It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Clay assigned a team at the High Commission the task of establishing what was going on. The Kenyan media, he felt, made the mistake of tackling each episode in isolation. The larger embassies could play their part, he believed, by putting together the pieces of the jigsaw to form a coherent picture. ‘Those of us who had an institutional memory could stitch the various episodes together. We used to get all sorts of bits and pieces. There were three or four of us at the embassy working on it, and we did so continuously.’ The team was small, effective and of like mind. ‘We were all in tune with one another, and we all knew that if London didn’t like what we were doing, Edward would take the rap,’ recalls a former member.

  The donor community was part-funding John Githongo’s office, and also providing technical advice on constitutional affairs, so liaising with diplomats was part of John’s official duties, something Kibaki had expressly asked him to do. But Edward Clay denies the oft-repeated claim that John spied for him. When the two met, they always chose highly visible spots, such as the Norfolk Hotel’s exposed Delamere Terrace, to signal that there was nothing secret about their meetings. ‘There were things we could advance to one another,’ says Clay. ‘But the idea that we exchanged files–that’s a fantasy. John never betrayed anything he ought not to have done, and I don’t think I did either. We knew our limits. It wasn’t some kind of joint strategy. None of the diplomats were suborning civil servants.’

  In fact, the diplomatic community didn’t need to be leaked to. If Western surveillance in much of Africa can be a pretty sketchy affair, this is not the case in Kenya, regarded in London and Washington as too strategically important not to be closely monitored. Mobile phone conversations are worryingly easy to listen in on, and on a continent where the landlines have virtually collapsed, VIPs depend on their mobiles. The contents of those intercepts were fed to the key embassies, offering a fascinating insight into what Kenya’s rich and powerful were up to. No wonder that when John met up with key diplomats, he was sometimes startled by the extent of their grasp of his patch. On one occasion during a meeting at the American embassy, a member of staff leaned over and said: ‘John, we probably know more about this than you.’

  Even without the intelligence, it was amazing what a systematic approach could yield–whether that meant checking company websites boasting about contracts with the Kenyan government, sifting through the rarely examined detail of the government’s yearly budget or trawling old press cuttings to establish the track records of local entrepreneurs. That information could then be cross-referenced with snippets gathered via that most traditional of diplomatic techniques: old-fashioned schmoozing. Clay’s resurrected network stood him in good stead. ‘The classic diplomatic skills of getting out and talking to people really count for a lot,’ he says. ‘This is a very oral and anecdotal society. People will talk to you in a way they would never write to you. You could go around the ministries and report back on the mood music. There was a susurration of talk of corruption going on at many levels by people who were concerned.’

  He reported what he was finding back to the other ambassadors. He also kept the World Bank’s country director abreast, but the Kibakis’ tenant, after an initial show of interest, manifested little appetite for what he was hearing. ‘I let Makhtar Diop into quite a lot of it, who didn’t believe me,’ remembers Clay. ‘And when he was forced to believe it, he declined to do anything about it.’

  Clay felt supported in his digging by a new, more muscular line on corruption being touted in Whitehall. A growing recognition in the West that it took two to tango–for every minister trousering a bribe, there had to be a Western company ready to pay it–had culminated in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Convention on Combating Bribery, signed by thirty-six member states. The convention became British law in 2002, for the first time giving British courts jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad by domestic companies. In America, bribing officials working for foreign governments is illegal, but that had not traditionally been the case in many European countries, including Britain. Now, thanks to the work of organisations like TI, a legally ambiguous era when foreign contracts were routinely clinched with massive ‘sweeteners’ paid to African wabenzi was supposedly coming to an end. Blair’s government also gave its backing to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, a scheme under which firms in the petroleum and mineral sectors agreed to open their arrangements with client governments to public scrutiny. So seriously did Whitehall take the new legislation, it sent a team to Kenya in 2004 to spell out its implications for the expatriate business community, and Clay and his colleagues gathered British and Kenyan businessmen together to warn them that corruption abroad could now lead to prosecution in Britain.

