It's Our Turn to Eat (9 page)

It was noticeable that when Kibaki was delivering a speech he no longer extemporised or made eye contact with his public, keeping his eyes glued to the autocue. He knew that if he lifted his gaze he might never find his place again. There were reports of him sleeping through cabinet meetings, of aides having to repeatedly brief him on the same subject. At an investors' meeting I attended in London two and a half years after his collapse, by which time many were remarking on the extent of his recovery, Kibaki still gave the impression–characteristic of stroke victims–of being a little tipsy. His delivery was slightly slurred, his enunciation ponderous, and when answering questions he meandered and contradicted himself. The entire audience seemed to be willing him on, praying he would make it through to the end without some monstrous
faux pas
. Like the latter-day Ronald Reagan in the grips of early Alzheimer's, he came across as an urbane, delightfully charming old duffer, but not a man anyone would want running a country.

Confronted by a calamity no one had anticipated so early on, Kibaki's closest aides reeled and then rallied. If the Old Man was temporarily incapacitated, then they would have to run the country until he regained his faculties, just as the Kremlin's stalwarts had done whenever their geriatric Soviet leaders turned senile. The kernel of this group consisted of Chris Murungaru, the burly former pharmacist appointed minister for internal security; David Mwiraria, finance minister and Kibaki's longtime confidant; Kiraitu Murungi, justice minister; State House comptroller Matere Keriri; and personal assistant Alfred Getonga. The one factor all these players had in common was their ethnicity–they were all either Kikuyu, like Kibaki, or members of the closely related Embu and Meru tribes, who the Kikuyu regard as cousins. In naming his cabinet, Kibaki had presented himself as a leader of national unity, careful to distribute all but the key ministries across the ethnic spectrum. But in his hour of need, like any sick man, he reached for what was familiar and safe,
and that meant sticking with the tribe. The popular press, noticing the trend, soon coined a phrase for this circle, the real power behind the throne. ‘The Mount Kenya Mafia', it called them, a reference to the mountain that dominates Central Province. The phrase was to prove more apposite than anyone could have guessed at the time.

The group's influence was swiftly felt in a vital area. A new constitution had been one of the key promises NARC had made to an electorate exasperated at the way in which Kenya's colonial-era document had been repeatedly amended to place ever greater power in the president's hands. Kibaki had also, it emerged, secretly signed a memorandum of understanding with his NARC partners promising, amongst other things, that fiery Luo leader Raila Odinga would be given the post of executive prime minister under a future dispensation. Incapacitated by his car accident, Kibaki had depended on Raila to do his heavy lifting during the election campaign, and the younger man had done so indefatigably. The prime minister's post was to have been his reward. It was a promise that implied a radical trimming of powers in favour of a tribe that Kibaki's Kikuyu community had, since the days of Jomo Kenyatta and Raila's late father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, regarded as its greatest rival. After decades of marginalisation, during which they had seen their leaders assassinated, jailed and exiled, the thwarted Luos were itching to come in from the cold.

But now, with Kibaki looking like the weak old man he was, all promises were off. The Mount Kenya Mafia felt too vulnerable for magnanimity. The very same men who had, as members of the opposition, tirelessly denounced a document that skewed the playing field in Moi's favour, suddenly found there was much to be said for this tilted arrangement. A national conference convened to hammer out the modern arrangement Kenya needed ground to a halt, as Kibaki's key ministers proposed changes that would, if anything, concentrate even more power in their man's hands. The Kibaki delegation would eventually storm out of the talks at the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village, and unveil a draft constitution which bore little relation to what had originally been proposed. The setting aside of ethnic rival
ries, hailed as marking the Kenyan political class's coming of age, had outlived the elections only by a paltry couple of months. No sooner had the Mount Kenya Mafia climbed the ladder than they were kicking frantically away at it to ensure no one came up behind.

In State House, the process of ethnic polarisation was palpable. Since starting his new job, John had made a conscious effort during working hours to use Kiswahili–the national language–not Gikuyu, as would feel natural with tribal kinsmen. He knew how easily non-Kikuyu colleagues could be made to feel boxed out. The Mount Kenya Mafia showed no such restraint, finding his self-discipline quaintly amusing. ‘We know you have a problem with this, John,' they would laugh, lapsing into a throaty barrage of Gikuyu. John would shake his head at the message conveyed. ‘I used to warn them: “This talk will fix us.”' He noticed how mono-ethnic State House had become. ‘When meetings took place, they would all be people from the same area. All the key jobs were held by home boys.' The old tribal rivalry had returned–or rather, John realised, it had never actually gone away. ‘With the collapse of Bomas I realised we had never been serious about power sharing. Kiraitu Murungi, the very man who had written about the problem of ethnicity, was the first to use the term “these Jaluos” in my presence.'

