It's Our Turn to Eat (20 page)

Could John, then, be relied upon by his colleagues to keep quiet, given what he represented? At first glance the notion of a challenge to the establishment emerging from within the upper class, the very social group that benefited most from the status quo, might seem counterintuitive. But the aristocratic scion who chooses to live as a pauper, the class rebel whose antagonism towards his peers is based on the most intimate of understandings, is a well-established historical phenomenon. Discussing why someone of John's lofty caste might choose a ‘deviant' path, Dr Tom Wolf, a US analyst living in Kenya, cites the examples of Lenin and Fidel Castro, ‘both from well-established, upper-middle-class families…who nevertheless re-engineered themselves into the most ferocious of revolutionaries'. Mahatma Gandhi came from a long line of statesmen, Che Guevara was of aristocratic descent, John and Robert Kennedy were born into a family of immense wealth, much of it shadily acquired. Growing up close to power, Wolf argues, probably ensured that John was ‘less in awe of those wielding it' than a Kenyan contemporary from a more humble background, anxious to assimilate. ‘In that sense, his “class” heritage encouraged independence of thought and action, rather than sycophantic loyalty.' ‘Less in awe' is putting it mildly. ‘Generational contempt' might be a more accurate term. ‘My parents' generation are the reason we are in a mess,' Mugo Githongo, John's brother, once told me. ‘We have nothing to learn from them.'

There was also a specifically Kikuyu shape to John's revolt, and it took outright oedipal form. With the oil crunch of the 1970s and 1980s, which coincided with Moi's abandonment of any attempt to win the acceptance of the business elite, many Kikuyu heads of families lost their jobs. Patriarchs who had grown fat on the cream of the Kenyatta regime, bragging about their deals in the bar, suddenly found themselves out of work, disrespected at home and with time on their hands. ‘In the Kikuyu community you are raised hearing ponderous voices saying “the family is this, the family is that”. But as you grow there's a straining of the social contract, it begins to crack,' says Martin Kimani. ‘You become aware of this tension in the house, this anger between your mother and father.' Just as Kikuyu women took the helm in the absence of their menfolk during the Mau Mau Emergency, these church-going mothers came to the family's rescue. Working as nurses, running milk-trading schemes and sewing circles, they counted the pennies as their husbands wasted pounds on beer, mistresses–who gave the men the respect they no longer received at home–and deals that failed to miraculously revive the family fortunes.

Kikuyu sons, who traditionally enjoy a special bond with their mothers, absorbed their anger at wastrel husbands, the humiliation as rumours of girlfriends and illegitimate children drifted back to the family home. Like doting gangster bosses who send their daughters to convent schools, only to be horrified when the girls turn judgemental on them, many Kikuyu fathers endured the final irony of seeing their offspring turn against them, rejecting their entire code of behaviour. ‘The generation that sent its sons to schools where they got a good Catholic education were hoist by their own petard. The NGO values, the desire to build a better, more virtuous Kenya, were all sown at home,' says Kimani. ‘It's a very complex family drama.' The children in these families often only grasped the full extent of a paterfamilias's perfidy at his funeral, when they would discover, standing at the graveside, a previously unknown second family, complete with second widow, grieving children and claims to the estate.

If these were some of the broad trends that meant John's allegiance could not be taken for granted, there were also some simple prag
matic reasons why a man of his background might choose to act with unprecedented recklessness.

Under both Kenyatta and Moi, the government's hold on the Kenyan economy–whether in terms of civil service jobs, parastatal posts or contracts up for grabs–was so vast that alienating the president virtually meant financial ruin, as Joe Githongo and many Kikuyu entrepreneurs knew only too well. You could be firmly entrenched in the private sector and
still
be crushed by the hostility of the powers that be. Centralised systems of power are like onions: each layer faithfully mimics the core. Make an enemy in the top echelons of government, and business mysteriously dried up, public tenders no longer went your way, your goods took an age to clear customs, your phones were never connected and the tax inspectors took a sudden, obsessive interest in your accounts. There was simply no getting away from State House. Fall foul of the president or one of his cronies and the only thing to do was to hide yourself away and pray for either a change of regime, however long that took, or eventual forgiveness.

