectly illustrated that shift. Kenyatta had undoubtedly been both authoritarian and corrupt, but a healthier economy meant the looting drew less attention. Moi’s far leaner economy struggled, in contrast, to sustain the impact of State House’s system of authorised looting, which a minister later estimated to have cost the taxpayer a total of 635 billion Kenya shillings (roughly $US10 billion) in the space of twenty-four years.29 Identical practices were viewed in the West with freshly critical eyes. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant support for disreputable African regimes could no longer be justified on traditional ‘He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard’ lines. Many of those bastards were seen to produce failed states, judged–with the menace of the Soviet empire gone–to threaten Western interests. The new head of the World Bank, the Australian James Wolfensohn, gave voice to the new approach when he declared corruption an ‘intolerable cancer’. Donors began digging in their heels, insisting on elections and attaching ever more detailed conditions to their money. Wily presidents responded by playing games. That tension explained a pronounced stop-start pattern to Kenya’s aid flows. Jerky as a car driven by a learner with no clutch control, relations between the two sides revved, stalled, and then sputtered back into life as trust came and went.

  Like other African strongmen before him, Daniel arap Moi proved a master in running rings around the donors. Economists use the term ‘reactance’ to describe leaders’ tendency to demonstrate their autonomy by doing precisely the opposite of what their Western supporters want. But Moi’s contrariness was not simply a form of bloody-mindedness. Only a fool could have failed to spot that most latter-day World Bank and IMF reforms implied a radical trimming of emperor-like powers. At times in Kenya the donors appeared to carry the day, as happened in 1991 when, exasperated by Moi’s refusal to allow multi-party politics, they suspended $350 million-worth of aid. Moi responded within weeks, amending the constitution to legalise opposition parties. At others, Moi emerged the victor by dint of sheer tenacity. He would fiercely resist a suggested change throughout months of negotiations, then appear to give way, only to implement it in a way that made a mockery of the entire exercise, effectively sending a two-finger salute to his foreign partners. Economist Paul Collier logged how the Kenyan government promised the same reform–of its maize marketing system–to the World Bank at least five times over a fifteen-year period in return for aid, only to reverse it on each occasion. ‘The amazing thing is that the money kept coming. How did Kenyan government officials manage to keep straight, sincere faces as for the fifth time they made the same commitment? How did officials of the agency manage to delude themselves into thinking that adherence this time was likely?’30

  It was a similar story with the establishment of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACA). Aware that both Kenya’s judiciary and police force were rotten to the core, Western donors seized on the idea of setting up a special anti-sleaze body, a Kenyan version of Chicago’s Untouchables. Its director would enjoy security of tenure and its staff be appointed by an independent committee, shielding them from bribery and threats. Moi fought the proposal all the way, only caving in after the donors suspended $400 million in aid in 1997. He then appointed one of Kenya’s most insalubrious businessmen, a former police officer with a terrifying reputation, as KACA’s first director, compromising it from the outset. Six months later the director was suspended for incompetence, and in 2000 the high court declared KACA unconstitutional.

  Western donors were not the only ones made to look gullible by the ‘Professor of Politics’. In 1999, when the second major aid freeze was beginning to bite, Moi appointed Dr Richard Leakey, one of the few white Kenyans engaged in politics, to lead a ‘Dream Team’ of technocrats which would overhaul the country’s nepotistic civil service. The president was desperate to get a new IMF lending programme and Leakey, no political naïf, became convinced he had finally accepted the need for change. ‘When I went to see him, he told me to prosecute his own son, Philip, if it proved necessary. When you have that kind of assurance, you feel you can blast your way through.’ The Dream Team worked wonders for a year. An impressed IMF, convinced Kenya was finally on the right track, approved a new agreement. ‘A week after that, direct access to Moi was closed off,’ remembers a rueful Leakey. With the removal of the president’s blessing, the Dream Team hit the buffers. ‘He’d got what he wanted. We had shot ourselves in the foot by securing that IMF deal far too quickly.’ Leakey stepped down, aware he had been thoroughly outmanoeuvred. Moi might be led to water, but could only rarely be made to drink.

