Kenya’s favourite reading matter offered a telling insight into this strand of the national psyche. In Nairobi bookshops, three times as much space was dedicated to Western self-help books as to African politics or history. Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, How You Can Get Richer Quicker, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, The Magic of Thinking Big, Why We Want You to be Rich. Nothing, explained a salesman at Text Book in the Sarit Centre shopping plaza, sold faster than these motivational books, which enjoyed a display all to themselves. ‘This shelf makes my day,’ he enthused. ‘People are looking for ways to create a positive environment. If I think negative things, I portray negative things.’ He was, he admitted, a keen consumer of his own wares. ‘These books give me confidence and a purpose. It’s part of a different attitude in Kenya. Essentially,’ he explained, ‘it’s all about getting rich.’
‘My favourite word is “Aspirational”,’ declared Aly Khan Satchu, a Kenyan Asian who returned from the City of London to launch a stock market analysis website in one of those very plazas. His website was baptised www.rich.co.ke and promised: ‘Strike it rich.’ The adjective he’d picked was virtually a national theme tune. ‘How do you see your average reader?’ I’d ask the young editors who launched a spray of new metropolitan newspapers, business weeklies and lifestyle magazines that year. ‘Very aspirational,’ came the uniform answer. ‘Graduates with job prospects and disposable income.’ The same word cropped up in the excuses proffered by Kenyan companies refusing to endorse NGO community projects in the slums that everyone tried so hard to forget: ‘Sorry, not an aspirational enough audience.’
Were there really enough ‘aspirational’ people in Kenya, I wondered, to keep all these malls busy? Or, to put it slightly differently, weren’t all these thrusting entrepreneurs in danger of forgetting that the most genuinely ‘aspirational’ segment of Kenyan society was not in fact its small middle class, but the millions of exasperated inhabitants of Korogocho, Dandora, Mathare Valley and Kibera? And what would happen when those Kenyans finally registered that while a tiny elite was ‘eating’ as never before, their own, more modest aspirations were doomed to go forever ignored?
Perhaps the most worrying element exposed by economic surveys was the extent to which, once you set aside the cosmopolitan cities, the growing divide between rich and poor took geographical–in other words, ethnic–form. A Kikuyu inhabitant of Nyeri, just north of Kibaki’s constituency, could expect to live 23.4 years longer, on average, than his Luo counterpart in Raila’s home town of Kisumu. If 46 per cent of the population in Central Province had only limited access to a qualified doctor, the problem was nearly twice as bad–88 per cent–in remote North-Eastern Province. Adult illiteracy, just 16.7 per cent in largely Kikuyu Thika, was 78.1 per cent in Bomet, a heavily Kalenjin Rift Valley town.38 And so it went on.
The regime’s critics noted that many of the superficial features of the former era had crept back, so quietly they almost went unnoticed. Kibaki had promised to keep his name and image off Kenya’s currency, institutions and roads. Now his official portrait hung on the wall of almost every office, just as those of Moi and Kenyatta had, and his features were stamped on the new forty-shilling coin. The man who, while in opposition, had promised not to waste Nairobi residents’ time by blocking the city centre with official motorcades, now regularly paralysed traffic for hours at a time, prompting one outraged letter-writer to the Daily Nation to suggest he try using a helicopter instead. Trivial disappointments, perhaps, but behind them lurked massive betrayals: the failure to reform the constitution, the failure to devolve power, the failure to appoint a prime minister. However noble the Kibaki government’s intentions had been at the outset, yesterday’s radicals had by 2007 turned into the steeliest of reactionaries, propping up a system they once abhorred. And kitu kidogo had made a comeback, with ordinary Kenyans–a Transparency International survey revealed–encountering corruption in more than half their dealings with officialdom.
