It's Our Turn to Eat (24 page)

Finally, like many of those who worked in the Great Lakes region in the 1990s, a horror story tugged at Clay's conscience, preventing him from relaxing into his last assignment. In Uganda he had also been responsible for Rwanda and Burundi, two small countries, he'd been confidently told by his Foreign Office bosses, he could expect to occupy just 1 per cent of his time. The Rwandan genocide, which began within weeks of Clay presenting his credentials in Kigali, made a mockery of their words. He was haunted by a feeling of undefined inadequacy in the face of the killings. ‘If I'd been five years younger,' he said of his posting to Kenya, ‘I wouldn't have had the confidence. I'd have felt constrained by lack of experience. But one thing I'd absorbed in my previous African posting was the costs of not speaking up.' Those in the Kenyan state apparatus who would later view Clay as the sinister hand of a Kikuyu-hostile British government missed the point just as thoroughly as they misunderstood John
Githongo's
raison d'être
: Edward Clay, by this stage of his life, had all that it took to become a rogue ambassador.

Arriving in Nairobi in December 2001, when John Githongo was TI's energetic young director, Clay noted with puzzlement the roller-coastering attitudes of diplomats posted to Kenya. ‘In the first year, there was great enthusiasm: “We must increase aid.” In the second year, revision set in. In the third year they all seemed to go bonkers, so disillusioned they couldn't speak or think rationally. I thought they'd all gone mad.' It never occurred to this diplomat, who would go down in history as one of the Kenyan government's most flamboyant critics, that his own attitude might trace a similar arc. Moi was on his way out after twenty-four years in which, whatever his failings, he had managed to keep the nation intact. So much seemed possible. This was a time to engage, not carp. ‘There was a great feeling of a new departure, which is why I'd wanted the job.' And for quite a while Clay was happy to talk up a country he loved. When the US State Department issued a terrorism alert in December 2003 which threatened to devastate Kenya's tourism industry, already battered by a series of travel warnings, the local media learnt that Clay would be breakfasting at two of the hotels identified as possible terrorist targets, and would be available for photographs. It was a gesture of support appreciated by the Kenyan media, and he was briefly dubbed ‘the two-breakfast diplomat' by the BBC.

But worries about terrorism, development and constitutional reform were soon subsumed by an overarching concern: Kibaki's loss of control. The comparison with his predecessor, a fitter man despite his extra seven years, was telling. ‘Moi always had a grip on what was going on in the country and in his office. After Kibaki's accident, his authority fell into the hands of those around him. The sense of disarray was palpable. The donors were lining up, ready to engage, and they weren't getting any guidance.' As the vacuum persisted, stories of shady goings-on began surfacing. At first, nothing seemed connected. But as time went by, and connections between the various stories became apparent, an ominous pattern seemed to emerge.

Clay assigned a team at the High Commission the task of establishing what was going on. The Kenyan media, he felt, made the mistake of tackling each episode in isolation. The larger embassies could play their part, he believed, by putting together the pieces of the jigsaw to form a coherent picture. ‘Those of us who had an institutional memory could stitch the various episodes together. We used to get all sorts of bits and pieces. There were three or four of us at the embassy working on it, and we did so continuously.' The team was small, effective and of like mind. ‘We were all in tune with one another, and we all knew that if London didn't like what we were doing, Edward would take the rap,' recalls a former member.

The donor community was part-funding John Githongo's office, and also providing technical advice on constitutional affairs, so liaising with diplomats was part of John's official duties, something Kibaki had expressly asked him to do. But Edward Clay denies the oft-repeated claim that John spied for him. When the two met, they always chose highly visible spots, such as the Norfolk Hotel's exposed Delamere Terrace, to signal that there was nothing secret about their meetings. ‘There were things we could advance to one another,' says Clay. ‘But the idea that we exchanged files–that's a fantasy. John never betrayed anything he ought not to have done, and I don't think I did either. We knew our limits. It wasn't some kind of joint strategy. None of the diplomats were suborning civil servants.'