  That legacy of presidential jousting and international distrust goes so deep that many of Kenya’s donors–the EU is a notable exception–still steer clear of direct budgetary support, in which money is paid straight into government coffers. The equivalent of handing a beggar a fistful of cash and saying, ‘Do with it as you see fit,’ this is the most cost-effective way of funnelling aid, but it requires a reliable partner. The alternative, project support–the equivalent of telling the beggar, ‘You can’t be trusted not to waste your money on beer, so here’s a voucher for a cup of coffee’–requires the involvement of NGOs and constant monitoring by donor officials.

  Covered in detail in the Kenyan media, the fraught nature of Moi’s dealings with the donors established a principle in the minds of ordinary Kenyans, understandably sceptical of their MPs’ readiness to stand up for the ordinary citizen. If things got too bad, they told themselves, if the GSU was out in force and teargas billowing along Uhuru Avenue, the West would express its disapproval in terms a materialistic government understood: money. Hence the intense interest, bordering on obsession, in what foreign countries thought of the way Kenya was being run. As a journalist based in Nairobi I would often be taken aback by the way in which a routine story of mine, echoing what had already been stated ad nauseam in the local press, would be seized upon and reprinted for the benefit of the Kenyan domestic market. ‘Britain’s Financial Times Says Kenyan Economy on the Slide’, the newspapers would trumpet, as though here was the final, ultimate proof that the government was doing a lousy job. A foreigner was saying it, so it must be true. Western donor governments, their media and their expatriates, had become the ultimate, trusted arbiters of Kenyan reality.

  The truth was a lot murkier, the donors’ stance rather less heroic than it at first appeared. The very factors that made them fret about governance in Kenya–the country’s position as East Africa’s dominant economy, its history as a capitalist ally, its military agreements–also encouraged a conviction that a certain amount of abuse was tolerable in the name of realpolitik. ‘The British in particular have long held the quietly racist, patronising view that Kenyan affairs are being managed as well as anyone could expect, that the present government is the best we can hope for–in other words, that Africans simply don’t have the intelligence or sophistication to manage very well,’ John noted in Executive in February 1994. There was a tendency to favour democracy’s concrete symbols–election day–over its substance, which required constituencies to be redrawn and the constitution changed if the opposition was to have a fighting chance. Rigged elections were hailed as ‘steps in the right direction’, a euphemism for ‘good enough for Africa’. When, after the 1997 elections, the donors found that KANU victories in eight constituencies did not stand up to scrutiny, a finding which cancelled out the ruling party’s parliamentary majority, they agreed not to mention this awkward fact in their final report on the polls. ‘The donors’ primary concern appeared to be the avoidance of any path that could lead to a breakdown of the political and economic order,’ wrote academic Stephen Brown. ‘Fearing instability, looking for quick results and avoiding more uncertain but farther-reaching reforms, donors act
ually forestalled more fundamental change.’31

  Britain wanted to continue training its soldiers in Kenya. Washington, in the wake of the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi and attacks on Israeli targets on the Mombasa coast, wanted a pro-Western administration in power in Kenya, a bulwark against Islamic extremism in the Horn of Africa. In a region which had seen both civil wars and genocides, there was no point being too purist. In their defence, foreign officials could point to a string of development studies showing that to be effective, aid had to be disbursed consistently, not turned on and off like a tap as punishment or reward. To make the most of Western generosity, African finance ministers needed to know how much they could expect in five or ten years’ time. For the sake of the poorest of the poor, they argued, donors must lift their eyes from the petty abuses of the day and take the long view. Institutions and the moral imperatives they enshrined took decades to establish, checks and balances years to shore up, civil society a lifetime to build. To their credit, the donors contributed funds to all three processes, footing the bill for prosecutors’ offices to be revamped, technocrats hired, media conferences staged and human rights groups established. The harvest would be reaped a long way down the line. Genuine concern required a curious form of brutality, in which the gaze was trained, Buddha-like, on the far horizon.

  Less creditably, another innate human tendency was also at work. In every enterprise there is a powerful urge–particularly pronounced in those of a methodical, paper-pushing nature–to Keep the Show on the Road. Habit creates its own compulsion, supposedly temporary projects develop a momentum and logic of their own, and the larger the sums of money and the staff numbers involved, the harder it is to admit a thing has run its course. The inclination to Carry on Carrying On means donors shrink from walking away, no matter how disappointing the results of their intervention.