One of the lessons of the previous five years seemed to be that when the spirit wasn’t willing, it really didn’t matter how many worthy new institutions, appointments or laws a government unveiled: the status quo remained unchanged. Witness the fate of the Public Officer Ethics Act, part of the raft of anti-corruption laws proudly announced on the lawn of State House in the wake of Kibaki’s inauguration. Hailed as landmark legislation, it required government employees to declare their wealth, in the hope that this would prevent them using their positions to line their pockets. Yet the Act was rendered ridiculous from the outset. While countries like Tanzania and Uganda only required employees in key positions to fill in the declarations, Kenya made it compulsory for all 660,000 civil servants, whether drivers, messenger boys or volunteers, and extended the requirement to their spouses and children. The information provided was confidential, was not computerised, and since the declarations were to be kept for thirty years, storage space soon became a problem.
Having created a tsunami of information, the Act failed to specify how it should be analysed or what action should be taken if wrongdoing emerged. By September 2007 there had not been a single case of a public servant being prosecuted or even fined under the legislation. Who was to blame for this exercise in futility? According to Erastus Rweria, head of the Efficiency Monitoring Unit in the Office of the President, a group of parliamentarians who had served in the Moi government had deliberately neutered the Act. ‘The MPs’ aim was to make it unuseable. Most of them are in parliament to protect what they grabbed.’ No doubt. But it was difficult to imagine, in light of Anglo Leasing, that government ministers of Kiraitu, Mwiraria and Murungaru’s ilk would be too distressed by this act of sabotage.
Nothing better illustrated Kenyan society’s acceptance of its own glaring faults than the rehabilitation of Kamlesh Pattni, architect of the Goldenberg scandal. By 2006, the man who had nearly destroyed Kenya’s economy had renounced his Hindu faith, embraced Christianity and been reborn as ‘Brother Paul’, preaching from a hall inside a casino complex. When journalist Kwamchetsi Makokha was assigned to interview the sleek former jailbird on live television, he was taken aback by what followed. ‘All these young people who had been manning the lights and cameras suddenly rushed up and mobbed Pattni like groupies. They were all excited, asking for his autograph, one even held out his sleeve for Pattni to sign.’ Salim Lone, spokesman for Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) opposition party, was attending a funeral for a group of MPs killed in a plane crash in north-eastern Kenya in April when he heard a storm of applause. ‘I assumed some celebrity had arrived. But no, it was Pattni. They were applauding him like some kind of hero.’ Far from earning society’s opprobrium, one of Kenya’s most outrageous conmen had acquired the glamorous aura of a rock star. He had done what so many dreamed about but did not dare attempt.
Perhaps the ultimate act of cynicism came in August 2007 when, to the astonishment of his own Kalenjin kinsmen, former president Daniel arap Moi suddenly announced his support for Kibaki’s reelection bid. The probable explanation for this baffling move came shortly after, when a 2004 version of the report Kroll had been compiling into Goldenberg’s missing millions was leaked to the press. Kroll had abandoned the project when the Kibaki government stopped paying its fees, but the draft still shed devastating light on the systematic looting conducted by Moi’s family and friends. The former president’s sons Philip and Gideon were reported to be worth £384 million and £550 million respectively, with the assets held in an array of international real estate, bank accounts and shell companies. The implication of the leak was clear: Moi had given his political endorsement in return for a promise that he would remain free to enjoy his stolen assets, whose location the government had known for years but done nothing to recapture. A few months later, a section of a bill was quietly approved granting amnesty to anyone who confessed to grand corruption and offered their illicitly-acquired assets in amends. Section 56B of the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act miraculous
ly appeared on the statute books despite having earlier been deleted by parliament. ‘Help us remain at the trough, and we’ll let you continue eating,’ one administration had told its predecessor.
The ruling class seemed locked in a mood of amoral pragmatism. If the economy was thriving, what did the unsavoury realities denounced by anti-corruption campaigners really matter? To use a cliché beloved of economists, the rising tide of prosperity would surely end up floating every citizen’s boat, and a little sleaze was no more than scum on the water–unsightly, but not doing any real harm. When challenged about graft in the media, government ministers always responded by pointing to growth rates, apparently unable to grasp that the issues–economic prosperity and individual theft–were, in fact, distinct. ‘We can afford to be corrupt, given the kind of growth we’re delivering,’ was the implicit boast.
