It was time, Wolfowitz told his restive staff–92 per cent of whom had been opposed to his appointment–the bank moved more decisively against ‘irregularities’. He acknowledged he was demanding a step change from an organisation that had once regarded any discussion of the issue as unpardonable cheek, but the move was ‘horribly overdue.’ The era in which career success was measured by the number of projects approved was over. Managers would in future be rewarded ‘as much for saying “no” to a bad loan as for getting a good one out the door’. Hundreds of millions of dollars of scheduled aid to Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, India, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Argentina were halted as the boss set out to invigorate one of Washington’s most complacent institutions.
Within days of announcing a raft of new lending, Colin Bruce in Nairobi was forced to publicly correct the impression of a harmonious relationship between World Bank and Kenyan government. In fact, he told Nairobi’s journalists, $265 million of loans to Kenya remained on hold, delayed because of corruption concerns. In a strenuous remarketing effort, the same facts were given a radical new gloss: the World Bank and John Githongo were essentially fighting the same battle. Daniel Kaufmann, who had become convinced corruption’s impact on developing economies was massively underestimated, was sent to Nairobi to carry out an independent assessment of the lending programme.
Passing through London at the end of January 2006, Wolfowitz invited John to join him for dinner. Not someone who had ever expected to see eye-to-eye with a Bush hawk, John found himself inwardly cheering the neo-con’s proposals to restructure lending programmes to focus on the graft issue. When the World Bank unveiled a special panel to investigate the underperforming internal investigation unit created by Wolfensohn, the Department of Institutional Integrity (INT), John was one of six independent experts recruited. The panel was headed by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who had also probed the UN’s oil-for-food scandal. John had made the transition from domestic whistleblower to internationally recognised expert on graft, with a finger on the pulse of the global aid debate.
The fight against corruption had mushroomed out of all recognition, going from an issue championed by a few activists to an industry whose meetings filled five-star hotels with per-diem-claiming suits. Hungry for heroes, this was a sector with a limitless appetite for the rare voices of support coming from Africa, the continent where official graft was seen as doing most damage. Courted by academic bodies, NGOs and multinationals anxious for his endorsement, John was increasingly spending his time in the air, flying to speak at an African Development Bank meeting in Ouagadougou, to Washington for working sessions of the Volcker panel, to Ottawa to plan a Canadian-funded anti-corruption research programme, to Dakar to open offices for the Ford Foundation.
His time in exile had hardened him, bringing to the fore a calculating tendency previously diffused in a young man’s general bonhomie. He was less generous with his affections, more self-serving in his relationships. ‘I’ve become much more careful, much more distrustful. What has happened–which I’m slightly uncomfortable with–is that I find myself thinking: “So-and-so wants to meet me? How is it going to be helpful to me?” I never used to think like that. I used to think: “Oh, So-and-so is around, that will be fun.”’
There was a ruthlessness in his social dealings now that went beyond the careless Githongoing of the past. He would be his usual engaging, curious self with new acquaintances, people it was useful to add to his contacts list. But old family friends, childhood mates, work acquaintances who had helped him in the past but had nothing fresh to offer, would agree dates, rearrange flights and travel up to Oxford or London, only to discover he had switched off his mobile and gone to ground. Githongoing had become such an established aspect of John’s methodology, he no longer felt the need to apologise or justify. If he experienced the odd qualm, the contents of his answering machine and email inbox allayed his conscience. As long as the world kept begging him for interviews, talks and consultancy work–and the requests never seemed to stop–he could afford to hurt a few feelings. Like a shark that has to keep moving to survive, he powered relentlessly ahead, leaving ripples of hurt and dismay behind.
