It's Our Turn to Eat (33 page)

Kenya's elite had always shown a readiness to use the legal system to strangle criticism. John could see the process at work in his own life. In Kenya he was being sued for libel by Chris Murungaru, former internal security chief, while the shadowy businessman Anura Perera, the man who had bought his father's debt, and Perera's lawyer were both pursuing him separately in the UK, the former hiring the high-
profile libel lawyers Carter-Ruck. In the old days, the various suits would have kept John worrying into the small hours. But he had toughened up, actively relishing the twists and turns of this high-stakes chess game.

The Mount Kenya Mafia, he realised, was recovering its equilibrium after a momentary wrong-footing. The shelving of the Goldenberg scandal, he became convinced, heralded an imminent mothballing of investigations into Anglo Leasing. ‘There's a massive rollback going on.' It was time, he had decided, to give the spinning top that was Kenyan public opinion another flick. ‘We're going to go for Round Two. You know, we never finished the first round, we fired a first blast and waited. They think it's over. So I need to make it clear it's not.'

This time, he knew, it would be harder to win a hearing. Relations with his former employer, the Nation Media Group, had deteriorated, with distrust building on both sides. ‘John has been too slow in releasing his story. We were begging him for more,' managing editor Joe Odindo complained to me that August. ‘You have to strike while there is an appetite. You cannot keep hitting people time and time again with these things. People just get tired of it, and so do the journalists. They begin to say to themselves: “Hey, we thought we were releasing a story, not forming part of a campaign.”' John's careful husbandry of his material had left editors feeling used, while he suspected that behind-the-scenes pressure from NARC, leaning on its friends on the board, explained the newspaper's tangible loss of appetite.

His first targets had been the ministers and civil servants who had negotiated and signed the Anglo Leasing contracts. The men and institutions notionally responsible for delivering justice, so compromised that they had become part of Kenya's sleaze problem, rather than its cure, would be next. This time his target would be his supposed former brother-in-arms, the venerable head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission. In drafting his dossier, John had avoided all criticism of Justice Ringera. He had done so partly for tactical reasons–fighting on more than one front is never a wise
strategy. But there had also been an emotional element to his self-censorship. Despite everything, John had harboured a grudging affection for Ringera, a man he saw as trapped in a near-impossible job. He had hoped that within the limits of what State House allowed, the judge might find some way of reining in Anglo Leasing's perpetrators. That belief had evaporated, and with it any magnanimity.

 

The building housing the KACC is not particularly ancient, but it has aged at turbo speed. Located on the site of a former nightclub, it was once the site of Trade Bank, one of the most notorious of the ‘political' banks set up in the 1980s by Moi's cronies, eventually destroyed by illicit loans. The premises became available when Trade Bank's Asian founders fled the country, leaving depositors seduced by their ‘No Hassle' motto to mourn their folly. That history prompts a certain mirth. ‘I mean, you take the spot where one of Kenya's biggest scams took place and call it “Integrity Centre”?' guffawed a Kenyan Asian I met at a party. ‘Are they taking the piss, or what?'

The building's architects clearly saw this as a cutting-edge project, its glass front, tubular design and shiny metallic panels intended to transmit a message of brash efficiency. But that was before Nairobi's rains got to work. The bronze-coloured panels are now rusting along the edges. Long orange drips stain the once-shiny surfaces. As for the centre's blue neon sign, some of the connections have gone, leaving parts of the giant lettering invisible at night. Whenever I return to Nairobi I like to drive past it, to see what it is telling passers-by. ‘INTEGRITY CENTRE' it once proclaimed. Nowadays, it reads: ‘INT¯GFI Y CENT¬E'. The garbled message seems appropriate for an organisation which has lost its way: an addled sign for a befuddled institution.