The international community seemed of like mind. No one would have guessed from its behaviour that Kibaki’s government deserved anything other than unqualified support. In May 2007, the United Nations actually awarded Kenya its annual Public Service Award. No April Fool’s, this: a government whose key ministers and top civil servants had conspired to steal up to $750 million in public funds was commended for ‘improving transparency, accountability and responsiveness in the public sector’, with Kenya beating states like Singapore, Austria, India and Australia. In September came another prize: the World Bank ranked Kenya as one of the world’s top ten reformers when it came to ease of doing business. And that same month, a beaming Amos Kimunya, the man who had gone to Oxford to beg for John Githongo’s silence, signed a joint aid strategy with seventeen foreign donors, including Britain, the United States, Japan, the World Bank, the EU and the UN, giving the Kenyan Treasury a greater say in how aid funds were spent. Aimed, the signatories said, at ‘improving the effectiveness of development aid’, the agreement also allowed the government to closely monitor aid being channelled to civil society. Anglo Leasing might never have existed. And the same went for John.
It was a Saturday afternoon at the Karen Country Club, that time of day when the club’s golfers stroll in off the greens and settle on the leather banquettes in the wood-lined bar to play the role so relished by the Kikuyu elite: that of African English country squire.
Across the rolling lawns, shaded by the kind of giant fig tree the golfers’ forefathers would once have regarded as sacred, the caddies padded away, their job done. Above the tennis courts, the giant knuckles of the Ngong Hills were delicately outlined in indigo. Wallets were opened to allow private bets to be settled, chits were signed and beers downed, producing a chorus of low, deep belly burps. Gradually, the conversation got round to John Githongo, who many of the golfers–prosperous businessmen, lawyers and doctors in their fifties, sixties and seventies–had known as a youngster. ‘Too young for the job,’ said one. ‘Amateurish, hugely naïve,’ chimed his businessman neighbour. ‘It takes time to tackle corruption. John expected things to happen from one day to the next, and so do the donors. It’s very immature.’ ‘Ah, but it was worse than that,’ said an older friend, a retired bureaucrat. ‘To take confidential information that you came across in your job as a government employee and pass it on to foreign governments, now that’s an act of gross betrayal. I was a civil servant under both Kenyatta and Moi, and that would have been a hanging offence.’ Voices were rising now as they warmed to their theme. I began to recognise a particular tone to the conversation. These statements had the vehemence of arguments rehearsed so many times they had become a kind of rote-recital, exercises in group affirmation rather than real debate. ‘The man was a spy,’ said a lawyer, ‘a spy who was recruited’–his eyes widened, his finger jabbed the air for emphasis–‘yes, recruited, by the British embassy.’ There was a chorus of nods and murmurs. ‘Yes, yes, he was a spy.’
Now the conversation shifted a gear. John’s betrayal, they felt, could not be separated from its wider context, a long-held colonial-era grudge. The fact was, said the businessman, looking directly at me, that the Brits had been happy to do business with Moi, but they had always had it in for Kibaki. Why? Simple: because he was a Kikuyu. I shook my head, aware I was beginning to flush with irritation. But the club member who had invited me agreed. ‘The Kikuyu were the first Africans to fight colonialism on the continent. After the Kikuyu came the Algerians against the French. But we were the first. And the fact is that the British have never, ever forgiven the Kikuyu for fighting them, not till this very day, and that is why they are out to destroy a Kikuyu presidency.’ The civil servant joined in, with a certain pride: ‘We were the Mugabes of the day, the bad boys.’ ‘They hate us,’ said the businessman. ‘They really hate us.’ In a mood of belligerent victimhood, the beers were finished off and the golfers headed off to their SUVs, gleaming in the car park.