  As the weeks passed and an increasingly unsavoury picture of bloated procurement emerged, the two leading ambassadors started taking their concerns to Kenyan ministers. Both of them assumed this could not represent government policy. For Clay, a meeting with the head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura, marked a personal turning point. ‘I asked him what was going on. He made some Panglossian statement, assuring me that various contracts had been stopped, this was a dead horse we were flogging, and in any case it was a Moi-era horse. We had a real set-to. The colleague who was with me said he had never seen me so angry. By that time we had a pretty good idea there was a conspiracy abroad and that the various bits of malfeasance were linked. Some was old corruption being revived, some was new, but the constant theme was the networks were being recultivated and reactivated.’

  Getting nowhere with the Kenyan government, Clay decided to go public, in a July 2004 speech to the British Business Association of Kenya. Circulated ahead of time to ensure no media outlet missed it, it was a typically whimsical Clay offering. Headlined ‘Some Bread and Butter Questions’, it ended with a pastiche of an old-fashioned children’s rhyme. It was characteristic of the high commissioner that having got the serious stuff about corruption off his chest in the body of the speech, he should deliver a rambling spoof of ‘The King’s Breakfast’, by A.A. Milne, inventor of Pooh Bear, fine-tuned during several enjoyable hours with his staff.

  The King asked

  The Queen and

  The Queen asked

  The Dairymaid:

  ‘Could we have some butter for

  The Royal slice of bread?’

  The Dairymaid

  She curtsied,

  Thinking that this might be

  A lovely little earner

  If generously spread.’

  The Dairymaid

  Swiftly

  Went and said to

  The Alderney:

  ‘About the butter contract

  For the Royal slice of bread–

  Are you interested

  In long-term

  Exclusive tendering?

  For I heard that butter prices

  Were about to leap ahead.’

  The eleven subsequent verses sailed over most Kenyans’ heads. But they had no problem grasping a few choice phrases carefully chosen by this journalist manqué to reverberate in a culture where power is so often expressed in terms of ‘eating’. They were all the more shocking for being delivered in the clipped accent that has always allowed the Foreign Office’s denizens to deliver the rudest of messages while remaining, in format at least, exquisitely polite.

  ‘We never expected corruption to be vanquished overnight,’ Clay told his audience. ‘We all implicitly recognised that some would be carried over to the new era. We hoped it would not be rammed in our faces. But it has.’ Those in government were now eating ‘like gluttons’ out of a combination of arrogance, greed and panic, he said. ‘They may expect we shall not see, or notice, or will forgive them a bit of gluttony, but they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes.’

  ‘Vomit One’, as Clay now refers to the speech, had an even greater impact than he had anticipated. He was summoned fo
r a dressing-down by foreign minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere, and told to support his allegations with names, facts and figures. MPs accused Clay–embittered neo-colonialist that he clearly was–of insulting the Kenyan people. The newspaper cartoonist Gado brilliantly lampooned the government’s hypocritical relationship with its foreign critics in the Nation, showing a drunken minister, vodka bottle in hand, vomiting copiously on Clay’s feet. When Clay objects, the minister unleashes a torrent of belligerent abuse–‘Nobody tells me what to do in my own country, you hear me, so why don’t you #*@* off?’–before suddenly holding out his hand. ‘Er…Can you spare me a quid, mate?’

  While recognising that Clay had expressed an ugly truth, the mainstream press was shocked by his indelicate language, riled that a diplomat representing Her Majesty’s Government, with its brutal colonial history, should dare tick off a Kenyan administration in such terms. Even members of Clay’s staff shared that view. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, he went too far,’ one told me. ‘He was right, but in Africa, it’s simply not acceptable to disrespect the Big Man, and that’s what Clay was seen as doing.’ In the gutter press, the smear machine began churning out its rocambolesque accusations. Clay was the president of the Royal Gay Society (leading member: one John Githongo) which staged weekend orgies in Lake Naivasha, scene of much aristocratic bed-hopping during the Happy Valley years. Clay’s wife was in the pay of a foreign state, the planted stories claimed, and the high commissioner was so hated that the outraged Chris Murungaru, minister for national security, had tried to strangle him at a State House function.

