One of the many lessons of John Githongo’s story is that the key to fighting graft in Africa does not lie in fresh legislation or new institutions. To use the seemingly counter-intuitive phrase of Danny Kaufmann, expert on sleaze: ‘You don’t fight corruption by fighting corruption.’ Most African states already have the gamut of tools required to do the job. A Prevention of Corruption Act has actually been on the Kenyan statute book since 1956. ‘You don’t need any more bodies, you don’t need any more laws, you just need good people and the will,’ says Hussein Were. In Kenya, as in many other countries, the KACC is part of the grand corrupters’ game, providing them with another bureaucratic wall behind which to shield, another scapegoat to blame for lack of progress.44 Rather than dreaming up sexy-sounding short cuts, donors should be pouring their money into the boring old institutions African regimes have deliberately starved of cash over the years: the police force, judicial system and civil service.
Yet even today in Kenya, donors will get excited about the imminent approval of an anti-money-laundering Bill, or suggest that if only the KACC could be given prosecutorial powers–that old mantra–everything would be different. Things would be different, all right. With Justice Aaron Ringera at its head, a KACC with the power to prosecute could serve as an even more formidable obstacle in the fight against graft.
Donors would do better focusing on removing the beam from their own eye, by targeting the Western companies, lawyers’ chambers and banks which make it possible for crooked African leaders to spirit hundreds of millions of dollars out of the continent each year. Deepak Kamani and his brother Rashmi, suspected of involvement in a dozen Anglo Leasing contracts, regard Britain as a second home. Guardian journalist David Pallister has tracked the Kamanis’ business links with a Scottish arms dealer who funnelled Kenyan funds through accounts in Jersey and Guernsey.45 His wife signed the first Anglo Leasing contract, and businessmen in Liverpool, Cambridge and Daventry played facilitating roles. These things are happening on British territory, with the active cooperation of seemingly respectable British companies.
In July 2007, a full two and a half years after John Githongo’s departure from Kenya, Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the City of London Police finally launched an investigation into British links with Anglo Leasing. Investigators took days’ worth of testimony from John, and a dozen premises in London, Cambridgeshire, Liverpool and Scotland were raided. If the time taken by the SFO to interest itself was telling, so was the outcome. In February 2009 the SFO announced it was dropping its probe, citing a lack of cooperation by the Kenyan government. The SFO blamed Attorney General Amos Wako, Wako lambasted the SFO, Ringera blamed both Wako and Kenya’s high court. When it comes to legalistic foot-dragging, the Kenyans have been able to imbibe lessons from the best. Their old colonial master still pays no more than lip-service to the anti-corruption cause. Since the OECD anti-bribery convention came into force in 2002, Britain has brought only one, minor, prosecution against a domestic company for corruption abroad, while the US has brought 105 and France nineteen.46
When former Kenyan justice minister Kiraitu Murungi described Anglo Leasing as ‘the scandal that never was’, he could not have been more wrong. Kenyans are still paying for Anglo Leasing, with the outgoings for several of the suspect contracts registering on the yearly budget. The Mars Kenya group has highlighted the ticking time bomb represented by the billions of shillings in irrevocable promissory notes issued in payment, whose final destination remains unclear. When former finance minister Amos Kimunya assured parliament in May 2007 that none had been issued for a digital communications network never supplied to the administrative police, he was immediately made to look ridiculous by Maoka Maore, the MP who first exposed Anglo Leasing, waving a fistful of such notes worth 49.7 million euros. Despite being deemed by Kenya’s auditor general to have no legal existence, Anglo Leasing’s ‘ghost’ firms are actually suing the Republic of Kenya for breach of contract. A responsible government would seize upon any court case as the perfect opportunity to flush out the players behind this network of fictional suppliers and phantom financiers. Instead, a colluding state is quietly reaching out-of-court settlements with the litigants. Although supposedly listed as ‘wanted’ by Kenyan police, in May 2008 Deepak Kamani returned to Nairobi, where he met with top officials. He is said to be considering a permanent return.47
What of John Githongo himself? As anyone who has watched old Westerns knows, the quest for retribution is doomed ultimately to disappoint; the lone avenger, no matter how righteous his cause, always ends up thwarted at some fundamental existential level, his vindication acid in his mouth. Being proved right is never enough.