His seven-year relationship with Mary was in its death throes. The sniping of supposed friends–‘When are you going to wake up and realise, girl, that man is gay, gay, gay?’–had not helped, but the breaking off of their engagement was the result of profound character differences and irreconcilable aspirations. In contrast, there had been a rapprochement with his parents, who flew regularly to Britain for medical treatment. There was no need to hide things from them now. Properly relaxing for the first time in years, John succumbed during their extended visits to the sudden adrenalin slump that can afflict the highly-strung, discovering an insatiable appetite for sleep. When he surfaced, the family caught up on lost time, discussing recent events over meals.
A mother’s indulgence is something a first son can always count on, but a blessing from Joe Githongo, friend of so many of the men he had defied, the man whose business was surely doomed to suffer for John’s actions, was less certain. One afternoon, John sat the old man down with a pair of headphones and played him the tapes. ‘It was fascinating. The room was hot, the air conditioning was off and he’s a diabetic. But he didn’t snooze for a moment. He knows these people much better than I do, he has much greater insights into their thinking. He said, “Listen, John, can’t you tell? These people have been talking about you all night.”’ Once again, John watched someone else tracing his own steep learning curve. ‘What hit him as a revelation was the extent to which people he considered old friends betrayed me, and through me, him. He said: “You never told us anything of this. We could see it in your face, but you never told us.” Afterwards, he kept saying: “You did the right thing. You stayed too long.”’ Father and son had made their peace.
So long suppressed, John’s indignation had surged to wrathful heights. Ironically, he felt angrier in his second year of estrangement than in his first. ‘There’s a sense in which my own exile has been me coming to terms with the fact that Kibaki, Wanjui, that entire generation, used me. Because I had a great affection for Kibaki, I’ve had great difficulty coming to terms with that emotion.’ He was increasingly conscious that he had been in an extended state of denial, determined not to hear what his more knowing colleagues told him about the head of state. ‘I’ve been going back over the documentation and you suddenly realise, “Of course, they are telling me.” They told me several times, “John, the president was doing this type of thing when he was vice president, when he was minister of finance…I mean, what do you think?” And I have had a blind spot. I don’t know, I can’t describe it.’ He had thought he fled Kenya in fear for his life. He had also, he suddenly realised, been running from having to face the truth.
But his aspirations stretched beyond Kenya now. He hoped to push the global aid industry into recognising that its chirpy determination to look on the bright side, its readiness to turn a blind eye to blatant abuse, was doing Africa more harm than good. Increasingly, he found himself at odds with the Geldofs, Bonos and Sachs of this world, and the government departments and multi-lending institutions upon which these celebrity campaigners focused their gaze. There was something almost neo-colonial, he felt, about constantly pushing for more aid for Africa, while failing–as so often happened–to ask searing questions about the quality of the leaderships responsible for disbursal. The wristband-wearing activists who linked hands around Edinburgh in solidarity with the Make Poverty History cause might bask in the glow of moral righteousness, but to John, an unarticulated ‘It’s Africa, what else can you expect?’ lay behind their pitying stance. ‘There’s a condescending, implicitly racist argument with regard to Africa, which says that “excessive enthusiasm” in the fight against corruption somehow undermines the task of fighting poverty. But corruption, systemic corruption, is the most efficient poverty factor on the continent.’
Such views put John at odds with those he had once regarded as allies. His enemies in Nairobi were convinced he regularly briefed British officials on the innermost workings of the Kibaki government. Even I had assumed that, as soon as his exile became public, Kenya’s donors would beat a path to his lodgings, anxious to learn the sordid truth about an administration entrusted with hundreds of millions of dollars of their taxpayers’ money. Not exactly. It would be two and a half years before any Western institution asked John for a debriefing on Anglo Leasing, and the request, when it was eventually made, came from the Serious Fraud Office, not from any department responsible for shaping British policy abroad. Kenya’s donors had no need to quiz John, for they had understood the scandal’s contours even before he had, and had determined to carry on lending regardless.
