It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  I met him a week after the elections, camping with his siblings in a friend’s suburban villa. They had all been forced to flee Mathare. His ebullience had evaporated. He would never, he said, make the mistake of voting across ethnic lines again, for none of his Luo acquaintances had returned the favour. ‘I’m becoming more tribalistic with each and every day. In future, wherever I go to live, I will want to know who my neighbour is on my left and who is on my right, and if we are ten and there are only five Kikuyu, I will want to bring in another Kikuyu. That’s the way we will think in future in Kenya.’

  He rang me after I took my leave, his voice flat. Before, he had been happy–proud–to be quoted by name. Now he said, ‘Please don’t use my name. Someone who spoke to the press has just been hacked to death in Mathare.’

  The election results had acted like a sharp tap on the side of a long-damaged porcelain vase, suddenly revealing an already-existing network of hairline fractures. A painful shift in perspectives had occurred, a fundamental recalibration that caught most Kenyans floundering, looking strangely naïve. Before, tribe had been something to whisper over, joke at and bitch about. Suddenly it was the only thing that mattered, and everyone found themselves wrong-footed, stumbling over the new terrain.

  Employers scrambled to charter planes to perform short-haul loops around the country, scooping up employees whose ethnicity, irrelevant when they were appointed, now meant they were in mortal danger. ‘This sounds ridiculous, but we’ve somehow managed to send a Kikuyu camera crew to Kisumu,’ one television producer told me. ‘Of course they can’t leave the hotel, let alone do any filming, so they’ll have to be replaced. I’m used to taking these issues into consideration in other African countries. But not here. Not in Kenya.’

  Nowhere was this dawning of ethnic self-awareness more sudden than in the slums, Kenya’s melting pots, where new frontiers coagulated like DNA strands, forming as suddenly on the ground as they had in people’s minds. The notion that urban youth would serve as midwives to the birth of a cosmopolitan, united nation looked like idealistic nonsense–the worst violence took place in places like Kibera and Mathare, and it was committed by youngsters.

  For crime reporter Robert Ochola, the experience had the vividness of a lightning strike. ‘I was in Huruma, where there’s a huge barrier–not a physical one, an imaginary one, an equator,’ he recalled. ‘I just happened to be on the Kikuyu side, collecting reports, when someone came up and said, “Hey, you’re a Luo.” It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. My heart started racing, a crowd began gathering, I could see the flash of pangas here and there. If it hadn’t been for those I was with, I’d be dead by now. I have to accept, now, that I’m a Luo first and a journalist second.’

  But similar double-takes occurred in Nairobi’s gated communities, where the middle classes, who had assumed they had brushed off such distinctions along with the mud of the upcountry shamba, discovered a new social awkwardness. Forget Sheng, there was now one conversation for one’s own kind, another for outsiders. ‘I went to dinner with colleagues recently and there was silence round the table,’ one young woman told me. ‘We were so aware of the landmines in the conversation–because it was a mix of ethnic groups–no one dared say anything.’

  We were all shamefully aware of sprouting new, ethnic antennae. In my address book, I found myself surreptitiously scribbling ‘Luo’, ‘Kik’ or ‘Kam’ after entries. As the violence escalated, my contacts were being forced to choose their camp. Formerly nuanced, their positions were growing cruder, their opinions shriller by the day. To interpret what someone said, you needed to know who they were.

  ‘Save our beloved country,’ Kenyan newspapers pleaded, calling on Kibaki and Raila to talk. But the media’s message itself was muffled and blurred: weeks into a crisis taking the crudest of ethnic forms, journalists stuck stubbornly to their self-imposed rule of never identifying tribe. Kenyans might be killing each other, slum-dwellers occupying one another’s shacks and entire neighbourhoods upping sticks on purely tribal lines, but the local media still coyly refused to tell their audience who was doing what to whom.

  No one, in any case, was listening to the press. Having refused to surrender State House, Kibaki was bent on entrenching his position. Much of the eventual 1,500 death toll could be laid at the door of the government, which announced an unnecessary ban on public demonstrations and then ordered the mainly Kikuyu GSU, issued with live ammunition, to ruthlessly enforce it.