At a formal dinner in London several years later, I found myself discussing with John and a British peer of the realm, in light-hearted vein, what were the little signs that betrayed the fact that once-reformist African governments had lost their way. ‘My measure is the time a person who's agreed to an appointment keeps you waiting,' said the Lord. ‘If it's half an hour or under, things are still on track; more than half an hour and the place is in trouble.'

I quoted a journalist friend who maintained that the give-away was the moment a president added an extra segment to his name–‘Yoweri
Kaguta
Museveni', ‘Daniel
Torotich
arap Moi'–but added that I regarded the size of the presidential motorcade as the tell-tale indication that the rot had set in.

John had been silent till then. Now he suddenly spoke up. ‘How about the time it takes for the man in charge to get a gold Rolex?'

‘But surely Kibaki already had a gold Rolex?' I asked, surprised.

‘Yes, but this was a brand-new one. Very slim, with a black face and diamonds round the edge. It was so new it hadn't yet been measured to size, and it dangled off his wrist. That's why I noticed it, because it didn't fit.'

‘So, then, how long did it take?'

‘Just three months,' John said, with a grim shake of the head. ‘Just three months.'

In April 2004, Kenyan MP Maoka Maore received a mysterious phone call telling him that if he visited a fellow MP from the tea-producing area of Limuru, he might find some interesting paperwork there.

Maore would subsequently discover that at least five other MPs were already in possession of the same documents, which someone–almost certainly a disgruntled corporate executive–was energetically leaking. Fearful of the implications, none had acted. But Maore, a cheerful scallywag with a taste for the limelight, was made of more daring stuff. Proud of the role he had played in a 1994 exposé of kickbacks paid during the construction of an airport in Moi's home town, he boasted that his name struck fear in government circles. Expose one scandal, he had discovered, and all sorts of people will approach you with incendiary information about others.

The tip-off whetted his appetite. Rumours had been swirling around the Kibaki government for months, involving the procurement of AK47s, handcuffs and police cars. An administration which had vowed to crack down on graft had itself, it was said, begun ‘eating'. Once he got his hands on the papers, he immediately tabled them in parliament, not entirely certain himself what they revealed.

The first document was a copy of a 2002 tender opened up by the previous government to supply Kenya with a computerised passport printing and lamination system. Nothing strange there–in the wake of Al Qaeda's 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Washington had been pressing Kenya, seen as a soft target for Islamic extremists filtering in from Somalia, to upgrade its passport system and better monitor its borders. The highest bid for that tender had been made by De La Rue, a British company, while the lowest came from Face Technologies, an American firm. What was strange, if the second document Maore tabled was to be believed, was that the tender had gone to neither. A payment voucher showed a Central Bank downpayment to a British rival called Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Limited.

This contract, which had never been put out to competitive tender, was a bloated, murky thing. For one thing, it was worth $34 million, nearly three and a half times as much as the lowest bid made back in 2002, which the government would ordinarily be expected to accept. What was more, the company awarded the contract, Maore reminded colleagues in the House, hardly boasted a savoury reputation. Six years earlier, under the former KANU government, Anglo Leasing had been blacklisted for supplying Kenya's police force with over-priced Mahindra jeeps–‘a cross-breed between a tortoise and a snail', in the words of a local newspaper–which broke down so regularly the police became a laughing stock. It looked as if officials at the ministry of home affairs had approved a contract inflated to the tune of at least $20 million. The whole deal gave off a sour, suspicious smell.

As far as the public was concerned, Maore's parliamentary question marked the start of the Anglo Leasing affair, the Kenyan equivalent of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex. Today Maore marvels at what followed from his moment of chutzpah. ‘It was like a dream in which you pull the tail of a snake, you keep pulling, and you find that it just goes on and on forever.' For John Githongo, however, Maore's action brought into the open an issue he had been probing for six long, anxious weeks, but naïvely believed he had brought
under control. ‘I thought I had it contained. We'd been trying to quietly fix the problem behind the scenes. Then, suddenly, the cat was out of the bag.' He would later come to feel a certain gratitude to Maore for exposing a matter which would prove too big for a mere permanent secretary. But at the time, convinced this was a minor affair that could be dealt with discreetly, the MP's intervention was just another problem to add to his growing number of headaches.

