It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Munyakei was a tiny but vital cog in a machine that was eating up billions of shillings in taxpayers’ money, supposed compensation for non-existent gold shipments. Processing the payments, he became increasingly uneasy. One Central Bank official, who had himself refused to sign off on the payments, warned him: ‘These things are not proper. You must take care.’ Colleagues from other departments ribbed him–‘Mister, where exactly is the gold you seem to be clearing?’ But his superiors fobbed off his enquiries. Instructions came from above, they said; these were not the concern of a lowly clerk.

  What his bosses hadn’t catered for, just as John’s colleagues never spotted it, was the element of sheer mulishness in Munyakei’s character. He might not have attended some expensive Western university, but he was nobody’s fool, and he didn’t appreciate being treated like a patsy.

  One got a glimpse of that streak of truculence within seconds of meeting him. Maybe the long years of being snubbed were to blame, but there was no conversational give-and-take with David Munyakei. Ignoring all interjections, he talked fixedly at you, finger jabbing the air, eyes locked unblinkingly onto yours, frowning in concentration. One sensed that he might not have been an unmitigated joy to work with. Slight, with badly pocked skin, he came across as prickly and awkward, the kind of civil servant who would be a stickler for detail, whose professional inflexibility might drive more easygoing workmates to distraction. This, most definitely, was not a man who would simply shrug his shoulders and mutter the words used to justify wrongdoing from time immemorial: ‘I was only following orders.’

  The scandal exploded into the public arena in April 1993, when the Daily Nation published a series of articles about Goldenberg, the company benefiting from this generous compensation, and shady dealings at the Central Bank. Munyakei was arrested at work and taken to CID headquarters. A week later he was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act. He was not the only employee unhappy at what was going on, but his superiors had decided he was responsible for leaking Kenya’s largest ever officially-sanctioned financial scam, photocopying sensitive documents and spiriting them out of the Central Bank. On hearing the news, Munyakei’s shocked mother suffered a stroke, dying without regaining consciousness.

  ‘I did it as a patriotic citizen,’ Munyakei protested. ‘I knew what I was doing’–a touch of pride there. ‘I was not guessing, I had the evidence. I thought I was doing the government a favour. Instead we got arrests, court cases, threats and dismissals.’

  Five months later, the attorney general ruled that Munyakei had no case to answer. But his ordeal had only just begun. The Central Bank sacked him, and refused to give him references, making future employment in the banking sector impossible. As the government sought to placate outraged donors by going through the motions of investigating Goldenberg, Munyakei started receiving threatening anonymous phone calls. ‘I would meet people from the bank, and they would say to my face: “It’s better if you disappear from Nairobi completely. If you keep pressing the bank to reinstate you, you may not live long.”’ He fled with a cache of sensitive documents to Mombasa, where he reinvented himself, taking a new name, converting to Islam and marrying a local girl. Eventually the jobs ran out, and Munyakei moved his new family upcountry, to the shack his mother had built on a windswept homestead in Maasai country. The white-collar worker became a gum-booted subsistence farmer, eking a pitiful living from the dry land, just as his ancestors had done. The Goldenberg scandal simmered inconclusively on, with donors nagging president Moi for action. Kenya had forgotten about David Munyakei.

  Then came the 2002 election, and NARC’s establishment of the Goldenberg Commission. It felt as though fate had reached out and tapped Munyakei on the shoulder. Testifying before the Commission’s judges, lawyers and financial experts, he finally won his moment in the sun. A lawyer remarked that if ten witnesses could only be of an equal standard, the Commission’s work would soon be done. There were hotel receptions and photographs, the Transparency International award ceremony at which he met John Githongo. The reverberations rippled all the way back to Narok, where Maasai elders materialised on his doorstep asking for a share of the booty. He had to show them the door. None of this notoriety brought in any money. Back home he was still just a peasant, hoeing his plot and struggling to pay his girls’ school fees. The one thing Munyakei really wanted–his Central Bank job back, with compensation for years of lost earnings–remained out of reach. He had betrayed his colleagues, he was told, and they would never work with him again.

  With the release of the Bosire report into Goldenberg, his hopes briefly lifted, only to be dashed. ‘Did you see how few mentions there are of me?’ he said, jabbing the report. ‘Did you see? I’m very disappointed.’ The report noted that there was no legislation protecting whistleblowers in Kenya, but did not suggest how this lacuna could be addressed. There was no reference to compensation. ‘The people who face prosecution are very rich and powerful. They could do anything to ensure people don’t give evidence in court. We’ve seen this before in Kenya. Not one of the witnesses in the Ouko murder case is living now. They all died mysteriously. I feel very insecure, now, very much demoralised.’

  But my impression was that what really dismayed Munyakei was not his personal security, but the fear of going down in history as a fool. He craved a ruling that would validate his act in his own eyes and those of his community. ‘I thought as a whistleblower you should be treated with high esteem. But it appears,’ he scowled, ‘that when you do such a thing no one appreciates it. If nothing is done for me, no one will come forward and expose corruption in future. They will look at me and say, “Munyakei did it, and what did he get? He ruined his life.”’