  Taking the wind out of Africa Union mediation efforts, Kibaki named a partial cabinet whose members, among them Kiraitu Murungi, George Saitoti, John Michuki, Amos Kimunya and Martha Karua, included not only a host of Mount Kenya Mafia hardliners, but any survivors of the Anglo Leasing and Goldenberg scandals who had managed to hold on to their parliamentary seats. Having tumbled into the ditch, the drunk had hauled himself to his feet and headed straight back to the bar to order another beer.

  Five years of economic recovery were sabotaged in a matter of weeks. Tourists packed up and fled, whisked away by charter companies which then cancelled future flights. With militias blocking the roads and ripping up sections of the colonial railway, goods could no longer cross the country. Flowers lay rotting in silent airport storage rooms, maize stood unharvested, vegetables failed to get to market and Kenya’s landlocked neighbours watched aghast as fuel deliveries ground to a halt, crippling their own economies. Seeing their hard-earned profits shrivel, appalled Kikuyu professionals formed lobby groups, drew up detailed peace plans and called on Kibaki to extend a conciliatory hand. ‘Kibaki is entirely to blame for this,’ said one banker friend. ‘Raila was not a difficult person to satisfy. By his absolute indolence, Kibaki failed to manage a pretty easy process. And now, because of what he did, we’re hated. Oh boy, are we hated.’

  The response was silence. It was others’ turn now to share John Githongo’s revelation. ‘People are beginning to realise it’s not a question of Kibaki being misled by the hardliners around him,’ one investment expert told me. ‘He is the hardliner.’

  Fury at the danger to which the Mount Kenya Mafia’s greed had exposed their community was not shared by all Kikuyu. Instead of lambasting their leaders for playing the ethnic card, many actually thanked them for saving them from the ODM bogeyman, who had now assumed such proportions his monstrous outline seemed to blot out the sun. ‘I keep getting emails from friends saying, “We all know Kibaki rigged.” Everyone knows,’ said a musician friend. ‘And you know what? We’re all so glad!’

  At the end of January 2008 came the Kikuyu backlash. For weeks, rumours had circulated that PNU hardliners were raising funds and mobilising the Mungiki, a Kikuyu criminal organisation usually confined to the slums, where it ran protection rackets and oversaw the illegal brewing business. This army for hire now went into action in the lake towns of Nakuru and Naivasha. When British journalist Lucy Hannan found herself driving past hundreds of young Kikuyu fighters assembling on the outskirts of Nakuru, she noticed a small, telling detail. ‘I realised after we had passed them they were all carrying brand-new machetes. That’s where the Nakumatt machetes ended up.’ This was ethnic solidarity at its ugliest. In full view of the police, the Mungiki crudely circumcised non-Kikuyus with broken bottles before beheading them. When groups of Luos and Kalenjins retaliated, it took army helicopters, firing from the sky, to separate the two sides.

  As ever in Kenya, those with the least paid the highest price. On one side of the police cordons, Kenya’s middle classes were paranoid but protected; on the other, slum-dwellers slaughtered one another. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I heard one resident sardonically telling a friend calling from abroad for reassurance, ‘here in Nairobi’s gated communities we have staff to do our looting and raping for us.’

  By mid-February, with some 300,000 displaced Kenyans living in camps and another 300,000 on the move, analysts were speculating about how long it would be before the army took over. The worst bloodletting in the country’s brief history had d
estroyed its always misleading image as one of the few ‘tame’, ‘user-friendly’ African destinations. The nation was in shock, though many recognised their surprise was impossible to justify. ‘It’s bizarre,’ pondered one foreign correspondent. ‘We’ve all been writing for years about ethnic tension, the growing divide between rich and poor, unsustainable pressure on the land. And yet somehow none of us digested the implications of our own articles.’ After years of being made to feel inferior, Kenya’s neighbouring countries luxuriated in the feeling of schadenfreude, talking sagely about ‘learning the lessons’ and ‘not going down the Kenya route’. Interviewed by a Nairobi newspaper, Daniel arap Moi could not resist the chance to crow. ‘I told you it would be disastrous…I okayed it because you insisted on democracy. But let me ask you, is arson the new democracy you were talking about?’

