As far as the regime was concerned, it was business as usual. A man whose presence had been regarded by all as a litmus test of its good intentions had resigned in a way that made clear something was very, very wrong at the heart of government, and–after the briefest of wobbles–State House had got away with it. Few were surprised when four days after the donors’ meeting, the militant Gladwell Otieno was forced to resign from TI-Kenya by the same wazee who had once recruited John. A second high-profile anti-corruption campaigner was gone, from a none-too-crowded field. The regime had received the signal it wanted from the donors, however grudging, and saw no reason to hold back.
Clay’s last few months in Kenya would be a difficult time. His health was playing up–stress-related, perhaps–and as he underwent a series of medical scans he sensed a falling-away by his colleagues. Relations between DfID and the FCO in Kenya had become ‘awful’, recalls one junior officer: ‘One side was saying it was white, the other was saying it was black.’ When Clay talks about this period now, his voice becomes light and whispery with remembered strain, so thin the tape recorder barely picks it up.
In June 2005 the Clays headed back to their home on the chalky foothills below Epsom’s racecourse, a semi-detached house on a middle-class estate so modest any retired African high commissioner would regard it as evidence of a wasted career. Before leaving, he tried in vain to persuade local DfID staff to meet and discuss a common approach on corruption. ‘From July 2004, no one in the FCO in London and no one in DfID in Nairobi was willing to debate the issues. DfID staff always had something better to do. That demoralised me to a huge extent. It was clear to me that when I left there would be a marked rowing back on the past.’
13
In Exile
‘…Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event…I do not know
Why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do.”’
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
As he began his exile in February 2005, John could be under no illusions as to the life-and-death nature of the choices before him. A few days before his resignation, he’d been presented with the most chilling lesson imaginable in the dangers of challenging the powers that be.
Georgia’s prime minister, Zhurab Zhvania, had been the undisputed star of an anti-corruption conference staged at Nairobi’s Safari Park Hotel the previous October. Zhvania had played a key role in the Rose Revolution that had toppled president Eduard Shevardnadze after his clumsy attempt to rig the 2003 Georgian elections. As prime minister, Zhvania had dismissed most of Georgia’s army generals, slashed the size of his own office and scrapped the traffic police unit, a key source of sleaze. His no-nonsense advice to delegates had been electrifying. When a regime has been toppled it is vital to strike fast, before the power blocs that perpetuated graft had the chance to regain their balance, he had told the audience. ‘Use your chance. You will not have another.’ That message had contained a certain personal irony at the time for John, horribly conscious that NARC had almost certainly already missed its chance. Sharing a podium, John and the Georgian prime minister had hit it off. Like John, Zhvania had been subjected to a smear campaign at home, accused of being a foreigner and a homosexual. John had been touched by the fact that Zhvania had brought his young son to Kenya with him, explaining that his job allowed him little time with his family, and the trip was an opportunity for some precious paternal bonding.
That young son was in mourning now. Zhvania’s bodyguards had found his father’s lifeless body in an armchair in the Tbilisi apartment of an associate, also dead. The official explanation was carbon monoxide poisoning, caused by a faulty gas heater. A subsequent FBI investigation would find that levels of carbon monoxide in the flat were not high enough to kill, leading Zhvania’s family to conclude that the two men had been murdered elsewhere, their bodies brought to the flat and arranged to make their deaths appear a banal domestic accident. Dead at forty-one, Zhvania had probably paid with his life for the very take-no-prisoners approach that had so impressed the Nairobi conference.
It was a dreadful corroboration of Justice Ringera’s warning, but other cautionary tales urged John in the opposite direction–to take action. He knew former officials who had served under Moi, watched procurement scandals break on their watch, and retired. ‘They left government, kept their mouths shut and went into private practice. And look what happened. After that came queue voting, the Ouko murder, ethnic clashes, and Goldenberg. Letting the system repair itself doesn’t work. I’m left thinking: what would have happened if they had taken a stand?’
By March 2005 John had established his base in Oxford, at the city’s newest and most international graduate college. Founded in 1950–absurdly recently by Oxford’s standards–St Antony’s neither looked nor behaved like a traditional Oxbridge college. While most colleges boast a small contingent of tenured fellows who have the right to live out their days on site, St Antony’s had embraced the notion of ‘senior associate members’, a title conferred on foreign visitors temporarily setting aside their careers to don academic robes. With sixty senior associate members on staff at any one time, the college prided itself on being more open to the outside world, more invigorating, than its more ancient rivals.
Back in Kenya, many of John’s friends had groaned when his new country of residence became clear. ‘He should have gone anywhere else: Norway, Sweden, Canada, anywhere, just so long as it wasn’t Britain,’ one told me. The choice played into the hands of John’s enemies, who could cite it as final proof that Githongo had been a British snitch, working to destroy the NARC administration from within all along. The situation was not helped by the fact that St Antony’s College, whose first warden was World War II soldier and adventurer William Deakin, included several crusty former members of Britain’s intelligence on its staff and was popularly rumoured to be a recruiting ground for agents. But from John’s perspective, Britain was always the obvious destination. It was where he was born–which meant he didn’t need to apply for political asylum–and where he had gone to university. It felt like a second home.