  But the reaction on the street was different. The British high commissioner’s residence in Muthaiga lies at the end of an almost permanently traffic-clogged thoroughfare linking Nairobi’s slums with its centre, so Clay had plenty of time on his way to work each morning to savour the public mood. Spotting his face–now familiar to every Kenyan–the touts selling newspapers at the traffic lights clustered round his car to urge him to greater efforts. ‘You’re right!’, ‘It was time!’ Matatu drivers leant from their windows to cheekily offer lifts to Kamiti, Kenya’s maximum security prison. Spotting the high commissioner’s diplomatic plates, a policeman stepped forward to wave him through on a busy roundabout, a huge smile on his face. A former permanent secretary stopped him in the street, a twinkle in his eye, to remark that Clay’s shoes looked remarkably clean. ‘Thank you, you have done this country a singular service,’ he added. When Clay visited his bank, the shoeshine men outside joined in the fun. ‘Five shillings for shoeshine!’ they yelled. ‘Ten for vomit!’ A beggar boy was spotted in the city centre with a sign reading, in Kiswahili: ‘A penny please but don’t puke on my foot’. At Nairobi’s nyama choma joints, where roast meat was served with helpings of ugali maize meal, diners clasped bulging stomachs and joked, ‘I’m so full, I could vomit on your shoes.’ Ordinary Kenyans, it turned out, were rather less prone than the educated elite to post-colonial prickliness, bearing the brunt as they did of their government’s predatory tactics.

  Overwhelmingly positive, the public reaction came as a massive relief to Clay. In theory, his speech had been vetted by the Foreign Office, but staff in Whitehall, not expecting their envoy to Kenya to present a problem, probably skimmed it so quickly they missed the juicy bits. Clay knew he had caught his colleagues in London on the hop. ‘It was clear to me that if it had gone wrong, I’d have been dropped like a stone. It was a bit like walking the plank. Instead, the British government saw what we saw, that there wasn’t great public support for the official Kenyan line.’ He had, in fact, become a hero to many Kenyans, in whose eyes he was playing the rambunctious role they expected of foreign donors. But Clay was about to run up against a far more formidable opponent than the Mount Kenya Mafia: his own government.

  In public, British ministers supported their outspoken high commissioner. But as he set about drafting further speeches on government sleaze, Clay found he was fighting over words and phrases with Whitehall, fully alert now to their firebrand representative’s capacity to stir things up. He was grateful for the lawyers’ steers–no one wants to be sued for libel–but this went further. His colleagues in King Charles Street were essentially questioning the wisdom of speaking out at all. ‘It was extremely tedious. I didn’t expect London to try to teleguide what I was trying to do and say in my own way. I remember taking a call on my mobile from somebody in London trying to get me to pull one of my speeches as I was actually walking into the venue to deliver it. I said, “It’s too late. And why?” He said, “We don’t have time to go through all this,” meaning: “We don’t have time at the Foreign Office to have this internal debate.” So I said: “Then leave it to me.” By the time I gave Vomit Two, I’d fought over every word and sentence.’ Clearing the speech took two months.

  These conversations were with staff at the Foreign Office, but behind them Clay sensed a brooding presence. ‘Someone was whispering in their ears.’ That someone, he was certain, was the Department for International Development.

  12

  A Form of Mourning

  ‘It isn’t facing danger that cuts you up inside. It’s the waiting, the not knowing what’s coming.’

