It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Even those immune to this mixture of chauvinism and professional envy took issue with John’s tactics. Rationing his leaks had certainly wrong-footed his enemies, but he had lost the sympathy of his audience in the process. A PR guru of the Max Clifford variety could have told him that winning public affection requires more than sensational facts and compelling proof, it demands a touchy-feely instinct for how the masses–emotionally fickle, sometimes vengeful–will respond. Absence of spontaneity, the obsessive preparation on which this cerebral operator prided himself, had its price. John came across as too clever by half, a man playing a game rather than acting from the heart. One newspaper later commented that he had leaked his dossier ‘like a man chewing groundnuts from his pockets’. A Kikuyu community worker in Mathare slum summed it up. ‘At the start, people said, “This is great.” But now he’s lost a lot of credibility. People say, “Why doesn’t he give us the whole story? It’s like a movie: you don’t want it in bits. And he keeps giving it out in bits.”’ If the public wanted the catharsis of a three-act blockbuster, John had offered instead a maddening ‘Tune in for next week’s instalment.’

  As Kenya braced itself for elections, the Anglo Leasing affair looked increasingly irrelevant. John remained an avid follower of Kenyan news, religiously scouring newspaper websites each morning, and being briefed by his network of sources. Over his mobiles came offers of key positions in a future ODM cabinet. ‘Come back. Your country needs you,’ was the message. He vacillated, packing his things in boxes, shredding his papers, mentally saying goodbye to Oxford. Then he paused, unable to take the final, irrevocable step.

  He did not share the donors’ faith in the future, noting instead the vast crowds turning out for ODM rallies in the Luo and Kalenjin strongholds of Kisumu and Eldoret, voters who, it was safe to assume, could not afford the Hummer H3. Surveys would expose, on later analysis, a curious phenomenon. Most Kenyan voters acknowledged that the economy had done better under Kibaki than under Moi. Even a majority of the opposition’s natural supporters admitted that their own ethnic community’s living conditions had either stayed the same or improved under NARC. Yet there was a widespread perception that particular ethnic groups had done far, far better than the rest, and it was that sense of relative deprivation that rankled.40 ‘There’s an anti-Kikuyu vote forming, based on perceptions of inequality,’ said John. ‘Development experts are allowing themselves to be bamboozled by the figures. They are not asking themselves the key question, which is “growth for whom”? The way the rest of the country sees it, it’s growth for the Kikuyus, and it hates our guts.’ On his travels, John was approached by delegations of diaspora Kenyans, non-Kikuyu who saw him as an ally. ‘They tell me they would rather vote in a way that causes an economic slowdown, if necessary, so long as these arrogant Kikuyu are taught a lesson.’

  Familiar with the Alcoholics Anonymous programme, John had come to think of his country–so determined to hope for the best, so reluctant to tackle issues that kept bobbing to the surface like a drowned man’s corpse–as a boozer in the ultimate state of denial. The first principle of AA is that the hardened drinker cannot cure his addiction until he recognises his problem. Bumbling around, knocking into the furniture, this particular drunk–John was beginning to suspect–would only admit the need for change when he came round in the gutter with puke over his clothes, blood in his hair and his wallet gone. Things might have to get a whole load worse before they got any better.

  One of the few to share his fears was KNCHR head Maina Kiai, the other ‘anti-Kikuyu Kikuyu’. ‘Luos are saying, “No matter what it takes, we must win,” and Kikuyu are saying, “No matter what it takes, we can’t lose.” It’s scary.’ A few high-profile gestures would be enough to defuse the growing antagonism, but the Kikuyu elite’s sense of entitlement was so great it did not see the need. That failure of imagination, Kiai said, had been illustrated a year earlier, when the Nation published a photo showing Kibaki shaking hands with all his provincial commissioners. ‘All the suits that day were either Kikuyu, Meru or Embu. Every non-Kikuyu saw it, but the people at the Nation, who published the photo, didn’t even notice.’

  But the two doomsayers were in the minority. Most analysts noted how often the country had teetered on the brink of disaster, only for commonsense and the profit motive to triumph every time. Land of the compromise and the fudge, Kenya had a knack for staring ruin in the face, backing off and muddling along. The nation, declared businessmen, journalists and diplomats, had now staged so many multi-party elections it qualified as a seasoned democratic player, with all that implied in terms of stability. Showing the same cheeriness, financial advisers boldly classified the forthcoming polls ‘zero risk’–a remarkable position to take in any African election, let alone one in a nation whose fissures ran so deep.