Detractors in Nairobi whispered that he was living the life of Riley, richly rewarded by his British paymasters for his perfidy. So convinced were many by these claims that the St Antony’s switchboard got the odd call from angry Kenyans demanding to know how much the college was being paid by MI6 to lodge this known British spy. In fact, while John’s title of ‘senior associate member’ sounded impressive, his living arrangements were as bleakly functional as those of any postgraduate student. St Antony’s provided lodgings–a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a house on the Woodstock Road–and space was cleared in the study of a college-owned Victorian house where a computer and filing cabinet were made available. Sharing this room with a succession of scholars, John would sit tapping at his keyboard, fuelling himself with Red Bull and cups of tea brewed from the kettle in the corner, as the driving rhythms of ‘Green Onions’, that undergraduate perennial, wafted down from the rooms above.
At the age of forty, John had left the world of bodyguards and cocktail receptions, returning to the Spartan life of the student bachelor, doing his own washing, fixing sandwiches in a kitchenette, measuring out his life in instant coffee spoons. He was now an ordinary citizen, and one, ironically, whose credentials won him not fawning respect but suspicion. When, trying to open an account at the local branch of Barclays, he mentioned that he had worked in the office of the Kenyan president, the process suddenly hit an invisible buffer. ‘I had to get a special letter from the college authorities. Barclays realised I was the kind of PEP–Politically Exposed Person, to use the lingo of the corruption world–who could be depositing a large amount of illicitly-acquired money.’ For someone who had expended so much energy trying to police Kenya’s PEPs, the exchange was grimly amusing.
John was soon made aware that his watchers had followed him from London. Coming out of hi
s study one day, he noticed a smartly dressed black woman outside the house, mobile phone clamped to ear, perched in a position from which she could survey his comings and goings. She made no attempt at concealment. In fact she seemed to be deliberately making her presence felt. While some of his ‘shadows’ in London had borne the hallmark of Kenyan intelligence, this, to John’s eyes, looked more like the employee of a private firm of detectives, hired perhaps by one of the Kenyan businessmen whose profits he had jeopardised. ‘We’re still watching you,’ they were telling him.
He was always careful never to speak long on his mobile, aware that private sleuths, unlikely to suffer from the Mount Kenya Mafia’s technological backwardness, only needed a tracking device set up across the road or in a parked car to tune in. The wisdom of that policy was highlighted when he received an unnerving call from his mobile phone provider:
‘We’re calling to confirm you received the fax we just sent you, Mr Githongo.’
‘What fax is that?’
‘Didn’t you just ask us to fax you itemised copies of your recent bills?’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘But we just got a call from you asking for exactly that…’
The impostors were so sophisticated they had sailed smoothly through the mobile phone company’s security checks, obtaining in the process several months’ worth of itemised bills, a priceless guide as to how John got his information and who he spoke to. He changed his passwords, but it was a valuable lesson not to let his guard slip.
The role played by the burly college porter, an Oxbridge institution, came as a welcome revelation. Often recruited from the ranks of retired policemen, college porters act as a cross between receptionists, postmen and bouncers. As any student staggering back drunk in the early hours learns, nothing delights them more than an opportunity to put their old skills to the test. At St Antony’s these professional talents were particularly finely tuned, given the college’s practice of welcoming controversial guests. Before John, there had been former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, who like him had been smeared with the homosexual brush after accusing his prime minister of corruption. Another senior associate, a Colombian, had been gunned down after returning home to campaign in his country’s presidential campaign. Notified by the college authorities that their new African student was one of these ‘special’ guests, the porters closed around John like bulldogs. ‘These chaps have really formed a ring of steel around me. I’ve learned new lessons about professionalism, dignity, a sense of power and tradition from them.’
He appreciated their understated, lugubrious humour. Soon after John’s arrival, the head porter had called to report that a suspicious-looking package had arrived with his name on it. When John asked, only half-jokingly, whether it was ticking, the head porter solemnly replied: ‘I will immediately dispatch my most dispensable porter to give it a firm kick and find out, sir.’ When John popped into the Porter’s Lodge to mention that a visitor from Nairobi–someone he did not want to meet–might come asking for him, the news was met with grim relish. ‘The porters love that kind of challenge. You can see their eyes light up. “Is that so?” they’ll say, and later they’ll mention casually: “Oh, we sent them on their way.” St Antony’s is a nasty place to try and get into if you’re not invited.’ If John didn’t want to see you, you might as well not turn up. And if you phoned the college switchboard asking for him and didn’t give the correct extension, your call would not be put through.
But John still felt vulnerable enough to call on the services of the police. Officers from Special Branch came to inspect his premises, providing an emergency number to be called if ever he felt in physical danger. The system was later upgraded, with alarm buttons installed in both study and bedroom, and John given a mobile device to carry around, which he promptly forgot. Having been in a constant state of alert for two years, he could no longer summon the psychological tautness of old, as he discovered on the very few occasions when he tried taping conversations. ‘Since leaving Kenya, I’ve never been able to use a wire with any success. I’ve lost my competence.’