  He got up to leave. Could I give him something, he asked, for the taxi fare at least, or the cost of his Nairobi hotel? Times were tough in Narok, he explained. The drought was killing crops and cattle. The man belatedly hailed by government ministers as a national hero was struggling to make ends meet.

  I had planned to visit him in Narok, but left it too late. His nervousness proved misdirected. Future Goldenberg prosecutions were robbed of a key witness not by a hired assassin but by an ordinary African killer: pneumonia.

  The tale of David Munyakei reads, in many ways, like a practice run for the John Githongo story. John was able to improve on Munyakei’s dress rehearsal in part because of his status and birth. Munyakei could not muster journalists in Kenya and Britain to publicise his cause, could not tap a network of academics, foreign institutions and VIPs for succour and sympathy. But John had also learnt explicit, valuable lessons from his predecessor, in particular when it came to collecting the evidence that proved he was no fantasist. ‘Can you imagine how I would look now if I hadn’t taped those conversations?’ says John. ‘Just some loony in Oxford making crazy claims.’

  In that progression lies a clue to Africa’s future.

  Both men set out to end Kenya’s long tradition of impunity by making a ruling regime accountable for a major corruption scandal. Neither succeeded. To date, only the lowly have faced legal pursuit. In Anglo Leasing’s case, three permanent secretaries and three junior civil servants prosecuted in 2005, on John’s watch, have yet to be tried. Justice Ringera says that until investigators Kenya asked for help in France, Switzerland, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands have provided details of the foreign firms and bank accounts involved–and, sadly, that may take some time–he cannot send his files to the attorney general for prosecution. With Goldenberg, the dropping of charges against high-profile figures continues: former Central Bank governor Eric Kotut is the latest to be exonerated. Since the suspected perpetrators of both scams hold key positions on either side of the political divide, each faction can effectively blackmail its rival. The culprits are likely to spend the rest of their lives being driven around by chauffeurs, relaxing in Nairobi’s wood-panelled clubs and strolling the lush fairways of its golf clubs.

  But prosecutions are not, actually, the point.
What is remarkable is that first David Munyakei and then John Githongo chose to launch their respective Missions Impossible at all, taking on their own society’s ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture and defying the rule which dictated that loyal employees might know exactly what tricks their bosses were up to, but could always be relied upon to remain silent. The contents of John’s dossier and Munyakei’s testimony matter far less than the fact that they emerged in the first place to challenge the system. As the playwright and Czech president Vaclav Havel said: ‘Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.’

  Mention John Githongo and his dossier to an educated Kenyan and you will often get a raised eyebrow and a sardonic look which suggests that Westerners would do well to abandon their naïve fixation on lone heroes. ‘What he did is of no significance. None,’ a yuppie businessman proud of his opposition sympathies surprised me by saying. Even admirers will tell you that the number of Kenyans who think like John is so small and atypical their words and actions can have no fundamental impact on larger society. Their scepticism is shared by a school of Western analysts who see sleaze in Africa, intertwined as it is with cultural respect for the extended family and ethnic loyalty, as part of the continent’s very haemoglobin. In these commentators’ view, the grand corruptors will always be able to remodel their looting techniques to keep one step ahead of those trying to purge the system, in part because they enjoy as much public admiration as they do opprobrium.

  They are wrong to be so dismissive, or so despairing. Cultural values are not immutable; they shift all the time, as the West’s own history–witness, for example, the view our courts take today, as opposed to fifty years ago, of a woman’s rights in marriage, or of racism in the workplace–amply demonstrates.43 The dramatic changes Africa has experienced in the last hundred years, hurling its citizens from herding livestock on the shamba to lunchtime at the cyber café, shows the continent is no bizarre exception, impervious to the trends and processes that affect the rest of humanity.

  John Githongo is no saint, as his many exasperated friends can attest. But the fight against graft in Africa is not to be settled in one battle, or by one person. It is being waged in stages, step by step, with many a sideways shuffle and backwards totter, by many individuals. By doing what he did, John, like David Munyakei before him, permanently shifted the debate’s parameters. Altering expectations of how a civil servant under pressure could behave, he made it possible not only for others to follow in his wake but to move beyond him. Everyone needs role models, helping them see the way ahead. ‘I’d like to throw a small spanner in the works,’ John says. ‘I’ll do my little bit and the next time it’ll be someone else and someone else and someone else. At the very least, it should never again be possible for civil servants and politicians to get together in a room and discuss how to rip off the Kenyan people.’