  ‘The ethnicity thing has actually got much better. The media is just playing it up,’ insisted economist David Ndii when we met three months before the polls. I was, he hinted, indulging in a very typical Western stereotyping of Africa. ‘Why assume that grievances, even justified ones, translate into violence? We don’t take things as seriously as people expect us to. Of course people resent not getting a job because they are from the wrong group, but they know next time around, when it’s their tribesman in power, it’ll work in their favour. It’s part and parcel of our public life. Kenya is a very nepotistic society. We expect it.’

  For the first time since John had materialised on the doorstep of my London flat, I found my belief in the importance of what he had done wobbling. My doubts crystallised in, of all places, the slick new Westgate shopping centre, where Nairobi’s plaza phenomenon had surely reached its apogee.

  I was old enough to remember the tremor of excitement that shuddered through Nairobi when Kenya’s first escalator opened in the Yaya Centre in the 1980s, heralding the arrival in East Africa of the modern consumer experience. But Westgate’s Nakumatt hyper-market was in an entirely different league. Open seven days a week, extending over two storeys and boasting motorised shopping trolleys for the disabled, its shelves offered everything from dog muzzles to mattresses, artificial flowers to birthday cards, nappies to dishwashers. Forty-five different types of shower gel, twelve varieties of soy sauce, eleven types of toilet paper, this was a supermarket designed to satisfy a fussy society’s every whim. Slicing Parma ham and handling French cheese takes certain skills; Nakumatt’s staff had been taught them, and they had been drilled to the point where they could recite the precise location of key products without a moment’s hesitation. And how Nakumatt’s Kenyan customers, wheeling their loaded trolleys to the phalanx of checkouts–each equipped with a plasma screen beaming out slick commercials–revelled in it all, fishing out their loyalty cards and totting up their points.

  Wandering the aisles, I suddenly thought that maybe they had been right after all, those determined optimists who insisted it was worth tempering principle for the sake of a greater, long-term good. Oh, I knew Westgate catered for Nairobi’s wabenzi. I’d seen the nail-varnished Kenyan teenagers impatiently jiggling their Bluetooth mobiles and the keys to the car Daddy had given them at the tills. I understood this gleaming world of dishwashers and catfood bore no relation to life on the shamba or in the urban slums. But if this was the way the crème de la crème in Kibaki’s Kenya shopped, surely the rest of the nation must inevitably be swept along?

  I thought of John’s warnings. ‘Six per cent growth is all well and good, but the trickle-down isn’t trickling down.’ A small, irreverent voice in my head piped up: ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ How could John, who had walked out on this government over a point of principle, bear now to admit that he had got it wrong? How could he accept his sacrifice had been for nothing?

  17

  It’s Not Your Turn

  ‘Why worry? It’s only an election, not the end of the world.’

  Campaign billboard for BROTHER PAUL, aka Kamlesh Pattni

  The run-up to Kenya’s 2007 elect
ions would see a smattering of small, ominous incidents that should have set alarm bells ringing, if only people were in the mood to listen. One took place in the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, where police seized an assistant minister’s white Pajero carrying sixty-nine pangas (machetes), two hundred whips and fifty rungus (clubs). Another occurred when the Nakumatt supermarket chain announced, after logging a strange sudden spike in machete sales, that it was limiting purchases of gardening tools and kitchen utensils such as knives to just one per person. Some sections of the community were clearly preparing for a fight.

  From my perspective, the polls would serve as a litmus test of Kenyan opinion. Did Kenyans care enough about grand corruption to vote out the government, or would they agree with the donors, convinced the ‘overall trajectory’ mattered more than the inconvenient detail of Anglo Leasing?