  In the space of only two months, Kenya had changed beyond recognition. Rolling back the migration trends of half a century, a process of self-segregation was under way. ‘You have a right to reside anywhere in Kenya,’ shouted the red headline on a government statement published in the newspapers. But no one believed that now. Kikuyus, Merus and Embus flooded back towards Mount Kenya, Luos, Luhyas and Kisii streamed westwards, Kambas headed east. Teachers abandoned their schools and moved to areas where they felt safe, only to find many of their pupils had beaten them to it. University students and their professors applied for course swaps and transfers. Landlords gave tenants notice on the basis of ethnicity–‘Oh, we just can’t trust them any more’–flower farmers fired pickers to open up jobs for kinsmen, and kiosk-owners asked customers for ID before handing over groceries. Even the health system showed signs of Balkanisation, with ODM supporters checking into hospitals where they were sure not to be treated by Kikuyu staff. The voluntary zoning, first symptom of national disintegration, took place to begin with irrespective of class and income.

  Kenya’s crisis could be encapsulated in a single archetypal image: a Toyota pick-up, piled high with mattresses, a chest of drawers in one corner, bed frame in the other and a medley of pots, pans and plastic bowls in between. Thousands of families were criss-crossing the country, returning to what were optimistically being dubbed their ‘ancestral homelands’ but were, in fact, areas where most had no land, no assets, no friends and precious little family.

  Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, the emissary of a panicking international community, flew in to mediate between government and opposition. But it was not until 28 February, as Kenya stood braced for a Round Two that everyone knew would make Round One look like a gentle skirmish, that Kibaki finally blinked. Reviving a post phased out in 1964, he agreed to share power with an executive prime minister, concede key cabinet positions to the opposition and investigate the flawed election. The irony was that, combined with undertakings to review the constitution and discuss sweeping electoral, parliamentary and judicial reform, the deal brokered by Annan and Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete contained most of the elements of NARC’s pre-2002 programme. Had the regime only delivered on its original promises, Kenya could have been spared a multitude of horrors.

  Was Kibaki swayed by the realisation that his nation was heading towards civil war and economic ruin? Sadly, no. He folded for entirely self-serving reasons, in the face of a chorus of increasingly explicit threats. Warning that it would not be ‘business as usual’ if a political deal went unsigned, Western embassies leaked plans for a series of travel bans to be slapped on regime hardliners. US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice flew in to deliver the message that her government was ready to find and freeze the assets of Kenya’s leadership, just as it had with pariah nations like Iran and Sudan. The final straw was a simple message from Kenya’s generals: ‘If you don’t clean up this mess, the army will.’

  Traumatised Kenyans were then subjected to the distasteful spectacle of their elected representatives wrangling over cabinet posts and attendant perks. ‘We will not eat bones while the others are eating all the steak,’ said one ODM official, illustrating that Kenya’s near-death experience had done nothing to alter the elite’s traditional view of politics. With forty-two departments, the coalition government finally unveiled was the largest in Kenyan history, accounting for 40 per cent of MPs. Merely servicing this bloated exercise in jobs-for-the-boys would gobble up 80 per cent of the national budget, Mwalimu Mati’s anti-corruption group estimated, forcing cuts in spending on health, roads and education. When reformers had called for a system which ensured all got to ‘eat’, this was not exactly what they had intended.

  The mantra now in Kenya is that the nation peeked over the abyss, saw the scattered bones and burning shacks below, and drew back just in time. ‘We have been to hell and back,’ prime minister Raila Odinga told British parliamentarians, ‘[but] Kenyans now finally know and understand one another.’ This is almost certainly wishful thinking. Kofi Annan’s marriage of convenience is likely to last only as long as it takes the political players to build up war chests ahead of another electoral bout. Some 150,000 Kenyans still languish in squalid camps for the displaced, gradually turning into slums as tarpaulin is replaced with durable iron sheeting. Too frightened to return to contested shambas, with no way of earning a living, they are easy recruits for the fundraisers who believe the militias will deliver the solution to the questions the politicians skirt. Being initiated into violence is like losing one’s virginity: innocence cannot simply be wished back into existence. These youngsters now understand the alternative use of the panga. Momentarily dampened, their hatred only awaits the next referendum or election to re-emerge, red-eyed and bent on revenge.