In fact, the diplomatic community didn't need to be leaked to. If Western surveillance in much of Africa can be a pretty sketchy affair, this is not the case in Kenya, regarded in London and Washington as too strategically important not to be closely monitored. Mobile phone conversations are worryingly easy to listen in on, and on a continent where the landlines have virtually collapsed, VIPs depend on their mobiles. The contents of those intercepts were fed to the key embassies, offering a fascinating insight into what Kenya's rich and powerful were up to. No wonder that when John met up with key diplomats, he was sometimes startled by the extent of their grasp of his patch. On one occasion during a meeting at the American
embassy, a member of staff leaned over and said: ‘John, we probably know more about this than you.'

Even without the intelligence, it was amazing what a systematic approach could yield–whether that meant checking company websites boasting about contracts with the Kenyan government, sifting through the rarely examined detail of the government's yearly budget or trawling old press cuttings to establish the track records of local entrepreneurs. That information could then be cross-referenced with snippets gathered via that most traditional of diplomatic techniques: old-fashioned schmoozing. Clay's resurrected network stood him in good stead. ‘The classic diplomatic skills of getting out and talking to people really count for a lot,' he says. ‘This is a very oral and anecdotal society. People will talk to you in a way they would never write to you. You could go around the ministries and report back on the mood music. There was a susurration of talk of corruption going on at many levels by people who were concerned.'

He reported what he was finding back to the other ambassadors. He also kept the World Bank's country director abreast, but the Kibakis' tenant, after an initial show of interest, manifested little appetite for what he was hearing. ‘I let Makhtar Diop into quite a lot of it, who didn't believe me,' remembers Clay. ‘And when he was forced to believe it, he declined to do anything about it.'

Clay felt supported in his digging by a new, more muscular line on corruption being touted in Whitehall. A growing recognition in the West that it took two to tango–for every minister trousering a bribe, there had to be a Western company ready to pay it–had culminated in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s Convention on Combating Bribery, signed by thirty-six member states. The convention became British law in 2002, for the first time giving British courts jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad by domestic companies. In America, bribing officials working for foreign governments is illegal, but that had not traditionally been the case in many European countries, including Britain. Now, thanks to the work of organisations like TI, a legally ambiguous era when foreign contracts were routinely clinched with massive ‘sweeteners'
paid to African
wabenzi
was supposedly coming to an end. Blair's government also gave its backing to the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, a scheme under which firms in the petroleum and mineral sectors agreed to open their arrangements with client governments to public scrutiny. So seriously did Whitehall take the new legislation, it sent a team to Kenya in 2004 to spell out its implications for the expatriate business community, and Clay and his colleagues gathered British and Kenyan businessmen together to warn them that corruption abroad could now lead to prosecution in Britain.

As the weeks passed and an increasingly unsavoury picture of bloated procurement emerged, the two leading ambassadors started taking their concerns to Kenyan ministers. Both of them assumed this could not represent government policy. For Clay, a meeting with the head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura, marked a personal turning point. ‘I asked him what was going on. He made some Panglossian statement, assuring me that various contracts had been stopped, this was a dead horse we were flogging, and in any case it was a Moi-era horse. We had a real set-to. The colleague who was with me said he had never seen me so angry. By that time we had a pretty good idea there was a conspiracy abroad and that the various bits of malfeasance were linked. Some was old corruption being revived, some was new, but the constant theme was the networks were being recultivated and reactivated.'

Getting nowhere with the Kenyan government, Clay decided to go public, in a July 2004 speech to the British Business Association of Kenya. Circulated ahead of time to ensure no media outlet missed it, it was a typically whimsical Clay offering. Headlined ‘Some Bread and Butter Questions', it ended with a pastiche of an old-fashioned children's rhyme. It was characteristic of the high commissioner that having got the serious stuff about corruption off his chest in the body of the speech, he should deliver a rambling spoof of ‘The King's Breakfast', by A.A. Milne, inventor of Pooh Bear, fine-tuned during several enjoyable hours with his staff.