Still single, he works out regularly and retains the silhouette of the jock who kicks sand in the wimp’s eyes, but his stubble is now sprinkled with white. His multiplicity of talents have proved as much a curse as a blessing. By the time a man reaches his mid-forties, certain decisions need to be made. Unsure whether he wants to be a politician, academic, anti-corruption campaigner or NGO director, John has refused to make those decisions, trying, typically, to do it all.
By August 2008, however, one thing had become clear: he could no longer bear to remain in exile. Determined to be back in Kenya ahead of the storm he felt sure was approaching, he took up an invitation extended by the new coalition government and made his first visit in more than three years. He flew in to Jomo Kenyatta airport braced for possible arrest, his medication tucked into a jacket pocket in anticipation of a stretch in the cells, two privately hired bodyguards at his side and another at the wheel of a waiting car. The moment he registered that there were no intelligence agents at the airport, only a phalanx of grinning family members and flashbulb-popping cameramen, he knew his enemies had dropped any notion of pressing charges.
In February 2009 he checked out of St Antony’s for good, setting up base in a tense Nairobi, where a fresh spate of top-level scandals, some involving names familiar from Anglo Leasing, have fuelled a mood of public fury. He plans to base himself in Mathare, where he hopes to plunge into community work and gradually build the grassroots support required to run as an MP, a move that would fulfil a long-nurtured sense of personal predestination. A group of supporters has already quietly registered a political party, no more than a name at the moment, which awaits the Big Man’s kiss of life. John pins his faith–that same passionate, all-or-nothing faith he once pinned on Kibaki–on the young wananchi of Nairobi’s vast slums, who, he wants to believe, have grown wise to the ethnic string-pulling of their leaders. A sense of class solidarity, John argues, is forming in a community which finally grasps how cynically it has been manipulated.
Going straight to the slums, a St Francis-style path for the spoilt Karen boy, represents a break with tradition in Kenya, where political power usually depends on the ability to mobilise rural constituencies. It would also correct a trajectory which put John in danger of turning into a jet-setting African celebrity fawned over by Western politicians and campaigners, but detached from the country of his birth. Many believe his status as a Kenyan Brahmin disqualifies him from this course. ‘His lineage is too privileged, too patrician,’ says David Ndii. ‘Ultimately, politics in Kenya is representative. Who does John represent? He doesn’t have a Kenyan CV.’ My own doubts are based on different factors. Over-intellectual individuals who grind away at decision-making and shy from personal confrontation–and John is not a man to look anyone in the eye and say ‘No’–may make brilliant deputies and priceless second-in-commands, but rarely good prime ministers or presidents. Those roles need a capacity for rash judgement and sudden action which he lacks. Peppering his conversation with words like ‘lustration’, ‘parameters’ and ‘exponential curves’, John does not possess the common touch. It may well be that he has already made his most important contribution to Kenyan history, but on a continent hungry for heroes, it’s difficult to see his admirers allowing him to take the backroom job that would actually suit him best.
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br /> John’s permanent return coincided with the publication of this book, which was immediately deemed ‘too hot to handle’ by Kenya’s Asian booksellers, scarred by memories of Moi-era libel suits. Their refusal to stock the book is a sure indication of how jittery Nairobi feels below a show of frenetic normality. The booksellers’ boycott–a form of government censorship by proxy–has ensured that It’s Our Turn to Eat has become the most pirated book in Kenyan history, with a bootleg PDF file of the manuscript being passed between readers’ groups. This greedy appropriation of more than three years’ work dismays me, but perhaps there is something poetically fitting about a story of illicitly recorded confidences and website leaks being filched, in its turn, via the internet.