I’ve had that conversation many times now, in different locations and with different individuals, but always Kikuyu men of a certain age and class. I have tried to persuade them that the obsession driving–if not warping–British policy in East Africa these days is not repressing the Kikuyu but delivering on the Millennium Development Goals; that my country’s baby-faced foreign and development ministers are probably more familiar with the Arctic Monkeys’ back catalogue than with the history of the Mau Mau, and that to these New Labourites, products of the 1960s, the colonial rationale feels about as familiar and appetising as hoop skirts and spats.* I have never succeeded, even though the statistics bear me out, showing, for example, that British aid to Kenya under a ‘hated’ Kikuyu president is greater than it was under the Kalenjin Moi, and that Kenyan imports from British firms–supposedly smarting at being boxed out of the Kibaki economy–have actually risen by over a third in the same period.39 These Kikuyu gentlemen simply refuse to believe that the horrors of Emergency, which loom so large in their own minds, could be so easily forgotten by their former imperial master, just one of a succession of historic misadventures to be mentally filed away. A $750-million procurement scam has been miraculously transformed into a colonial vendetta.
The irony bites bone-deep. For very few of these aggrieved golfers came from families whose young men played deadly hide-and-seek with British soldiers in the dank forests of the Aberdares. Today’s Kikuyu elite traces its roots to the other side: to the Home Guard loyalists who helped the British crush Mau Mau and were handsomely rewarded for their collaboration when the whites pulled out. In fact one of the men fulminating over his beer that day was named, much to his irritation, as a prominent Home Guard member assigned by the British to ‘soften up’ recalcitrant Mau Mau detainees in the internment camps in a recent book by an American academic. In positing John Githongo as a pawn in some dastardly post-colonial plot, the Kikuyu landed gentry had cheekily rewritten their own role in the past.
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of these conversations is what is always omitted. No one, in these exchanges, even bothers to claim the Anglo Leasing deals were honest transactions, or that the ministers involved weren’t on the take. No Kikuyu, especially Kikuyu of this social milieu, is naïve enough to believe that. Beneath their belligerence lies the same tacit acceptance conveyed by the refusal of every politician named in connection with Anglo Leasing to put his side of the story when I asked for comment. The issue, for these men, is not guilt or innocence, but loyalty. They cannot forgive the fact that the man who exposed a Kikuyu administration to public ridicule came from within. As the businessman told me that day in the Karen Country Club: ‘We have a saying in Gikuyu: “No matter how faded or shabby she is, she’s still my mother.” John should have felt that.’
In choosing to become the ‘Anti-Kikuyu Kikuyu’, as he was dubbed on many websites, John had expected to be reviled by his kinsmen, especially those of this age and class. ‘I will not be able to travel in certain parts of the country at night,’ he’d predicted when drafting his dossier. ‘If my car breaks down in Nyeri and people realise who is in it, I’ll be in for it.’ What he had not anticipated was the bo
red disaffection of his own peer group. When I telephoned Lisa Karanja, who had taken over the directorship of TI-Kenya, to arrange a get-together, she said she’d ask another member of John’s old anti-corruption unit along. But when we met, she was on her own. Her former colleague had bailed out. ‘You know, we’ve been talking about him for four years and a lot of people are all Johned out,’ she explained. ‘People feel a bit fed up. They feel he did some very good things, but that there’s more to Kenya than this.’
She had been surprised, she said, by the sour reactions of younger Kenyans in civil society–and not just Kikuyu–when John’s name surfaced. ‘When he was first appointed there was a feeling of “Oh, you’re just going to serve as a fig leaf.” Then it became hero-worship. Then, with the tape leakings, there was a return to hostility again.’ John had become indelibly associated with an interfering donor community which, in African eyes, always pinned its hopes on totemic individuals, ignoring the steady work done by less charismatic people and organisations. ‘It’s a form of national pride, and in John’s regard it translates into a feeling of “You’re over there in the UK being a prima donna, but you don’t have the guts to come and do this stuff here.”’
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