Scoured by the brisk winds of economic liberalisation in the 1980s, the Kenyan state shrivelled. Once a bright graduate would have automatically regarded a job in a government ministry, with its grading structure, pension scheme and subsidised housing, as the summit of his ambitions. Although structural adjustment reforms were often met with horrified cries from the likes of Oxfam and Christian Aid, the expansion of the private sector, the birth of a vibrant civil society and the blossoming of the media opened up a range of interesting new job opportunities. Who cared about keeping on the right side of State House when it was possible to join a South African research institute, work for a Nairobi-based multinational, or set up an NGO to garner well-paid consultancy work for foreign donors? John's experience at Transparency International had taught him there was life outside the state sector. Joining government had been a choice, not a necessity. What was more, the lucky fact of his birth in the United Kingdom meant that he enjoyed automatic residency there, and could work anywhere in Europe. That prospect
seemed intriguing rather than appalling to a man who felt himself to be a citizen of the world. In the shape of John Githongo, the Mount Kenya Mafia was dealing with the first generation of Kenyans whose members were financially free to follow the dictates of their conscience.

And then there were the individual peculiarities of the man himself. Ever since his childhood, John had come under huge pressure from those he loved: to excel academically, to join the family firm, to get married to a nice Kenyan girl, have kids, get involved in politics. He had ducked and swerved with skill, charting a highly individual path through the expectations of others. As a result he found himself that strangest of beings: a forty-year-old African bachelor with neither wife, household nor children. By the conventional standards of macho Kenyan society, John Githongo was weird, little short of a freak. In pre-colonial Kikuyu society, where only those regarded as having achieved something of lasting worth in their lives were honoured with burial, the bodies of unmarried men were carried outside the homestead and left for hyenas to devour. Dying incomplete, they might never have existed. Yet John was willing to defy those norms rather than neglect what really made his heart beat faster: the life of the mind.

Worryingly for the presidential coterie, John's eccentricities were all of the sort to close down possible avenues for applying leverage. For most Africans, the weight of the extended family serves as ballast, tethering their ambitions firmly to the ground. When confronting our destinies, we each tot up what we stand to lose and what we can bear to surrender. John had no direct dependants. Should he choose to commit career suicide, no child's education would be at risk, no ambitious wife's laments echo around the family home, no in-laws make impassioned appeals to his common sense. Gloriously self-sufficient, John Githongo was free to take whatever decisions he chose.

Even if the Mount Kenya Mafia's members were not given to probing motives and analysing underlying social shifts, an episode in John's past really should have caused them some concern.

In 1998, before John moved to TI, he had briefly agreed to launch a regional political magazine on behalf of a Kenyan NGO called SAREAT (Series for Alternative Research in East Africa Trust). Headed by political scientist Mutahi Ngunyi, SAREAT won generous funding from the Nairobi office of the US-based Ford Foundation. But the project, John came to believe, was being used to front a scam. He suspected Ford's local programme officer, a Zimbabwean called Jonathan Moyo who would go on to serve as Robert Mugabe's information minister, of plotting with Ngunyi to misappropriate tens of thousands of dollars of Ford funding. Carefully documenting what had happened, John walked away from the project. Initially, recalls former work colleague Milena Hileman, he had no plans to report the issue to Ford's senior management. ‘He was very upset, but he simply didn't trust the
wazungus
to do anything about it. I kept nagging him, saying, “Not all
wazungus
are the same. These are good people and they need to know.”' In the end, the two flew to New York to brief Ford's vice president, and the foundation sued both Ngunyi and Moyo.

A practice run, in many ways, for Anglo Leasing, the SAREAT episode was not exactly an encouraging sign for anyone hoping the new permanent secretary would show leniency towards those caught with their hand in the till.