  ELIOT NESS, The Untouchables

  By the turn of the century, Western policy in the developing world was increasingly being set not in ministerial offices but by the NGOs–organisations like Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid. The Make Poverty History campaign, pushing for the cancellation of Africa’s foreign debt and dramatic increases in Western aid levels, was gathering momentum. Jeffrey Sachs, the brilliant American economist who campaigned in favour of a massive hike in funding, appeared to have won the emotional, if not the intellectual, argument. Other analysts might shake their heads at Sachs’s simplistic formula for the continent’s recovery, but he had successfully wooed pop-star campaigners like Bono and Sir Bob Geldof, and their ability to mobilise a younger generation bored by traditional politics awed Western governments. Whether on the right or left, political parties realised that promising to ‘save’ Africa was a potential vote-winner in the eyes of an idealistic coming generation. No wonder members of the African elite, aware of these pressures, sometimes sounded unappetisingly smug when contemplating tortured Western attitudes to the continent. As one Kenyan newspaper editor told me: ‘What we Africans have realised is that your leaders need to lend to us more than we need to be lent to.’

  An early convert to the cause of vastly boosted aid was Tony Blair, who denounced the state of the continent as ‘a scar on the conscience of the nation’ and called for a Marshall Plan for Africa. He pledged to raise British aid levels to the 0.7 per cent of GDP demanded by the NGOs and agreed to the creation of DfID, a ministry whose development agenda, separated from the Foreign Office, would no longer be tainted by national self-interest, so the theory went. The American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, bitterly contested by the British public and deeply unpopular with the left wing of Blair’s Labour Party, further boosted his interest in the continent. Africa was one of the few remaining areas where a compromised prime minister with a liking for the international stage could still show moral leadership.

  In May 2004, just as the Anglo Leasing scandal was breaking, Blair launched the Africa Commission, whose recommendations–writing off debt, tripling aid by 2010 and improving trade terms–paved the way for the 2005 G8 meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland. The Gleneagles summit, Downing Street trumpeted, would be the climax of a Year of Africa, marking a turning point in the continent’s relationship with the West. Playing to the industrialised world’s guilt complex, the Make Poverty History campaign, Africa Commission and Gleneagles summit all shared one characteristic: the emphasis was on Western, rather than African, action. Top-down, statist, these initiatives were all about donor obligations, pledges and behaviour. What they definitely weren’t about–despite token references to the importance of ‘good governance’ and a supposed pact between North and South–was highlighting the shortcomings of African gov
ernments set to benefit from future Western largesse.

  DfID, the only British ministry with explicit instructions from the Treasury to boost rather than slash spending, swiftly won respect in other Western capitals for its focus, energy and principled insistence on untied aid. In development, at least, a fading imperial power could still claim to ‘punch above its weight’ on the global scene. At home, DfID’s altruism, combined with its readiness to challenge decisions taken by fustier, more parochial departments, meant it was seen as a sexy place to work: 85 per cent of those applying to the Civil Service put it top of their list of preferences. Yet DfID’s ‘spend, spend, spend’ philosophy was beset with difficulty.

  Critics of international aid, like the American economist William Easterly, point out that one of the defining characteristics of the industry is its inherent unaccountability. An institution setting itself a narrow goal can statistically assess whether or not its efforts are having an impact. The more it takes on, the harder it is to separate out the various strands and quantify success and failure. ‘Some of its goals are so huge as to be meaningless,’ wrote The Times on the occasion of DfID’s tenth anniversary. ‘As well as saying that “our overall aim is to get rid of world poverty,” it wants to scrap the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, complete the Doha Round of world trade talks and combat climate change.’32 ‘If you are responsible for everything, you are responsible for nothing,’ comments Easterly. DfID gauges improvement by a country’s progress in meeting the UN’s eight millennium development goals, but DfID is not the only organisation disbursing aid, and recipient governments, after all, also play some role in determining their national course. This leaves the amount of money which is disbursed as the only solid yardstick of progress, hardly a situation likely to encourage discrimination amongst the officials who are responsible for approving projects.