  That assessment, however, was askew. Top-level sleaze per se would not be the issue, as was amply illustrated by Kamlesh Pattni’s decision to stand as MP in Nairobi’s Westlands constituency. ‘Steal a mobile in this country and you get lynched, steal $100 million and you get to run as MP,’ scoffed a journalist friend. But the issue of corruption would nonetheless lie at the election’s beating heart. As the polls neared, opposition leader Raila Odinga revived a key theme of the constitutional debate, calling for a return to ‘majimboism’–a system of devolved regional government left behind by Britain’s colonial administration but abandoned by Jomo Kenyatta in 1964. To Western ears, majimboism seemed difficult to fault. Who could deny that power in Kenya, as in most African countries, was damagingly over-centralised? There was learned discussion as to whether the American, German or Canadian federal system would be best suited to Kenya. But for ordinary Kenyans, majimboism meant something very different, and quite specific. To opposition and government supporters alike, the toxic concept challenged the fundamental notion that a Kenyan was free to work, live and invest anywhere in his own country. Under majimboism, those who had bought land, farmed the soil and opened shops outside their ethnic communities’ traditional areas would be forced to sell up and move. Given the country’s historic patterns of population growth and migration, majimboism’s main target could only be the Kikuyu.

  This was not so much a principled rejection of the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ principle of government itself, as a challenge to the notion that one particular tribe should enjoy a monopoly position at the trough. On the stump, Raila’s supporters repeatedly cited the Anglo Leasing scandal as concrete evidence of what a bothersome ‘certain community’ got up to when given half a chance. Ethnic favouritism, the foundation on which Anglo Leasing was built, became the rallying issue of the election campaign. On the websites, non-Kikuyu bloggers sketched a ‘41 versus 1’ scenario: the notion that Kenya’s forty-one other tribes must unite, come polling day, against the Kikuyu. I was astonished to hear the same refrain on the lips of a staff member of the Kenyan High Commission in London. ‘The way we see it,’ he confided in an unguarded moment, ‘it’s going to be everyone against the Kikuyu.’

  ‘There’s a snake in the nest,’ Raila declared at his rallies. Using a parable from the animal kingdom, he explained how the safari ant–so tiny, so seemingly insignificant on its own–could, by sheer dint of numbers, overpower the snake that had curled itself around Kenya’s hearth. ‘You are the safari ants,’ he told his audience, to roars of approval.

  In the Rift Valley, vernacular Kalenjin radio stations called on listeners to ‘clear the weed’, to remove the ‘spots’ on the landscape represented by the ‘settlers’: Kikuyu whose forefathers had acquired land under Kenyatta. Kalenjin youths, bent on finishing the job started during the ethnic clashes of the 1990s, were more direct. ‘Whatever happens in the elections, win or lose, you’re out of here,’ they told Kikuyu neighbours. The message also won support on the Swahili coast, where local Muslims had for years resented the stranglehold ‘upcountry’ Kikuyu, who owned many of the large hotels, enjoyed over the tourist industry.

  While ODM leaders stoked their supporters’ sense of ethnic grievance, the government side–hurriedly mustered under the banner of the Party of National Unity (PNU), yet another ideology-free political formation–systematically whipped up a matching paranoia in Kikuyu ranks. At weekends, hard-line MPs regularly made the trip from Nairobi to Central Province to warn any Kikuyu stupid enough to consider voting ODM of the community’s looming marginalisation.

  When the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights published a report accusing top civil servants of breaching their supposed neutrality and government ministers of misusing public funds in their eagerness to campaign for the PNU, the names cited–from Francis Muthaura, head of the civil service, to Kiraitu Murungi, John Michuki, George Muhoho and Joe Wanjui–read like a roll-call of the Mount Kenya Mafia.

  Bit by bit, an ethnic siege mentality was created. ‘The notion of defending the government as an institution merged gradually into the notion of defending the president, and that then became defending “one of our own”,’ recalls Nation columnist Kwamchetsi Makokha. ‘It was very, very subtle. If you did a forensic examination you would hardly be able to track the shift.’

  As the months passed, Raila, who in 2002 had received a rapturous welcome in Central Province from Kikuyu grateful for the campaigning he had done on Kibaki’s behalf, was successfully transformed in their eyes into a terrifying bogeyman. A series of extravagant rumours, inflammatory leaflets and fake memos–Raila was planning to bring in sharia law; the ODM had drawn up plans for the genocide of one million Kikuyu; the Kikuyu would be chopped into pieces, Rwanda-style–played their part in creating the mood. ‘The amount of fear-mongering SMSs and emails was stupendous,’ says Makokha. ‘It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you set the stage where a single community has isolated itself, what follows is resentment. People start saying, “What’s so special about you?” and, “We’re going to get these guys.”’