As the long rains spluttered to an end in June 2004, Kenya's anti-corruption chief was aware of a range of possible scams being hatched across various government departments. Yet he decided to train his focus exclusively on Anglo Leasing, for unashamedly political reasons. There were only so many projects his office could handle. Had he channelled his energies into cleaning up a Kamba-led ministry or Luhya-headed department, it would have looked like ethnic targeting of the most blatant kind. ‘I had to make choices. I knew of at least one other minister who was a complete crook, but I was a Kikuyu, in a Kikuyu government, and people around me were saying, “It's our turn to eat.” You have to start at home.' Although he knew few fellow kinsmen would see it as such, his approach was a form of protective ethnic loyalty–his interpretation of what it meant
to be a ‘good Kikuyu'. In the tribe's long-term interests, a fundamental principle needed to be established. Ever since Kibaki's inauguration, cynics had been predicting a return to the abuses of the Kenyatta era, when the Kikuyu had enriched themselves without compunction. The new government had to prove such predictions false, show that such practices had become obsolete in the new Kenya, if history was not to repeat itself. ‘Moi's term in office wouldn't have been possible without widespread resentment towards the Kikuyu. Moi was a Kikuyu blunder. The richest and biggest tribe has to be the most magnanimous.'

John's suspicions of key colleagues did not necessarily mean his entire venture was holed below the waterline, he told himself, reciting the Chinese proverb ‘A fish rots from the head down.' As long as the president was still committed to the fight against sleaze–and that was certainly what John told any diplomat, journalist or NGO director willing to listen–his ministers could be tackled and thwarted. The simple matter of John's geographical location inside the white-colonnaded edifice of State House held the key, he had come to realise, for it guaranteed access to this least ideologically steadfast and most indolent of presidents. ‘On several occasions, John told me, “The battle will be where my office is,”' remembers Richard Leakey. ‘John said, “If I can walk down the corridor into the president's office, then I can continue. If I have to move downtown, it's over.”'

As family friends and prominent politicians virtually queued up to urge him to stop digging, John was also coming under pressure from the opposite direction. Alarmed senior officials were nagging him to now turn his attention to the second suspect Anglo Leasing deal, which involved the building of a forensic laboratory. His more lowly informants were not letting up, either. The flood of leaked information threatened to drown him. At times he felt as if his overenthusiastic agents were running him, rather than the other way round. ‘I became overwhelmed. I felt I could not satisfy these individuals.'

The pressure had an effect. On 4 June, after only ten days of playing the ‘softly-softly' game, John violated his self-imposed cease-fire. He wrote to Andrew Mullei, governor of the Central Bank,
asking him to stop all further payments to Anglo Leasing and requesting details of money transfers to the firm to date. The letter was a measure of his distrust of the permanent secretaries, as he had already written–in vain–to Joseph Magari at the finance ministry making the same request. As John was bracing himself for a response to this salvo, he was leaked a letter that put his efforts into chilling perspective. What he had glimpsed so far, the document made clear, was the merest tip of the iceberg. The Anglo Leasing affair was far more than a couple of dodgy contracts with a shadowy Liverpudlian company. It was a modus operandi taking place beyond parliamentary scrutiny, across two administrations, enthusiastically replicated by its inventors in confident expectation of huge profits.

The letter, drafted by the Central Bank governor, was addressed to the finance ministry and asked for confirmation that Mwiraria had authorised payment on a long list of contracts. The list embraced the two projects John already knew about, but included sixteen other contracts–eighteen in all–which had variously been signed off by the finance, transport and internal security ministries. Kenya's auditor general would later draw up a similar, even more detailed inventory. All the contracts could be described as ‘sensitive'. Military-or security-related in nature, they included a digital multi-channel communications network for the prison service, new helicopters, a secure communications system for the police, that state-of-the-art frigate for the navy, a data network and internet service satellite link for the Kenya Post Office, a top-secret military surveillance system dubbed ‘Project Nexus', an early-warning radar system for the meteorological department, and so on. Twelve of the contracts had originally been signed under the previous Moi regime and carried over under NARC. The other six had been signed by the new government. The list gave dates and values. Added together, the auditor general would calculate, the eighteen contracts were worth a gulp-inducing 56.3 billion shillings ($751 million).