The eleven subsequent verses sailed over most Kenyans' heads. But they had no problem grasping a few choice phrases carefully chosen by this journalist
manqué
to reverberate in a culture where power is so often expressed in terms of ‘eating'. They were all the more shocking for being delivered in the clipped accent that has always allowed the Foreign Office's denizens to deliver the rudest of messages while remaining, in format at least, exquisitely polite.

‘We never expected corruption to be vanquished overnight,' Clay told his audience. ‘We all implicitly recognised that some would be carried over to the new era. We hoped it would not be rammed in our faces. But it has.' Those in government were now eating ‘like gluttons'
out of a combination of arrogance, greed and panic, he said. ‘They may expect we shall not see, or notice, or will forgive them a bit of gluttony, but they can hardly expect us not to care when their gluttony causes them to vomit all over our shoes.'

‘Vomit One', as Clay now refers to the speech, had an even greater impact than he had anticipated. He was summoned for a dressing-down by foreign minister Chirau Ali Mwakwere, and told to support his allegations with names, facts and figures. MPs accused Clay–embittered neo-colonialist that he clearly was–of insulting the Kenyan people. The newspaper cartoonist Gado brilliantly lampooned the government's hypocritical relationship with its foreign critics in the
Nation
, showing a drunken minister, vodka bottle in hand, vomiting copiously on Clay's feet. When Clay objects, the minister unleashes a torrent of belligerent abuse–‘Nobody tells me what to do in my own country, you hear me, so why don't you #*@* off?'–before suddenly holding out his hand. ‘Er…Can you spare me a quid, mate?'

While recognising that Clay had expressed an ugly truth, the mainstream press was shocked by his indelicate language, riled that a diplomat representing Her Majesty's Government, with its brutal colonial history, should dare tick off a Kenyan administration in such terms. Even members of Clay's staff shared that view. ‘With the benefit of hindsight, he went too far,' one told me. ‘He was right, but in Africa, it's simply not acceptable to disrespect the Big Man, and that's what Clay was seen as doing.' In the gutter press, the smear machine began churning out its rocambolesque accusations. Clay was the president of the Royal Gay Society (leading member: one John Githongo) which staged weekend orgies in Lake Naivasha, scene of much aristocratic bed-hopping during the Happy Valley years. Clay's wife was in the pay of a foreign state, the planted stories claimed, and the high commissioner was so hated that the outraged Chris Murungaru, minister for national security, had tried to strangle him at a State House function.

But the reaction on the street was different. The British high commissioner's residence in Muthaiga lies at the end of an almost
permanently traffic-clogged thoroughfare linking Nairobi's slums with its centre, so Clay had plenty of time on his way to work each morning to savour the public mood. Spotting his face–now familiar to every Kenyan–the touts selling newspapers at the traffic lights clustered round his car to urge him to greater efforts. ‘You're right!', ‘It was time!'
Matatu
drivers leant from their windows to cheekily offer lifts to Kamiti, Kenya's maximum security prison. Spotting the high commissioner's diplomatic plates, a policeman stepped forward to wave him through on a busy roundabout, a huge smile on his face. A former permanent secretary stopped him in the street, a twinkle in his eye, to remark that Clay's shoes looked remarkably clean. ‘Thank you, you have done this country a singular service,' he added. When Clay visited his bank, the shoeshine men outside joined in the fun. ‘Five shillings for shoeshine!' they yelled. ‘Ten for vomit!' A beggar boy was spotted in the city centre with a sign reading, in Kiswahili: ‘A penny please but don't puke on my foot'. At Nairobi's
nyama choma
joints, where roast meat was served with helpings of
ugali
maize meal, diners clasped bulging stomachs and joked, ‘I'm so full, I could vomit on your shoes.' Ordinary Kenyans, it turned out, were rather less prone than the educated elite to post-colonial prickliness, bearing the brunt as they did of their government's predatory tactics.