It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  With his corona of white curls, the judge looks like an ageing cherub. He is charming, confiding, and has not a malicious word to say about his former ally–‘John was my friend, he is my friend’–merely softly chiding the younger man for failing to grasp the limits of his role. ‘When you are an adviser you are not the chief executive. Your advice may be taken, or ignored. John expected to be more important than he was. In that way he was naïve.’ Behind the cuddly façade, one catches a glimpse of a complex, sophisticated individual well aware of the contradictions of his own position. And behind that, one senses a colossal laziness, the complacency of a man who is exactly where he wants to be, in career and monetary terms, and intends to stay there as long as possible.

  The first hint the Kenyan public got of Ringera’s less than helpful role came in September 2006, when Martha Karua, the new minister for justice, announced she would soon release a list of those responsible for Anglo Leasing. Blaming all the dodgy contracts on the previous regime, she said investigations had been delayed by John Githongo’s failure to sign a statement authenticating his KACC testimony in London. This provocation could not go ignored. In a three-page statement to the press, John now revealed exactly what had taken place in the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place the previous March.

  Understandably wary, John had insisted his evidence be recorded. Yet at the end of two days of testimony–long enough, one would have thought, for any malfunction to be detected and rectified–Ringera informed John the recording equipment had failed and his words were, sadly, inaudible. The taper had not been taped, so a KACC-drafted summary would have to take the place of the audio transcript. After delivering that bombshell, Ringera waxed astonishingly candid about the charade being staged for public consumption. There would be no Anglo Leasing prosecutions until after the 2007 elections, if ever, he said. When John’s lawyer asked when his client could return to Kenya to give evidence, Ringera said: ‘No, no, I wouldn’t advise that.’ John should not underestimate the pain he had caused certain people. It would not be safe. Once again, the head of Kenya’s anti-corruption body was doing his best to halt investigation.

  John’s account would almost certainly have been dismissed as a fabrication by the establishment, had it not been for one man’s surprise intervention. A former lead KACC investigator who had accompanied Ringera to London went public to confirm the details of the conversation. ‘I was amazed by what Ringera said. There was no indication whatsoever the equipment wasn’t working. You don’t go for days without once going through what you have recorded,’ he told me.

  The man concerned has featured before in these pages. It was Hussein Were, the quantity surveyor who was once squeezed out of his former workplace by ethnic favouritism. He had joined the KACC, only to discover a new form of ethnic discrimination, this time pitched in favour of the Mount Kenya community. Having travelled with a colleague to Switzerland, France and Britain on the KACC’s behalf, attempting to establish a paper trail linking Anglo Leasing’s companies with bank accounts and principals in Kenya, he had seen their recommendations for further action ignored. ‘We were convinced that if we took those steps we were definitely going to answer the question at the heart of this affair: “Who really is Anglo Leasing? Who are the principals, who are the beneficiaries?”’ Were had become convinced no Anglo Leasing prosecution would ever take place as long as the judge, loyal defender of his ethnic community, headed the KACC. ‘It is not by accident that Ringera is still there.’ In daring to publicly defend John Githongo’s testimony in the Kenyan press, Were had once again demonstrated that there were things that mattered more to him than a quiet life.*

  If Ringera was embarrassed by these revelations, he did not let it show. Ignoring opposition calls for his resignation–he had tenure, after all–he sent a handful of supposedly ‘watertight’ files to attorney general Amos Wako, recommending a dozen Anglo Leasing prosecutions. The attorney general promptly sent them back, claiming they were too incomplete to be acted upon. Conveniently, each man could blame the other for the failure to proceed, leaving the public baffled as to who was really responsible. The purely cosmetic nature of all this seeming activity became clear on 6 November 2006, when Ringera exonerated former justice and finance ministers David Mwiraria and Kiraitu Murungi of a preliminary charge of obstructing justice. John’s testimony, ruled Ringera, was of no legal significance because he had not held the status of official investigator. It was an infantile justification for inaction–a crime is a crime, whatever the supposed status of the person uncovering it–but it would be grabbed hold of and repeated incessantly in future by the Mount Kenya elite. Kibaki promptly reappointed Kiraitu and George Saitoti to his cabinet. ‘I will never speak about Anglo Leasing any more because is it no longer an issue,’ declared a delighted Kiraitu. ‘It is dead.’ After less than a year in the cold, two of the three ministers who resigned after the leaking of John’s dossier were back.