 

John, too, had been hearing rumours of new graft, of dodgy procurement contracts and lavish spending by members of the NARC administration, who had been buying up large villas in Nairobi's most attractive suburbs. His colleagues, he registered with growing alarm, were changing as the temptations of high office came their way. Many had spent the 1990s in the badly-paid world of political activism, setting up NGOs, braving the GSU batons, enduring police harassment. While they had pursued the cause of multi-party democracy, they had watched less idealistic friends, focused on businesses and careers, overtake them, moving from scruffy areas like South C to the pristine gated communities of Runda and Muthaiga. Now came the chance to narrow that gap after the years of self-denial. ‘I had friends who bought three separate properties at once. They were handing their wives $100,000 in spending money,' remembers John.

At TI-Kenya, Mwalimu Mati also noticed the flowering arrogance of an administration that had started out eager to collaborate with former colleagues in the human rights world. With the launch of various inquiries into graft out of the way, NARC saw itself as beyond consultation. ‘At the end of the various commissions and task forces, civil society stopped being involved. The reports were being given to the minister and president and dying a death. In the first six months to one year, people started making excuses. And then it was: “Butt out,
we're
the government.”' The same men competed with one another to see who could secure the biggest office, the most ostentatious car. The Kiswahili term for the moneyed elite is ‘
wabenzi
'–a reference to the Mercedes Benz beloved of VIPs the world over–and
NARC officials wasted no time in confirming its literal accuracy. In their first twenty months in office, government officials spent at least $12 million (878 million shillings) on luxury cars, a survey by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) and Transparency International revealed. The sums spent on E-class Mercedes Benzes, top-of-the-range Land Cruisers, Mitsubishi Pajeros and Range Rovers could have provided 147,000 HIV-positive Kenyans with anti-retroviral treatment for a year. ‘There was something of the Scarlett O'Haras to the Kibaki government at that time,' chuckles a Kenyan Asian businessman friend. ‘They were gathering their flouncy petticoats around them and declaring: “As God is our witness, we'll
never
go hungry again!”'

The realisation of the virtual impunity enjoyed by those with connections to State House was hitting home. It had the giddy impact of a sudden rush of blood to the head, the first sniff of cocaine to the novice drug-taker. No longer ordinary mortals, they had become supermen, invincible, omnipotent. ‘It's completely intoxicating, mesmerising. I could see it in their eyes,' remembers John. ‘It's a point you reach. You simply do it because you can.'

Kenyan wags, the anti-corruption chief knew, had begun joking that the acronym NARC stood not for ‘National Rainbow Coalition', but for ‘Nothing Actually Really Changes'. Political commentators were reporting that the president's coterie had capitalised on his stroke and consequent inattention to get up to all sorts of mischief. Alarmed by a tangible sense of drift in State House, John confided to his diary that it might be time to consider resignation. But he stayed his hand. If he hadn't believed it was possible to reform a system from within, after all, he would never have accepted the job in the first place.

Trying to probe the provenance of all this easy cash, John found there was a striking difference in the treatment he now received from Kenya's National Security Intelligence Service (NSIS), which had been so very helpful when it came to dusting off the skeletons of the former regime. While the service had fallen over itself to provide information on Moi-era sleaze in the early days of the NARC
administration, it proved a different matter when it came to the new government's actions. While superficially friendly, meetings with the Kenyan intelligence services were in fact exercises in futility. ‘Their reports were complete rubbish, totally useless and unhelpful.' If John was going to do a decent job of policing his own government and not just pursuing the outgoing administration, he gradually realised that he would need to find his own, independent sources.

He was not on totally unfamiliar territory. During his time at TI, John had occasionally paid for information when compiling reports, so he had had some experience in recruiting sources. His natural propensity for befriending everyone and anyone, his ability to make both office cleaner and VIP feel equally appreciated was, as it happens, the spy recruiter's most treasured skill. Setting up a mini-intelligence network to rival Boinett's was never his intention; a policy of desperation, the thing began almost of its own accord.