  Samuel Kivuitu, head of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), could have been under few illusions as to what was being planned on the government side. In January 2007, violating a ten-year-old agreement that political parties should be consulted on the selection of electoral commissioners, Kibaki unilaterally announced nine new appointments to the twenty-two-member organisation. Then five more. The new arrivals broke with tradition in another worrying way: they chose to supervise the polls in their home provinces, where they hand-picked returning officers. ‘I’ve been trying to train the new commissioners appointed by Kibaki,’ Kivuitu privately told EU observers. ‘But they tell me they don’t need any training, because they are here for only one thing: to take over the ECK.’

  There were few more interesting places to be, in the closing days of the campaign, than the western town of Kisumu, in Nyanza province.

  Perched on one of Africa’s great expanses of fresh water, framed by emerald hills, Kisumu should be a bustling metropolis. The largest city in the Lake Victoria basin, it was once the terminus of the colonial Uganda Railway and should, for no better reason than geographical location, be a magnet for trade from Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Instead, it feels like a city time forgot, snoozing in the torpid heat.

  The local sugar, rice and cotton industries are either in decline or ticking over, awaiting better days. Kisumu’s once-frantic industrial area is now a quiet stretch of shuttered godowns, padlocked compounds and empty yards. The main road to Nairobi is so potholed, only the foolhardy or desperate attempt it. If you value your spine you are advised to go by air, and your plane takes off from outside a glorified shack. A promised international airport has yet to materialise, as has a deep-water harbour.

  Even the blue waters of Lake Victoria are not the blessing they once were. Kisumu’s fabled mermaid seems to have cast her curse. The bay is choked with water hyacinth, a bobbing green blanket fishermen have to battle across in their flimsy pirogues, which blocks the mouth of the yacht club and hides the herds of hippo the odd tourist comes to see. The fish-processing sector
is slowly dying, its workers lured away, managers complain, by Kikuyu factory owners from upcountry, promising fat pay packets and fantasy perks.

  Kenya’s recent economic surge has made little visible impact here. In 2005, according to the government’s own statistics, Nyanza overtook North-Eastern as the country’s poorest province. Unemployment is rife, and Kisumu cannot even produce enough food to feed its own population. The favourite method of transport–the boda boda taxi bike–says a great deal about Kisumu. In other Kenyan cities, cars and vans serve as taxis. But distances here are short, and human sweat is always cheaper than petrol.

  Residents harbour few illusions as to the reason for this neglect. ‘UK’–‘United Kisumu’, as it is known–is the regional capital of the Luo, Kenya’s third biggest ethnic group, a community that regards itself as victim of a plot to keep it poor and irrelevant. Two of Kenya’s most high-profile assassinations–those of Tom Mboya in 1969 and Robert Ouko in 1990–were of Luo government ministers. The male flag-bearers of the Odinga family, the family that has been a thorn in the side of every Kenyan president since independence, both spent time in detention. An opposition bastion since 1966, when the then vice president Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Raila’s father, broke with Jomo Kenyatta, Kisumu has paid an all-too-visible price for the family’s failure to win their spot at the table. ‘These NARC guys never even had a plan for Kisumu or Nyanza province,’ says Stephen Otieno, a local community worker. ‘Kisumu was never mentioned in any manifesto. You look at that and you start asking yourself: “Is this tribal?”’

  But in December 2007, all that looked set to change. Finally, Kenya’s game of musical chairs was about to turn in Kisumu’s favour. The opinion polls agreed: Raila was heading straight for State House. Four decades of calculated neglect were about to end, and it would all be thanks to ‘Agwambo’ (‘Man of Mystery’), ‘the Hammer’, ‘the Bulldozer’, ‘Mr Chairman’, a local hero who enjoyed near-god-like status in his own fiefdom. Given Kenya’s political tradition of ethnic patronage, a Raila presidency would surely mean new jobs, fresh investment, new roads, hospitals and schools for the Luos, just as it had for the Kikuyu under Kenyatta and the Kalenjin under Moi. On the podium, Raila might insist on presenting himself as a national unity candidate representing all Kenyans. As they queued to cast their ballots on 27 December, Kisumu’s residents had a clear sense of what was their due. ‘We’re voting for change,’ was the politically-correct formula. But many quietly added: ‘It’s our time.’