Theoretically, Justice Aaron Ringera enjoys an enviable level of independence. Blessed with security of tenure, running an office generously supported by foreign donors, banking what is–thanks to John's energetic advocacy–a staggeringly generous salary, he can be held accountable only by parliament. His critics say none of this matters when weighed against a key affiliation, one betrayed by a
linguistic quirk. Ringera has problems differentiating between ‘r's and ‘l's. ‘Lobbying' comes out ‘robbying', ‘present', ‘plesent'. It is a foible prevalent among the Mount Kenya community. Like former justice minister Kiraitu Murungi, with whom, in one of Kenya's classic Venn circles, he was once a partner in a law firm, Ringera comes from Meru. The day we met he boasted that he had never taken a telephone call from the presidency during his time in office. But a former colleague says he never needed to, going round in person to State House to receive instructions. ‘He would call staff together and say: “The message from the president is A, B, C and D.”' So perhaps it is appropriate that the interior of the KACC feels exactly like a government ministry, with its dark wood furniture, stiff flower arrangements, padded beige walls and obligatory Thermos flask.

With his corona of white curls, the judge looks like an ageing cherub. He is charming, confiding, and has not a malicious word to say about his former ally–‘John was my friend, he
is
my friend'–merely softly chiding the younger man for failing to grasp the limits of his role. ‘When you are an adviser you are not the chief executive. Your advice may be taken, or ignored. John expected to be more important than he was. In that way he was naïve.' Behind the cuddly façade, one catches a glimpse of a complex, sophisticated individual well aware of the contradictions of his own position. And behind that, one senses a colossal laziness, the complacency of a man who is exactly where he wants to be, in career and monetary terms, and intends to stay there as long as possible.

The first hint the Kenyan public got of Ringera's less than helpful role came in September 2006, when Martha Karua, the new minister for justice, announced she would soon release a list of those responsible for Anglo Leasing. Blaming all the dodgy contracts on the previous regime, she said investigations had been delayed by John Githongo's failure to sign a statement authenticating his KACC testimony in London. This provocation could not go ignored. In a three-page statement to the press, John now revealed exactly what had taken place in the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place the previous March.

Understandably wary, John had insisted his evidence be recorded. Yet at the end of two days of testimony–long enough, one would have thought, for any malfunction to be detected and rectified–Ringera informed John the recording equipment had failed and his words were, sadly, inaudible. The taper had not been taped, so a KACC-drafted summary would have to take the place of the audio transcript. After delivering that bombshell, Ringera waxed astonishingly candid about the charade being staged for public consumption. There would be no Anglo Leasing prosecutions until after the 2007 elections, if ever, he said. When John's lawyer asked when his client could return to Kenya to give evidence, Ringera said: ‘No, no, I wouldn't advise that.' John should not underestimate the pain he had caused certain people. It would not be safe. Once again, the head of Kenya's anti-corruption body was doing his best to halt investigation.

John's account would almost certainly have been dismissed as a fabrication by the establishment, had it not been for one man's surprise intervention. A former lead KACC investigator who had accompanied Ringera to London went public to confirm the details of the conversation. ‘I was amazed by what Ringera said. There was no indication whatsoever the equipment wasn't working. You don't go for days without once going through what you have recorded,' he told me.

The man concerned has featured before in these pages. It was Hussein Were, the quantity surveyor who was once squeezed out of his former workplace by ethnic favouritism. He had joined the KACC, only to discover a new form of ethnic discrimination, this time pitched in favour of the Mount Kenya community. Having travelled with a colleague to Switzerland, France and Britain on the KACC's behalf, attempting to establish a paper trail linking Anglo Leasing's companies with bank accounts and principals in Kenya, he had seen their recommendations for further action ignored. ‘We were convinced that if we took those steps we were definitely going to answer the question at the heart of this affair: “Who really is Anglo Leasing? Who are the principals, who are the beneficiaries?”' Were had become convinced no Anglo Leasing prosecution would ever
take place as long as the judge, loyal defender of his ethnic community, headed the KACC. ‘It is not by accident that Ringera is still there.' In daring to publicly defend John Githongo's testimony in the Kenyan press, Were had once again demonstrated that there were things that mattered more to him than a quiet life.
*