John has been served with a summons by his old nemesis Chris Murungaru, who is suing for defamation. But the fury of those whose money-making schemes he sabotaged remains his main concern. The March 2009 assassinations, a stone’s throw from State House, of two human rights campaigners who had dared publicise more than a thousand extrajudicial executions by the police was a sinister reminder that those who challenge the Kenyan establishment often court a death sentence. John takes extreme care, never moving alone. His life will never be entirely free of the fear of the assassin’s bullet. ‘John’s a tragic figure, in a way,’ a Kenyan television executive told me, ‘because those who admire him cannot protect him, and those who hate him have very long memories.’
A polariser of opinions, a man destined to be either adored or reviled, John knows his path will never be ordinary. Sometimes he fantasises about a conversation with his old boss, in which he tells Kibaki to his face: ‘You never believed in it, did you?’ But he knows it will never occur, and that what he did, in the eyes of even former friends, will always verge on the unforgivable, exposing a capacity for cool calculation they struggle to accept. ‘If your mother is naked, you throw a blanket on her, you don’t call the neighbours round to have a look,’ a Kikuyu acquaintance told me on my last trip to Kenya, capturing that sense of distaste. ‘The hardest part,’ acknowledges John, ‘has been coming to terms with the betrayal of my tribe, my class.’
American writer Samantha Power coined the term ‘upstander’–as opposed to ‘bystander’–for those who decide where to draw a line and then refuse to cross it. Most Africans will face, at some point in their lives, a John Githongo moment of their own when they must choose whether to challenge The Way Things Have Always Been Done Around Here, or to acquiesce. The dilemma goes to the heart of the puzzle of what it is to be a modern young African, forcing each individual to decide who he is and where his allegiance lies. The student who told me, ‘I want to live in a country where it doesn’t matter who my father is and where my family comes from,’ was speaking for many Kenyans, but not all.
A crystallisation of that wrenching quandary, John’s story attests to the qualities so often required by those who lead the way in breaking with the past: an intransigence verging on egomania, a literalism that is almost a form of foolishness. ‘The worst thing I’ve been called is “naïve”,’ says John. ‘I accept that. Only a naïve person would take an anti-corruption job after twenty-four years of systemic corruption. But that’s what you need. I went in naïve and I want to stay that way.’
When I think of John’s magnificently foolhardy attempt to bring down a system, an image comes to mind. It is of the carrion-eating marabou storks that nest in the scruffy thorn trees clustered around Nairobi’s Nyayo sports stadium, on the airport road. ‘Nyayo’ means ‘footsteps’ in Kiswahili, and the incoming Moi adopted it as his motif in order to reassure nervous Kenyans he would not deviate from Kenyatta’s path. When it came to grand corruption this was certainly the case, and it has continued to be true under Kibaki. As sleaze has flourished, Kenya’s poverty has deepened and the slums near the stadium have spread, along with the mounds of rotting rubbish on which the storks depend. Politicians, foreign aid officials and World Bank spokesmen continue to talk up Kenya’s prospects, but each year I notice that there are more of these bald-headed scavengers perched above the honking matatus and diesel-snorting exhausts, a quiet, tangible sign that inequality is growing, not diminishing. Occasionally one will launch itself into flight, dark wings whooshing in a heart-stopping Nosferatu moment, fleshy pink throat sac swinging obscenely. But mostly they stand like frozen sentinels on the uppermost branches of the acacia, shoulders hunched, heads buried, bearing grim witness to the ingrained cynicism of an increasingly unjust society.
The John Githongos of this world have their work cut out.