  ‘In war, it is not good practice to discharge all your ammunition in the first battle,’ John had warned his adversaries. He now demonstrated what he meant with the release of a second tape, this time posted directly onto the internet. On the tape, recorded in June 2004 in Kiraitu’s presence, an unhappy, audibly jittery Mwiraria frets: ‘This thing, this thing…If we are not careful, will come down with our government.’ ‘Drop this matter,’ he begs John. ‘I will get to the root of the matter, I will find out who it is in my own way.’ The recording stayed online long enough for it to be downloaded and relayed by every Kenyan media outlet, finally crashing when a saboteur posted Kenya’s economic recovery strategy repeatedly on the website. John had made his point. This was what the men exonerated by the KACC director had got up to.

  When quizzed about this entire, mortifying episode, Ringera takes refuge in legal niceties, as any skilled attorney knows how to do. There is a difference, he explains, between an illegal and an immoral act, and in the case of Anglo Leasing, many of the things that shocked John–the justice minister’s blackmail attempt, for example–fell into the latter category. ‘You could say morally it was terrible, but according to the Penal Code, no offence was committed.’ John’s evidence in itself was mere hearsay, and the law did not stop a president appointing ministers who had not been charged with a crime. ‘In the eyes of the law they are whiter than white.’ As for Ringera’s habit of passing on death threats, he was baffled by John’s interpretation of these exchanges. ‘I was telling John that as a friend. I don’t know how he could have seen that as threatening. We were very close.’

  Confronted by such brass face, John’s salvoes fizzled and died. Kenyan commentators labelled his revelations ‘the second Githongo dossier’, but it was obvious to all that their impact did not measure up to the first. With a series of KACC absolutions and ministerial reinstatements, the Kibaki administration had cynically set out to test domestic and international opinion, and had discovered that it could reverse the concessions of the previous year without serious repercussion. John was merely scoring points now, rather than changing the shape of Kenyan politics.

  When I met John’s brother Mugo in Nairobi, he acknowledged the shift. Since we’d last seen one another, he had become inured to the intelligence men who followed him around town, sitting within eavesdropping distance when he met friends in bars and restaurants. If he had adjusted to the post-dossier Kenya, so, he reckoned sadly, had others. ‘A lot of the guys who were engaged when John released his dossier are missing in action this time around.’

  On the international stage, too, the air was hissing out of the global anti-corruption drive. By late 2006, Paul Wolfowitz’s position at the World Bank was looking increasingly beleaguered. Described by one former colleague as a man who ‘couldn’t run a two-car funeral’, Wolfowitz had always been respected for his intellect but regarded as an incompetent manager, and his stint at the World Bank had exposed this administrative ineptness for all to see. He had ruffled feathers by surrounding himself with aides recruited from the Bush adm
inistration, abrasive young Americans who were allowed to overrule, bypass and humiliate non-US bank directors with decades of experience. Incapable of delegating, secretive by nature, Wolfowitz took decisions alone in his office, only to discover on emerging that they violated the procedures of this most rule-obsessed of organisations.

  As he alienated potential allies, his anti-corruption strategy took a hammering, with Britain’s DfID, champion of higher aid allocations, leading the way, and non-governmental organisations, which had always viewed Wolfowitz as a White House plant assigned to politicise a supposedly neutral international institution, piling in enthusiastically. Wolfowitz, argued the government ministers whose contributions kept the World Bank in business, was making the poor pay for the sins of the elite. The fact that Colin Bruce toured Western capitals, lobbying the same men and women to unfreeze pending loans to Kenya and approve fresh ones, was a measure of the mutinous mood. It was an initiative, said bank insiders, Bruce would never have dared to take without the blessing of influential colleagues and key ambassadors.