The tone of John’s relations with Britain’s development ministry was set during a lunch at a London hotel with Simon Bland, head of Nairobi’s DfID office, and Dave Fish, DfID’s director for Africa, called shortly before John was due to hold his one and only encounter with Hilary Benn, the then secretary of state for international development. ‘It was a very unpleasant meeting,’ John remembers. ‘The message was: “This is Africa, it’s always been corrupt.” They were very provocative and sneering, talking through gritted teeth. They kept referring to my “allegations”, basically saying: “You’ve upset our programme.” I realised afterwards I’d been talking to two very angry men.’ Like the ‘Hear No Evil’ monkey, hands clamped firmly over their ears, humming furiously to drown out the voices, donors had no interest in what John had to say.
Aware that he was a guest in a foreign land, John did not complain about the British authorities’ indifference. But there were others ready to do so in his place. ‘It’s damnable. Why they won’t act, I just don’t know,’ fretted Edward Clay. ‘John is a one-off, someone like him won’t come along again. In future, we’ll have intimations of corruption, the odd hint from MPs in parliament, but we’ll never have a case again in which someone with John’s insights and access offers the dope up on a plate.’ By failing to take forceful action, Clay believed, DfID and its fellow donors had set the worst possible precedent, not only for Africa, but to the recipients of British aid across the globe. If the donors were not going to make an example of Kenya over Anglo Leasing, it was hard to see when they would ever get tough. ‘By their negligence, DfID have shown that they don’t wish to see this issue pursued to a kill. And that’s unforgivable. The Kibaki government has said, by its actions: “We will reward and reappoint those involved in Grand Corruption.” And we’ve said: “OK.” The message we’re sending the Kenyan people is that on the whole, we’ll always line up with those in power.’
The Public Accounts Committee’s hard-hitting report into Anglo Leasing, the outcome of John’s Kenyan High Commission testimony, was tabled in parliament in March 2006,37 as was the auditor general’s equally damning account. The PAC report accepted that Kibaki had known about the Anglo Leasing contracts, recommended investigation of vice president Moody Awori, former finance minister David Mwiraria, justice minister Kiraitu Murungi and civil service head Francis Muthaura, and found attorney general Amos Wako guilty of serious negligence. It called for prosecution of those responsible, recommended termination of pending Anglo Leasing projects and said there should be no payment on projects already started until due diligence had been carried out. But there was a vast gap, in a country where real power rested in the hands of the president, between the recommendations of bolshy MPs and concrete action.
On the ground, the trend was moving in the opposite direction. Kenya’s highly politicised legal institutions and judicial system were about to start systematically erasing the anti-corruption work done in the first months of NARC rule. A first step in this process, laden with symbolism, was the clearing in July 2006 by the Constitutional Court of George Saitoti over the Goldenberg affair, quashing a recommendation by the Bosire Commission for possible legal action against the former vice president and finance minister. Lawyers predicted that all other pending Goldenberg-related cases would now fall by the wayside. Watching men like Kamlesh Pattni being questioned on live television had been one of the most astonishing breakthroughs of the early NARC era. The spectacle had sent out the message that, even if it took a decade and a half, the corrupt would ultimately be held to account. Now one of the keystones of the incoming government’s clean-up programme had been removed.
Kenya’s elite had always shown a readiness to use the legal system to strangle criticism. John could see the process at work in his own life. In Kenya he was being sued for libel by Chris Murungaru, former internal security chief, while the shadowy businessman Anura Perera, the man who had bought his father’s debt, and Perera’s lawyer were both pursuing him separately in the UK, the former hiring the high-profile libel lawyers Carter-Ruck. In the old days, the various suits would have kept John worrying into the small hours. But he had toughened up, actively relishing the twists and turns of this high-stakes chess game.
The Mount Kenya Mafia, he realised, was recovering its equilibrium after a momentary wrong-footing. The shelving of the Goldenberg scandal, he became convinced, heralded an imminent mothballing of investigations into Anglo Leasing. ‘There’s a massive rollback going on.’ It was time, he had decided, to give the spinning top that was Kenyan public opinion another flick. ‘We’re going to go for Round Two. You know, we never finished the first round, we fired a first blast and waited. They think it’s over. So I need to make it clear it’s not.’