The only other form of self-protection he could muster was his old stalwart: information. Knowing what was happening back in Kenya, perhaps better than many of the residents of State House, was a weapon of a sort. The network of informants he had established when in office had not evaporated with his departure. If some assumed that with resignation came irrelevance, many continued feeding him snippets. Now, no one expected to be paid. They acted out of a sense of civic duty, the fury of frustrated zeal, or simply took a punt on a distant future: ‘One day you will be a Big Man and you will look after me,’ some texted him, invoking the very patronage principle John regarded as holding the key to Kenya’s psychosis. Electric cables trailed across his small flat, an adaptor was jammed into every power socket, keeping the eleven mobiles on which this information-gathering operation relied constantly charged.
There was an East African Studies programme to be pulled together, in collaboration with St Antony’s existing experts, who included David Anderson, a specialist on Kenya’s Mau Mau, and Paul Collier, who had spent thirty years researching the causes of African poverty. While doing that, John fended off an onslaught of interview requests from journalists, foreign diplomats, NGO workers and Kenyan acquaintances. Many were genuinely concerned to see how he was doing. Others were simply curious, keen to be able to boast that they had met the former anti-corruption chief in his Oxford lair. Some, he knew, would have agreed to serve as the eyes and ears of the Kenyan government. The only entity that showed no intense interest in his presence–what an irony, given the accusations being levelled back home–was the British government.
For the most part he ignored the appeals. His move to Oxford would see the return of an idiosyncrasy long familiar to his friends, now exaggerated to cope with the sheer volume of invitations coming his way. Being Githongoed became an obsessive topic of rueful discussion amongst those who knew him. When the idea of a book was first mooted, I told John I would only press ahead if he approved. He gave the thumbs-up, but this, I learnt, did not mean preferential access. Every interview would feel like a triumph of perseverance, a small miracle pulled off in defiance of his constant urge to cancel our arrangements. I would be Githongoed over the mobile as I headed to the railway station; Githongoed on the train itself, hurtling towards Oxford; Githongoed on the very doorstep of his college study, finger on buzzer. I once spent a weekend staying with friends who lived a hundred metres from St Antony’s being consistently Githongoed, returning to London three days later with nothing to show for my persistence. The only thing that made being stood up by John less painful was knowing I wasn’t alone. We could have set up a club: the Jilted Friends of John Githongo.
The man, after all, was busy. For the very first time, all his Anglo Leasing evidence was gathered under one roof, and his focus now was on knitting together the material he had called in from his various postes restantes. It was not, he soon realised, going to be a quick job. Transcribing just one hour of taped conversation took at least four hours. And he had hours and hours of conversations to get through. He briefly considered taking on an assistant to help, but the problem was that while most of the conversations were in English, the quality of the recordings was so poor that it took an attuned pair of ears to make out what was being said. Anyone who has recorded a press conference, when the microphone is within inches of the speaker’s lips, will know that the Hollywood scene in which the wired-up insider whips out his tape recorder and plays back the incriminating conversation, each word clear as a bell, is a Hollywood fantasy. Despite later breathless speculation as to how John had made his recordings–some would say the device was hidden in his spectacles, a pen, a watch–his equipment was rudimentary, and the results would have had any professional soundman tearing out his hair. He knew studios specialising in the clean-up of scratchy recordings existed, but they were far too expensive for him to u
se with all but a few key tapes. It made a huge difference if the transcriber recognised the various voices and knew the context of each discussion, which effectively meant that only John could do the job.
Even as he was carrying out these preparatory tasks, the equivalent of a surgeon laying out his scalpels, John received a call from Kiraitu, phoning while on a trip to Germany. His colleagues, said the justice minister, thanked him for keeping his counsel. His discretion had been noted. Given the task on which John was engaged, the conversation held a certain irony.
Working his way steadily through the material, John was aware that his perceptions of the recent past were shifting. In Nairobi, the adrenalin of unfolding events had kept him on his toes, but the excitement had obscured his vision. Swept along, he had recorded conversations without absorbing their full implications. ‘I’d been too close, too close.’ Spreading the events of the last few years before him like a map of his life, John now matched entries in the black notebooks with photocopied documents and the downloaded contents of his taped conversations. From what had seemed at the time a messy chaos, new outlines now emerged, like a submarine rising from impenetrable depths. Why, here, back in June 2004, was a diary entry recording a conversation in which Kibaki told him to stop his investigations, to back off. ‘That was nine days before I was sacked. I came back, I wrote it down in my diary, but rereading it, I’m amazed. The words didn’t really go in. I didn’t digest it. There was so much else going on I put it to one side and carried on.’ Players who had seemed peripheral emerged with fresh prominence: he could trace the series of red herrings he had repeatedly been served up by Francis Muthaura, head of the civil service, track the sinister manipulations of Kenyan intelligence. Like a carpet-maker crouched over a loom, John had allowed his eyes to become distracted by the criss-cross of colours, haring along after individual threads. It was only now, stepping back to survey the fabric in its entirety, that he could make out the overall design.
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