One of the problems that would confront those trying to whip up public ire over Anglo Leasing–the same hurdle faced by those trying to stop Goldenberg in the 1990s–was that for a Kenyan public accustomed to calculating daily expenses in hundreds and thousands of
shillings, the billions involved had an abstract, intangible quality. Ironically, the bigger the figures, the less relevance they seemed to have to ordinary lives, making it difficult for civil society activists and opposition MPs to persuade voters that Anglo Leasing deserved their attention, taking a vast bite, as it did, out of their taxes and hiking their daily costs. Like a tourist attempting to capture the vast cathedral of St Paul's in his viewfinder, the ordinary Kenyan struggled to focus on the gigantic object looming unexpectedly before him.

In fact, the value of the eighteen contracts amounted to 5 per cent of Kenya's gross domestic product, and over 16 per cent of the government's gross expenditure in 2003–04, the period in which the six NARC-era contracts were signed. It easily outstripped the country's total aid that year ($521 million), and represented three quarters of the amount the hard-pressed Kenyan diaspora annually sent back home. The campaigning anti-graft organisation Mars Kenya would later calculate that the funds involved were the equivalent of 68 per cent of what the finance ministry allocated to infrastructure in 2006, and thirty-seven times more than it allocated to water projects in Kenya's arid lands. The American ambassador came up with an even more depressing figure: the money would have been enough to supply every HIV-positive Kenyan with anti-retrovirals for the next ten years.

While not on Goldenberg's gargantuan scale, Anglo Leasing was still big enough for its knock-on effects to impact on every Kenyan, no matter their social status. The scale of the thing made the nervousness John had encountered from suspected key players suddenly comprehensible. There was plenty to be uneasy about.

 

When I was stationed in Kenya as a foreign correspondent, I worked out of the international press centre in Chester House. The building is located in Nairobi's business district, next to one of the city's least salubrious nightclubs, on a scruffy street that is lined at night with prostitutes in tight white miniskirts. The press centre was often a very quiet place, because the Western reporters spent half their lives on the road, relying on Kenyan staff to pay their bills, update their files and
order stationery during long absences in Rwanda and Burundi, Ethiopia and Somalia. As the years passed, many of us began to suspect that our office managers, routinely trusted with huge volumes of cash, were getting a little sloppy. Going through my receipts, I'd be taken aback to see the price we'd paid for a few reams of photocopying paper, a plastic binder, or some ink. I'd pause, stare at the receipt, dark suspicions stirring. But there was always something more pressing that needed doing. If I couldn't rely on my office manager to do his job, my entire operation became unsustainable. Then, one day, I decided to check a suspicious receipt against the high street price. We'd paid three times as much. Furious, I confronted my office manager, planning to storm to the shop in question to have it out with the owner.

‘Where the hell did we buy this? Whoever sold it is a complete crook.'

My plan for a showdown immediately stalled. Looking uncharacteristically flustered, my office manager explained that, like his colleagues in the building, he routinely bought stationery from a supplier who went door to door in Chester House, rather than venturing into Nairobi's business district.

‘But you've been paying him three times the going rate!'

‘I didn't realise. I thought he was giving us special prices.'

‘They were
special
all right.'

‘I'm sorry. This will never happen again.'

For a moment, I almost fell for it. Who was this nameless, faceless, nebulous salesman who had been conning Chester House staff? I tried to remember if, during my stints in Nairobi, any office supplier had ever come knocking on my door. I could remember the Sudanese rebel spokesman with his acronym-spattered declarations, the charming amputee who begged for alms, the student hungry for freelance work. But no shadowy stationery supplier. I quizzed colleagues down the hall. None of them remembered him, either.