  There was a strong element in the gathering revolt of score-settling for American high-handedness in its War on Terror–‘payback-by-proxy’, as the Washington Post termed it, for the Iraq war. That was understandable, but in the process of taking their revenge, Wolfowitz’s critics risked throwing the baby–an overdue examination of the World Bank’s complicity in corruption–out with the bathwater. John had no doubts on which side his sympathies fell. ‘There’s a struggle for the soul of the World Bank taking place, and sadly that fight is being engaged over the small bit of paper called the anti-corruption strategy. The nomenklatura is pouring cold water over everything Wolfowitz suggests, deliberately misinterpreting his anti-corruption paper in order to kill it off.’ By the time Wolfowitz’s cherished Governance and Anti-Corruption (GAC) Framework was presented to the bank’s Development Committee at its annual meeting in Singapore in September 2006, it had, in the view of its initial supporters, already been diluted by the institution’s old guard to the point where it had become a collection of woolly aspirations rather than a pragmatic plan of action. Hilary Benn, DfID’s international development secretary, took the opportunity to stick the stiletto in a little further, announcing that Britain would withhold £50 million in World Bank funding unless onerous conditions on lending to poor countries were removed.

  The year’s end saw two massive setbacks to John’s fight against corruption. On 14 December 2006, Britain’s attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, suddenly announced that the Serious Fraud Office had halted a long-running probe into allegations that BAE Systems, the British defence contractor, had paid out millions of pounds in bribes to Saudi dignitaries in exchange for military contracts. The suspension, which came just as investigators were on the brink of accessing Swiss bank accounts, was justified on the unconvincing grounds of ‘national security’: continuing, prime minister Tony Blair said, would have damaged Britain’s relationship with a key ally in the War on Terror. But there was no disguising the ugly fact that a country which had signed the OECD anti-bribery convention had agreed to investigate no further when a high-profile company came under pressure from an important foreign customer. In one fell swoop, Britain’s outspoken stance on corruption was made to look like so much hypocritical posturing, its ability to criticise sleazy foreign states drastically undermined. As the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb put it: ‘How on earth can we lecture the developing world on good governance when we interfere with and block a criminal investigation in this way?’ Contemptuous laughter resounded across the African continent. ‘What the BAE case shows,’ said John, ‘is that Edward Clay didn’t represent a change in British policy. He was an anomaly.’

  The other blow was geostrategic. Taking advantage of the world’s inattention during the holiday period, on Christmas Eve Ethiopia sent its army rolling into neighbouring Somalia to deal with the burgeoning Islamic Courts movement there. The United States, Ethiopia’s closest ally, seized the opportunity to launch air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda operatives among the scattered Somalian forces fleeing south. Kenya played a helpful supportive role in the operation by closing its border, moving its army up to the frontier, and later flying suspected members of the Islamic Courts who fled onto its territory back to Somalia and Ethiopia for interrogation. When put to the test on an issue close to the Bush administration’s heart, Kibaki’s government had more than delivered. It was not hard to guess which, in future, was going to matter more to Washington–the fight against corruption, or the loyalty of a strategically situated ally in the War on Terror. However exasperated its ambassador on the ground might feel, Washington was unlikely to crack the whip in its future dealings with Kenya, and Kibaki’s team knew it.

  By early 2007, the World Bank was in a state of near open mutiny, with staff who wanted Wolfowitz gone openly sporting blue ‘good governance’ ribbons to work. Then, in April, the boss’s enemies were suddenly handed the excuse they needed. Wolfowitz, it emerged, had personally approved an overly generous severance package for his girlfriend, previously also employed at the World Bank. Shaha Ali Riza’s transfer, ironically enough, had been motivated by the laudable desire to avoid any conflict of interest, and what Wolfowitz had done paled into insignificance when compared to what government ministers in the World Bank’s recipient countries regularly got up to. But a man leading a global war on corruption had to be whiter than white. In May 2007, Wolfowitz accepted the inevitable and resigned.

  The Volcker panel on which John sat delivered its findings four months later, recommending, as part of a proposed overhaul, the elevation of the internal investigation unit’s head to the rank of vice president. But the wind had been knocked out of the World Bank’s anti-graft campaign. By December 2007, the bank’s representative Colin Bruce could proudly point to a Kenyan portfolio of sixteen active projects, worth $1 billion, with another $260 million due to Kenya from its share in three regional projects. Truly, this country director–now living in a compound whose perimeter wall and entrance gates had enjoyed a presidential upgrade at taxpayers’ expense–had pushed the money out of the door.

