It's Our Turn to Eat (40 page)

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, an 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.

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.
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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.
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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.