From the start he'd operated an open-door policy, making clear to all that anyone–whether civil servant, politician, military officer or private businessman–was free to walk into his office at State House with useful information or to voice concerns. ‘I didn't need to go looking, people would come to me.' To those who took up that open invitation, appearing at his doorstep with relayed rumours or suspicious documents that had passed across their desks, John was gently encouraging, gradually building up a relationship of trust. ‘I'd say: “Gosh, you have this. That's really very interesting. But I think there's a letter missing here…” And they would go off to find the letter.' He focused on the departments which held the most power, where the most egregious offences seemed likely to occur: the Office of the President, the finance ministry, the ministry of internal security. Having sowed the seed, he waited to reap his slow harvest. ‘The trick, I found, was never to be in a hurry, never get excited.'

What makes a law-abiding functionary, hardly the devil-may-care type, lift his or her nose above the daily grind and turn sneak, risking exposure, prosecution and dismissal? It was never for the money, something which was only mentioned late in the process, and usually
at John's insistence. For many of those who would become his
de facto
informers, a profound and justified sense of betrayal explained the readiness to help. They were Kenyan voters too, after all, and like the mass of the populace, had believed NARC when it had promised a new dawn. Kibaki's campaign rhetoric had been almost too effective–they had taken the anti-graft message to heart. Now they knew, with a certainty not available to the ordinary Kenyan, that the old games were starting up again. Nothing smarts quite like the dashing of raised hopes. It forces the deluded to regret the best part of their nature: their readiness to believe in a better world. They felt they had been made fools of, and they wanted other Kenyans to know what was going on. ‘Some were very angry,' remembers John. ‘They'd say to me: “This used to happen under Moi. If you let this get out of hand, we've seen what happens. We're glad you're here.”' And it was easy to rationalise the move from dutifully cooperating with the ‘Anti-Corruption Czar'as he was now known, just as they had initially been explicitly instructed to do by the president himself, to slipping that same individual–such a likeable young man–information they knew in their hearts their superiors wanted kept secret. Only a tiny step.

John reserved his keenest attention for the disappointed and downtrodden, for those whose careers were going nowhere. ‘I'd look for people who were frustrated. The employee who hadn't been promoted for a long time, the one who never got sent on training workshops, who couldn't get
per diems
, was being sexually harassed by the boss or felt that promotion had been denied on purely ethnic grounds.' For the man who had charmed Nairobi's donor community, winning the confidence of a grim-faced factotum in a worn nylon suit and broken-down shoes, the pre-retirement functionary who lunched off a cup of sweetened tea, took shelter under a plastic bag when the rain pelted down and went home to meals bulked out with the ubiquitous
sukuma wiki
–Kenyan greens–came all too easy. Bullied bearers of messages, loyal takers of notes, conscientious file-keepers, these ignored drudges bore astute silent witness to every top-level sleight of hand. It was the technique used by the CIA when it
infiltrated Congo's political circles in the 1960s by paying waiters to relay bar talk, and Rhodesia's guerrilla movements when they used herdsboys to report on army movements. The perfect informer is the employee so insignificant he or she has become part of the furniture, literally invisible to those in power.

And there was another motivation for these moles in the making: the sheer excitement John represented in otherwise humdrum lives. ‘To the uninitiated, the secret world is of itself attractive,' John le Carré wrote in
The Little Drummer Girl
. ‘Simply by turning on its axis, it can draw the weakly anchored to its centre.' For those whose cramped lives were hemmed in by their rank, their insignificance spelt out in gradings, job titles and pay structures, there was an extraordinary thrill to be had in the knowledge of being inside the loop, invisibly pulling the strings of those who made their working lives such a chore. ‘I may look like nobody, yet I know more than you,' they whispered to themselves, hugging that secret knowledge–simultaneously revenge and compensation prize–to their chests as the loud men in suits, gold Rolexes peeping below their cuffs, threw their weight around. ‘If I want, I can fuck with you.'

As the communications got more sensitive, it became dangerous to be seen in John's company. Many of his sources confined themselves to text messages, or calls to his many mobiles. He owned over a dozen, their chargers overwhelming every power point in his Lavington home. He worked them as an experienced conductor leads an orchestra, each player given his or her proper place in the musical score. Numbers were distributed in categories, so that he knew who was likely to be calling before he lifted the handset. He came to know which informants would ring at which time–if it was 6 o'clock in the morning then it must be so-and-so, calling before going to work–who would make contact once a week, who wanted a daily chat and who would only surface sporadically with something really important.