  16

  A Plaza Paradise

  ‘People in this country are like meat for hyenas. The only question is which hyena do you prefer to be eaten by: Hyena Raila, Hyena Kibaki or Hyena Musyoka? Whichever it is, it’s still a hyena coming to eat you.’

  Nairobi kiosk-owner

  In September 2007, huge billboards went up across Nairobi, looming over its busy roundabouts and honking junctions. ‘Hummer is here,’ ran the ominous message. ‘Maybe you felt the tremors.’

  And so we had. General Motors’ Kenyan launch of the Hummer H3, one of the most macho 4x4s on the market, was one of those small events which combine with a host of other details to send out a signal about where a country is heading. It came as no surprise that Raila Odinga, always a flamboyant performer, beat everyone else to it by importing one of the gas-guzzling behemoths, dubbed ‘The King of Bling’ by motoring fans, months ahead of the launch. But what took the breath away was the announcement by General Motors’ local director that he expected to take a hundred orders for the car, priced at a sobering six million shillings (£47,000), in the first year. Did one hundred people really have that kind of cash in a land where the average citizen earned just $460 a year? Had J.M. Kariuki, the left-leaning populist who warned Kenyatta of the dangers of creating a Kenya of ‘ten millionaires and ten million beggars’ shortly before his assassination, only got his figures slightly wrong?

  Certainly, as the presidential elections beckoned, the nation seemed in the grip of an urban spending spree whose brash ostentation was a world away from the dourness of the belt-tightening Moi years. The stock market was booming, the shilling strong, agriculture enjoying a recovery, tourist numbers hitting new records, tax revenue–boosted by the newly efficient Kenya Revenue Authority–higher than it had ever been. Was it possible the old boast of Central Province–that only the Kikuyu could be trusted
to run the country’s economy–had something to it after all?

  Once Nairobi had been known as the Garden City, where your breakfast could be stolen by light-fingered vervet monkeys sneaking in through an open kitchen window. Now it seemed a City in Permanent Construction, its birdsong drowned out by the sound of constant drilling, greenery thinning amid the high-pitched whine of electric saws. The self-confidence and technological nous of the Kenyan diaspora, which had brought its savings back and was investing at home, were reshaping the city. Cynics pointed out that construction had always been the easiest way of laundering illicitly acquired funds, but the sense of gathering momentum was beguiling. Across the capital, empty plots of land evaporated with the speed of puddles in the African sun. No street corner was now complete without a new apartment block in the local blue-grey Nairobi stone, and at the end of many of those streets the traditional two-storey shopping centre, with rows of small metal-grilled Asian shops, was dwarfed by a giant plaza offering seven-day shopping, twenty-four-hour service, beauty parlour, cinema, ATM banking, internet access and a branch of the Java café chain, the venue of choice for the city’s latte-drinking, BlackBerry-wielding, laptop-addicted young professionals. You could measure prosperity levels in a new phenomenon: the Nairobi traffic jam. Once an exclusively rush-hour feature, it now seemed to last all day. Why, these days Nairobi even boasted an ice-rink–one of only three in Africa–where squealing Kenyan boys and girls tottered across the ice and thumped against the wooden barriers.

  If Kibaki’s government wasn’t much good at delivering roads or affordable housing, it showed an impressive enthusiasm for the kind of purely cosmetic makeover calculated to warm the heart of the most pursed-lipped of bourgeois housewives. Nairobi had become one of the few capitals in the world to outlaw smoking outdoors, a rule enforced with a six-month jail term. Another ban was briefly slapped on plastic bags–so unsightly–and another on livestock inside the city centre: those herds of cattle and goats being driven along main roads by Maasai herdsmen were nothing more than an embarrassment, a reminder of Kenyan society’s humble roots. Thousands of the kiosks clustered on road verges–the cardboard-and-corrugated-iron shacks in which the wananchi ate their lunches, drank their sodas, gossiped and slept–were ruthlessly bulldozed and replaced with neat flowerbeds and tended lawns. Determined to broadcast the slickest of images to the world, the administration found such evidence of blatant poverty mortifying.