This time, he knew, it would be harder to win a hearing. Relations with his former employer, the Nation Media Group, had deteriorated, with distrust building on both sides. ‘John has been too slow in releasing his story. We were begging him for more,’ managing editor Joe Odindo complained to me that August. ‘You have to strike while there is an appetite. You cannot keep hitting people time and time again with these things. People just get tired of it, and so do the journalists. They begin to say to themselves: “Hey, we thought we were releasing a story, not forming part of a campaign.”’ John’s careful husbandry of his material had left editors feeling used, while he suspected that behind-the-scenes pressure from NARC, leaning on its friends on the board, explained the newspaper’s tangible loss of appetite.
His first targets had been the ministers and civil servants who had negotiated and signed the Anglo Leasing contracts. The men and institutions notionally responsible for delivering justice, so compromised that they had become part of Kenya’s sleaze problem, rather than its cure, would be next. This time his target would be his supposed former brother-in-arms, the venerable head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission. In drafting his dossier, John had avoided all criticism of Justice Ringera. He had done so partly for tactical reasons–fighting on more than one front is never a wise strategy. But there had also been an emotional element to his self-censorship. Despite everything, John had harboured a grudging affection for Ringera, a man he saw as trapped in a near-impossible job. He had hoped that within the limits of what State House allowed, the judge might find some way of reining in Anglo Leasing’s perpetrators. That belief had evaporated, and with it any magnanimity.
The building housing the KACC is not particularly ancient, but it has aged at turbo speed. Located on the site of a former nightclub, it was once the site of Trade Bank, one of the most notorious of the ‘political’ banks set up in the 1980s by Moi’s cronies, eventually destroyed by illicit loans. The premises became available when Trade Bank’s Asian founders fled the country, leaving depositors seduced by their ‘No Hassle’ motto to mourn their folly. That history prompts a certain mirth. ‘I mean, you take the spot where one of Kenya’s biggest scams took place and call it “Integrity Centre”?’ guffawed a Kenyan Asian I met at a party. ‘Are they taking the piss, or what?’
The building’s architects clearly saw this as a cutting-edge project, its glass front, tubular design and shiny metallic panels intended to transmit a message of brash e
fficiency. But that was before Nairobi’s rains got to work. The bronze-coloured panels are now rusting along the edges. Long orange drips stain the once-shiny surfaces. As for the centre’s blue neon sign, some of the connections have gone, leaving parts of the giant lettering invisible at night. Whenever I return to Nairobi I like to drive past it, to see what it is telling passers-by. ‘INTEGRITY CENTRE’ it once proclaimed. Nowadays, it reads: ‘INT¯GFI Y CENT¬E’. The garbled message seems appropriate for an organisation which has lost its way: an addled sign for a befuddled institution.
Theoretically, Justice Aaron Ringera enjoys an enviable level of independence. Blessed with security of tenure, running an office generously supported by foreign donors, banking what is–thanks to John’s energetic advocacy–a staggeringly generous salary, he can be held accountable only by parliament. His critics say none of this matters when weighed against a key affiliation, one betrayed by a linguistic quirk. Ringera has problems differentiating between ‘r’s and ‘l’s. ‘Lobbying’ comes out ‘robbying’, ‘present’, ‘plesent’. It is a foible prevalent among the Mount Kenya community. Like former justice minister Kiraitu Murungi, with whom, in one of Kenya’s classic Venn circles, he was once a partner in a law firm, Ringera comes from Meru. The day we met he boasted that he had never taken a telephone call from the presidency during his time in office. But a former colleague says he never needed to, going round in person to State House to receive instructions. ‘He would call staff together and say: “The message from the president is A, B, C and D.”’ So perhaps it is appropriate that the interior of the KACC feels exactly like a government ministry, with its dark wood furniture, stiff flower arrangements, padded beige walls and obligatory Thermos flask.
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