Of course, there was no such man. He was a ghost, conjured into existence in the mind of my canny office manager, whom I eventually sacked when the fiddling became too obvious to ignore. Capitalising
on my inattention, he had got together with a small army of obliging high street shop staff to fabricate inflated receipts. The shop owner, likely to be a Kenyan Asian, would get the official price. The difference between that and what I actually paid would be split between my office manager and the shop assistant, probably a kinsman–two sons of the soil ganging up satisfyingly to con the
mzungu
and the
mhindi
in one fell swoop. There was nothing original or complicated about the scam: it was the oldest trick in the book. It was, as it happened, almost exactly the technique used in Anglo Leasing.

While Goldenberg involved financial stratagems so complex even economists had difficulty grasping them all, Anglo Leasing was so simple a child could master the technique. It was a classic procurement scam, needing only two parties, although for it to work one of those parties had to be at the top of government, powerful enough to silence doubting minions and ignore institutional checks and balances. Another vital component was the military and security nature of the contracts. In every other sector, contracts had to be put to open tender, forcing even the greediest of suppliers to stay within the realms of the reasonable. Advertisements were placed in newspapers and trade journals, competitive bids collected, technical competence established, and the companies who came forward knew they might be subjected to due diligence before the relevant ministry made its decision. Any irregularities risked being picked up by opposition-dominated parliamentary committees and scoop-hungry journalists. The only area escaping such scrutiny was the security and intelligence sector, where single-sourcing, opaque negotiations and loosely worded contracts could all be justified on the grounds of ‘national security'. Could the government really be expected to tout for a counter-terrorism centre on the open market? Or to publish specifications for a new prison communications network in the press? Of course not. It would put Kenya itself at risk.

Security concerns served as the perfect cover for some extraordinary sharp practice. Before legitimate suppliers even knew the Kenya government was looking for a particular service, news would break that the deal had been signed. To experts in the field, the contract
awarded might seem suspiciously expensive–sure sign of a ‘commission' being paid–but since the government's contract specifications were not available, it was impossible to tell how much was being creamed off. ‘In the absence of competitive bidding, it was not possible to ascertain how the contract sums were determined and accepted by Government as fair,' Kenya's auditor general, Evan Mwai, would note in a damning April 2006 report into Anglo Leasing.
²⁷
One small example, however, gave a hint of the level of greed involved: Kenya was paying $US9 million each for MI 17 helicopters; a quick internet trawl revealed them to be simultaneously selling in Asia for just $3.9 million.

No due diligence had been carried out, the auditor general discovered, no implementation schedules agreed. In some cases, the companies concerned might actually have planned to supply the Kenyan government with promised equipment, albeit at ridiculously inflated prices, but once again, noted the auditor general, ‘the non-availability in most cases of detailed contract specifications, invoices and delivery notes' made it difficult to verify what was delivered, and the failure to keep an up-to-date register of assets left their whereabouts unclear. In others, the Kenyan government clearly never stood to receive anything at all, given the nature of the companies it was doing business with. ‘At least seven of the supplier/credit providers do not exist in the countries in which they are purportedly registered and may therefore not be bona fide registered business firms,' Mwai found. ‘Additional firms among the list of the suppliers/credit providers may also prove to be non-existent.'

Confusion over the firms' identities was an important ingredient in the scam. As John probed the eighteen contracts the Kenyan media and public would come to refer to collectively as ‘Anglo Leasing', he would be confronted by the surreal situation of a government which appeared to have no clear idea with whom it was signing its multi-million-dollar deals. Just as my office manager prevented me from identifying his fellow conspirators by inventing a shadowy door-to-door salesman, the anonymity of the contractors helped conceal both the mechanism and eventual benefactors of this laziest of scams. It
was always obvious that the identities of the entrepreneurs involved in Anglo Leasing could not be the great mystery claimed by the ministers and civil servants involved. How could they
not
know their suppliers, given the supposed sensitivity of the projects? How could they later go on to cash cheques from these nameless individuals, refunding monies paid? The very questions were absurd, yet no one in power was in any rush to ink in a deliberately created void. No wonder newspaper cartoonists drew Anglo Leasing as a featureless ghost, a figure with the sizeable belly, business suit, bulging briefcase and bloated potato shape of one of Kenya's
wabenzi
, but without nose, eyes or mouth.