If Ringera was embarrassed by these revelations, he did not let it show. Ignoring opposition calls for his resignation–he had tenure, after all–he sent a handful of supposedly ‘watertight' files to attorney general Amos Wako, recommending a dozen Anglo Leasing prosecutions. The attorney general promptly sent them back, claiming they were too incomplete to be acted upon. Conveniently, each man could blame the other for the failure to proceed, leaving the public baffled as to who was really responsible. The purely cosmetic nature of all this seeming activity became clear on 6 November 2006, when Ringera exonerated former justice and finance ministers David Mwiraria and Kiraitu Murungi of a preliminary charge of obstructing justice. John's testimony, ruled Ringera, was of no legal significance because he had not held the status of official investigator. It was an infantile justification for inaction–a crime is a crime, whatever the supposed status of the person uncovering it–but it would be grabbed hold of and repeated incessantly in future by the Mount Kenya elite. Kibaki promptly reappointed Kiraitu and George Saitoti to his cabinet. ‘I will never speak about Anglo Leasing any more because is it no longer an issue,' declared a delighted Kiraitu. ‘It is dead.' After less than a year in the cold, two of the three ministers who resigned after the leaking of John's dossier were back.

‘In war, it is not good practice to discharge all your ammunition in the first battle,' John had warned his adversaries. He now demonstrated what he meant with the release of a second tape, this time posted directly onto the internet. On the tape, recorded in June 2004
in Kiraitu's presence, an unhappy, audibly jittery Mwiraria frets: ‘This thing, this thing…If we are not careful, will come down with our government.' ‘Drop this matter,' he begs John. ‘I will get to the root of the matter, I will find out who it is in my own way.' The recording stayed online long enough for it to be downloaded and relayed by every Kenyan media outlet, finally crashing when a saboteur posted Kenya's economic recovery strategy repeatedly on the website. John had made his point. This was what the men exonerated by the KACC director had got up to.

When quizzed about this entire, mortifying episode, Ringera takes refuge in legal niceties, as any skilled attorney knows how to do. There is a difference, he explains, between an illegal and an immoral act, and in the case of Anglo Leasing, many of the things that shocked John–the justice minister's blackmail attempt, for example–fell into the latter category. ‘You could say morally it was terrible, but according to the Penal Code, no offence was committed.' John's evidence in itself was mere hearsay, and the law did not stop a president appointing ministers who had not been charged with a crime. ‘In the eyes of the law they are whiter than white.' As for Ringera's habit of passing on death threats, he was baffled by John's interpretation of these exchanges. ‘I was telling John that as a friend. I don't know how he could have seen that as threatening. We were very close.'

Confronted by such brass face, John's salvoes fizzled and died. Kenyan commentators labelled his revelations ‘the second Githongo dossier', but it was obvious to all that their impact did not measure up to the first. With a series of KACC absolutions and ministerial reinstatements, the Kibaki administration had cynically set out to test domestic and international opinion, and had discovered that it could reverse the concessions of the previous year without serious repercussion. John was merely scoring points now, rather than changing the shape of Kenyan politics.

When I met John's brother Mugo in Nairobi, he acknowledged the shift. Since we'd last seen one another, he had become inured to the intelligence men who followed him around town, sitting within eavesdropping distance when he met friends in bars and restaurants.
If he had adjusted to the post-dossier Kenya, so, he reckoned sadly, had others. ‘A lot of the guys who were engaged when John released his dossier are missing in action this time around.'

 

On the international stage, too, the air was hissing out of the global anti-corruption drive. By late 2006, Paul Wolfowitz's position at the World Bank was looking increasingly beleaguered. Described by one former colleague as a man who ‘couldn't run a two-car funeral', Wolfowitz had always been respected for his intellect but regarded as an incompetent manager, and his stint at the World Bank had exposed this administrative ineptness for all to see. He had ruffled feathers by surrounding himself with aides recruited from the Bush administration, abrasive young Americans who were allowed to overrule, bypass and humiliate non-US bank directors with decades of experience. Incapable of delegating, secretive by nature, Wolfowitz took decisions alone in his office, only to discover on emerging that they violated the procedures of this most rule-obsessed of organisations.