  Annan’s peace deal catered for a series of commissions to probe not just the election’s conduct but the deeper causes of the violence, including Kenya’s festering land disputes, its human rights abuses and its off-kilter constitution. The work is long overdue and desperately needed, but Kenyans know their country has a history of commissions whose findings and recommendations are either watered down before released or simply ignored.*

  While businessmen talk bravely of rebuilding shattered town centres and ministers call on tourists to return, many suspect the damage done the national psyche cannot be repaired. It will take a generation, at least, for young Kenyans to forget the images of slaughter. ‘The generation that harboured that kind of ethnic hatred was dying away,’ says John Kiriamiti. A former bank robber, he renounced crime to become a respectable newspaper publisher in Muranga, and now quails at the violence he once took in his stride. ‘Our children didn’t know about it. But they have understood it now, and it will take a long, long time to vanish.’ The myth of Kenyan exceptionalism–the notion that the chaos associated with other parts of Africa simply ‘didn’t happen here’–has been forever laid to rest. Kenya has become a land where bruised ethnic communities, whether Luo, Kalenjin or Kikuyu, wallow in the conviction they have been supremely hard-done-by, while striking terror into the hearts of equally aggrieved ethnic rivals. ‘They have opened the Pandora’s box and let all these issues out,’ an Asian shopkeeper in Nairobi told me with a shake of his head. ‘It’s hard to know how they can ever close it again.’

  John Githongo has been proved correct in the most terrible way. Long before most of his Kenyan contemporaries, he recognised graft’s awesome potential to destabilise and destroy a society. There could have been few more lurid illustrations of the fact that government corruption, far from being a detail of history, really does matter, than Kenya’s post-election crisis.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘This is the history of a failure.’

  CHE GUEVARA, The African Dream

  On 16 July 2006, a young man died in a district hospital in Narok, a dusty town on the road to the Maasai Mara, Kenya’s most frequently visited safari park. He was only thirty-eight, and the illness which killed him is treatable. But poor Africans, receiving only spasmodic medical care, often die of ailments that would be beaten off in Western Europe. He left behind a widow and three children.


  The man’s name was David Munyakei, and in a curious way he represented John Githongo’s alter ego. Of a similar age, the two men met and shook hands only once, at a prize-giving ceremony held a few months before John went on the run. One wonders whether either, at that moment, sensed their strange kinship.

  Like John, Munyakei was a whistleblower, a man whose rigid sense of right and wrong made it impossible, at a key point in Kenyan history, for him to remain silent, even if speaking out meant losing his job–and worse. Like John, his actions exposed a multi-million-dollar scam reaching to the highest echelons of government. But there the similarities end. Munyakei, unlike John, did not belong to Kenya’s upper class. An illegitimate child, he was born in Langata women’s prison, where his mother was employed by the Prisons Department. In contrast to John, a highly educated professional confident of finding well-paid employment wherever he chose, Munyakei spent his life worrying about money. While John was able to flee abroad, Munyakei’s horizons were necessarily smaller: he simply disappeared inside his own country. John, a natural charmer, could call in favours across the continents when he reached his point of no return. Munyakei, a diffident, not particularly likeable young man, found himself terribly alone, fighting forces poised to crush him. This was a man who had no safety net, no fallback position. And his eventual fate was far more typical of most African whistleblowers than John’s.

  Munyakei had considered enlisting in the army, but in 1991, when he was twenty-three, he joined Kenya’s Central Bank instead. A bit of string-pulling brought the offer of a clerk’s job, and he moved to the department responsible for pre-shipment export compensation. As part of a government scheme to increase foreign exchange reserves, exporting companies at that time benefited from a generous compensation scheme. The CD3 customs forms companies submitted to secure payment, declaring goods for export, went through Munyakei’s hands, and he began noticing irregularities. ‘I could see that I was processing the same forms again and again. The numbers had been changed–they’d been whited over and filled in again–but everything else was the same. And the sums being paid out were enormous, enormous.’ Billion-shilling payments were common, and the forms were arriving two to three times a week. The other thing that made Munyakei suspicious was the way his working routine changed. ‘These transactions used to take place at very odd hours–after five p.m., when no one else was around. The head of my division asked me to stay behind. He would present me with the documents and say, “I want you to work on this particularly.” I was not to go home until the respective accounts were credited.’