Colin Bruce is no longer World Bank country director for Kenya. He left soon after the election crisis, in a swirl of controversy. An internal World Bank memo, leaked to the Financial Times, revealed that even as one election monitoring team after another ruled the polls deeply flawed, Bruce was assuring his bosses in Washington that his landlord was the legitimate president of Kenya. A botched attempt to broker a deal between opposition and government–rejected by both sides–triggered criticism from across the political spectrum. His career does not appear to have suffered permanent damage, however. In June 2008 he was appointed Director for Strategy and Operations in the Africa Region, overseeing World Bank funding for the entire continent. Shortly before his reassignment, the World Bank’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman issued a memo to all Africa staff which named no names but had clearly been prompted by circumstances in Nairobi. ‘I would like to remind staff of the need to avoid situations where potential conflicts of interest may arise (or be perceived to arise), or where the Bank may be exposed to possible reputational risk,’ it said. ‘With that in mind, the Region will not support international staff who are on assignment in country offices in entering into rental contracts with a counterparty who is (or is closely related to) a member of a client government, or has a well known affiliation with any major political party in a client country.’
Retirement has not softened Sir Edward Clay. Ever alert to institutional hypocrisy, he follows African politics closely and is a vigorous writer of letters to British newspapers. ‘Like diabetes in people of my age, it is perhaps a case of late-flowering or late-onset iconoclasm.’ His frankness has prevented him building a post-ambassadorial career in the civil service. He was offered a job on the Foreign Office’s Chevening Scholarships programme, which gives grants to overseas students, on condition he signed a gagging order which would have made it impossible to express opinions on current affairs. The offer was withdrawn after he publicly criticised the dropping of the inquiry into BAE, leaving him acutely aware of what he calls ‘a symmetry of ostracism’ on the part of both the Kenyan and the British governments. In the course of a BBC Hard Talk discussion with justice minister Martha Karua in 2007, he discovered he had been made persona non grata in Kenya. During that exchange, Karua referred to his supposed real estate holdings in Kenya, often cited by the NARC elite as the reason for his interest in the country. Sir Edward owns no property in Kenya. He remains popular with ordinary Kenyans, and his remarks are often splashed across the local papers. A matatu baptised ‘Edward Clay’ has been spotted plying the roads of western Kenya.
Caroline Mutoko is still at Kiss FM. Her morning broadcasts during the election crisis, urging listeners to refrain from violence, take care of their neighbours and return to work, were regarded by many listeners as providing the moral leadership the nation failed to receive from its politicians.
Conrad Akunga came close to packing in his Mzalendo website. ‘I almost gave up. I’d spent five years being told, “Your vote is your voice and it will be heard.” Then you queue for three kilometres in the sun, and all for what?’ But he rallied, and is working on technical improvements. ‘As long as those guys are there taking salaries, they are answerable to me. I’m their boss, not the other way round.’
Hussein Were was held up by armed men while entering his compound in August 2007. He escaped his attackers, whose motives remain unclear, by driving through a security barrier at top speed, shaking
off a gunman clinging to his side mirror.
On a sunny afternoon on 22 December 2007, John Githongo’s former fiancée, Mary Muthumbi, married land surveyor James Ndirangu at a Catholic centre on a green hill in Dagoretti. The bride wore an ivory-coloured silk dress and her hair up. A matron of honour, four bridesmaids, five little flower girls and one embarrassed page hovered in attendance.
KEY CHARACTERS
Moody Awori–Vice-president in first NARC government
Colin Bruce–World Bank country director 2005–08
Edward Clay–British High Commissioner to Kenya 2001–05
Makhtar Diop–World Bank country director 2001–05
Alfred Getonga–Presidential aide in first NARC government
Dan Gikonyo–Physician to President Mwai Kibaki
Lisa Karanja–Former colleague of John Githongo, now runs TI-Kenya
Jomo Kenyatta–First president of independent Kenya, died 1978
Uhuru Kenyatta–Jomo Kenyatta’s politician son
Mwai Kibaki–President of Kenya
Amos Kimunya–Lands minister in first NARC government, later appointed finance minister, suspended over controversial sale of Grand Regency hotel
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