  Corruption relies for its survival upon an intangible, unspoken agreement of what is tolerable behaviour–witness the checkpoint policeman’s reluctance to ask mzungu drivers for bribes ‘because they will make a fuss’, which prompts the obvious question: ‘Well, why don’t the wananchi make more of a fuss?’ And while they grabbed the headlines, David Munyakei and John Githongo are not the only ones challenging such tacit acquiescence. Maina Kiai may have left the KNCHR–‘They have killed this country, killed it. I won’t be applying for another term,’ he told me during the election violence–but anti-graft campaigners Gladwell Otieno, Lisa Karanja and Mwalimu Mati, whose remarkable Mars Group website features a grim ‘inactivity counter’ logging government obfuscation, still fight on. Writers and bloggers like Parselelo Kantai, Muthoni Wanyeki, Binyavanga Wainana, Ory Okolloh and Martin Kimani, and a host of civil society activists, human rights campaigners and clergymen are changing the nature of what is considered acceptable in modern African society. The time taken for grand corruption to be exposed to public view, if not punished, has concertinaed: ‘Goldenberg took forever, Anglo Leasing has been far shorter, and the next one will be even quicker,’ predicts constitutional lawyer Wachira Maina. And Munyakei’s story shows that you do not have to belong to the elite to rock a system by just saying ‘no’, although it certainly helps.

  What role should Africa’s foreign partners play in this battle? This book does not seek to argue that donors should cut all aid to Africa, on the grounds that ‘It’ll only be stolen,’ as the cynics claim. It does, however, hope to alert Western readers to the damage well-meaning thoughtlessness routinely causes.

  Watching the violence that was unfolding in Kenya, the aid world’s self-justifying incantation kept echoing in my ears. ‘The overall trajectory is up, the line of travel is forward,’ development officials had repeatedly told me to justify support for Kibaki’s government. Oh, really? I thought bitterly as I watched Kisumu’s evisceration. The public’s deepening sense of unfairness, caused by the very abuses the donors were determined to ignore, eventually bloodied the machetes in Kenya. Kenya’s foreign partners failed to grasp that a system of rule based on the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ principle was explicitly designed to prevent the trickle-down upon which they counted for progress. The better Kenya’s economy fared, the more unstable the country actually became, because public awareness of inequality–sociologists call the phenomenon ‘invidious comparison’–deepened a notch.

  It was a poor bet for the donors to make, for nothing sabotages development programmes more dramatically than violence. Decades of work on school-building, AIDS prevention and gender-awareness-raising are wiped out in a moment when the first shamba goes up in flames and its terrified family hits the road. Convinced they grasped the big picture, the donors somehow managed to miss the approaching near-collapse of an African state.

  A country’s economic prospects cannot be disentangled from its politics. The Anglo Leasing scandal’s basic ingredients–ethnic arrogance and the growing sense of exclusion of a balked generation–provided the building blocks for the crisis that followed. The Mount Kenya Mafia’s assumption that it could indefinitely occupy State House, in defiance of voters’ wishes, marked the nadir of a journey that began with a score of too-good-to-refuse procurement deals. As South African analyst Moeletsi Mbeki told me: ‘What greater corruption could there be than stealing an election?’

  These are not merely Kenyan issues. Ethno-nationalism is emerging as Africa’s most toxic problem, challenging the continent’s very post-colonial structure. It has fractured Somalia, divided Ivory Coast, and is tearing at the fabric of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As for the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’, it is a feature of donor relations across the continent. Worried Westerners, who so often seem to fall prey to a benign form of megalomania when it comes to Africa, would do well to accept that salvation is simply not theirs to bestow. They should be more modest, more knowing, and less naïve. They owe it not only to the Western taxpayers who make development organisations’ largesse possible, but to the Africans whose destinies they attempt to alter.

  In the time taken to write this book, things have not gone smoothly for the other high-profile players attempting to challenge official sleaze in Africa. In Sierra Leone, the head of the donor-funded Anti-Corruption Commission, Val Collier, was sacked in late 2005 after saying most MPs were putting their financial interests as government contractors before the nation’s. In Nigeria, reformist minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who battled to change her country’s ranking as the world’s most corrupt, resigned in 2006 after being removed as head of the Economic Intelligence team. Nuhu Ribadu, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, was reassigned in December 2007, weeks after charging powerful former state governors with graft. Following in John Githongo’s footsteps, he has taken up the offer of a senior associate’s post at St Antony’s. In South Africa, Leonard McCarthy, head of the Scorpions, a
n FBI-style crime-fighting unit probing alleged police links with organised crime, learnt in February 2008 that the force was to be disbanded.

  In theory, these are the individuals donors should be supporting. In practice, they often do the opposite. ‘If you pump money into a system where there is leakage, you are effectively rewarding leakage and disincentivising those trying to stop it,’ says Paul Collier. ‘Change in Africa can only come from Africans, who are fighting against terrible odds. On the whole, they fail. They end up in exile, or come to a sticky end. If you don’t, as a donor, support people like John, you are counteracting their fight for change.’

  If they only set foot on the continent, idealistic Westerners would be astonished to hear how often, and how fiercely, politically engaged Africans–many of whom have featured in these pages–call for aid to be cut, conditionalities sharpened. Kenyan journalist Kwamchetsi Makokha is not alone in detecting an incipient racism, rather than altruism, in our lack of discrimination. ‘Fundamentally the West doesn’t care enough about Africa to pay too much attention to how its money is spent. It wants to be seen to do the right thing, and that’s as far as the interest goes.’ By subjecting donor budgets to unprecedented scrutiny, the global recession may, ironically, succeed where any number of sceptical reports on aid have failed, making it impossible for Africa’s foreign backers to maintain their Polyanna perspectives.