It’s Our Turn to Eat

And the new president kept hitting the right notes. When the country's biggest companies took out fawning newspaper advertisements congratulating him, Kibaki reproved them for wasting money. He had no intention, he said, of following his predecessor's example by putting his face on the national currency, streets and buildings. His pledge not to bring city traffic grinding to a halt with wailing presidential motorcades seemed to hold good. Across the land, the framed official Moi photograph, so ubiquitous it had become virtually invisible, came down from the walls, but was not immediately replaced with one of Kibaki. Shop owners propped the new official portrait against the walls, waiting to see how the political climate would turn. Perhaps Kenya had got beyond the point of needing such crude symbols of authority. As for the media, they luxuriated in a less fractious relationship with the new establishment. It had taken the dawn of multi-partyism in 1992 for any newspaper cartoonist to dare depict the president. Even then they had gone on tiptoe, initially showing no more than a hand with a rungu, Moi's signature baton, then depicting the Great Man as a silhouette from behind, before cautiously shifting him round, image by image, to face the readership. ‘It was from simple fear, because they could come for you,’ recalled cartoonist Frank Odoi. But with Kibaki, who had been drawn for decades lazing at the golf course, such veneration would have been absurd. The new president was shown full-on, just as he always had been.

The cabinet Kibaki unveiled on the lawn of State House – ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are in business’ – rewarded allies who had made victory possible. A member of the Kikuyu,1 Kenya's largest and most economically successful tribe, Kibaki knew his nation's two-score smaller tribes needed reassurance if they were to stay on board. Announcing the line-up, he promised foreign donors, itching to resume lending frozen during the Moi years of mutual ill-will, that he would swiftly implement two anti-corruption bills dear to their hearts. There was less detail on the new constitution NARC had undertaken to introduce within a hundred days, expected to trim the president's sweeping executive powers and force him to share decision-making with a prime minister. But few doubted this was on its way. A man with a reputation for soft living and hard drinking, Kibaki knew his younger coalition partners had in part rallied behind him because they viewed him as too indolent to want to do much, too old to attempt more than one term. They regarded him as virtually a figurehead, and there was no sign that he intended to renege on the deal.

Things finally seemed to be going right for Kenya, and the news spread beyond the country's borders like a warm glow. ‘The victory of the people of Kenya is a victory for all the people of Africa,’ South Africa's first lady, Zanele Mbeki, pronounced at Kibaki's swearing-in, and she was right. For Kenya is one of a handful of African nations which have always possessed a significance out of keeping with their size and population, whose twists and turns are monitored by outsiders for clues as to which direction the continent itself is taking. Somehow, what happens here matters more to the world outside than what happens in many larger, richer, more populous African countries.

This pre-eminence can in part be traced to Britain's colonial role and the astonishingly resilient memory of ‘a sunny land for shady people’, where English aristocrats swapped wives and downed gin-and-tonics while snorting quantities of recreational drugs. Long before Barack Obama's ancestry came to intrigue the Western public, a pith-helmeted fantasy woven from Ernest Hemingway's tales and Martha Gellhorn's writings, the escapades of the Delamere family, stories of the man-eating lions of Tsavo, Karen Blixen's Out of Africa and the White Mischief cliché – all references irrelevant to ordinary Kenyans but stubbornly sustained by the tourism industry – guaranteed the country a level of brand recognition other African states could only dream about.

But there are less romantic reasons for Kenya's disproportionately high profile. The most advanced economy in the region – thanks in part to the network of roads, cities, railroads and ports left by the British – Kenya has held linchpin status ever since independence by mere dint of what it is not. It has never been Uganda, where Idi Amin and Milton Obote demonstrated how brutal post-colonial rule could turn; or Rwanda, mourning a genocide that left nearly a million dead; or Sudan, venue for one of the continent's longest civil wars. In place of Ethiopia's feeding stations and Somalia's feuding warlords, it offered safari parks and five-star coastal hotels. Kenya's dysfunctional neighbours have always made it look good in comparison.

It had made the right choice in the Cold War lottery, allying itself with the winning, capitalist side. Kenya was the obvious place to train your soldiers, in the case of the British Army; to moor your warships, in the case of the Pentagon; to base your agencies, in the case of the United Nations; or to set up your Africa bureaux, in the case of Western television and radio stations. The road to the centre of Nairobi from Jomo Kenyatta airport – which services more airlines in an afternoon than many African airports manage in a week – said it all, with its industrial storage depots and hoardings advertising mobile phones and internet servers, beer and mattresses. ‘Nai-robbery’, as expatriates cynically dubbed it, might be potholed and crime-ridden, but it was the capital of a highly cosmopolitan, comparatively stable nation run, through the decades, by a series of administrations Westerners instinctively felt they could do business with. Like its former colonial master, Kenya had always punched above its weight, offering outsiders – wincingly sensitive to the continent's darker manifestations – a version of Africa they could stomach.

So when Kenya, in the latter part of the Moi era, appeared to veer off course, the world pricked up its ears. Moi, admittedly, had been nothing like as crudely predatory as Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, Togo's Gnassingbe Eyadema or Cameroon's Paul Biya – contemporaries all. But as diplomats repeatedly told government officials smarting at their criticisms: ‘We hold Kenya to higher standards than other countries.’ And when measured against what it could have become, rather than against neighbouring basket cases, Kenya, by the turn of the century, was beginning to look desperately unimpressive, the model pupil turning sullen delinquent. The end of the Cold War, which had transformed the prospects of so many African states devastated by the superpowers' proxy wars, had delivered no obvious dividend here. Hopeful talk of an emerging group of ‘Renaissance’ leaders who would find ‘African solutions to African problems’ did not include Kenya, weltering in a political, economic and moral miasma. Once ranked a middle-income country, Kenya lagged towards the bottom of the international league tables, its early potential unfulfilled. At independence in 1963, average per capita income had been level with that of Malaysia; now Malaysia's was ten times as high.

Moi liked to be known as the Professor of Politics, and the man dismissed by his enemies as a ‘passing cloud’ when he succeeded Kenyatta in 1978 had proved a remarkable survivor, riding out a shift to multi-party politics that many had assumed would unseat him. Yet in the process he had pauperised many of his thirty million citizens, of whom 55 per cent now lived on less than a dollar a day. In Nairobi's sprawling slums, the largest and most sordid in Africa, Western-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) provided basic services, not the state, of which nothing was expected. When Kenya marked forty years of independence in 2003, newspaper cartoonists could not resist highlighting the cruel trick history had played on the country. They captured its itinerary in a series of chronological snapshots: in the first, an ordinary Kenyan in a neat suit and shined shoes stands sulking under white colonial rule. In the second, a free man under Kenyatta leaps for joy, but his suit is beginning to look distinctly tatty. By the Moi era, the emaciated mwananchi is crawling, not walking. His suit is in tatters, he has lost his shoes, and, eyes crazed, he is begging for alms. The statistics made the same point, in drier fashion: living standards in the independent, sovereign state of Kenya were actually lower than when the hated British ruled the roost.

Kenya might well boast, by African standards, a large middle class, but the gap between that group and those eking out a living in its teeming slums was the stuff of revolution. ‘Kenya is now one of the most disappointing performers in sub-Saharan Africa,’ ran an editorial in my own newspaper, the Financial Times, the day after the 2002 election. ‘There is barely an economic or social indicator that does not testify to the country's decline.’2 Given that Kenya had never experienced a civil war, never been invaded, and had started out with so much in its favour, the fault must lie elsewhere. And everyone agreed where: in a system of corruption and patronage so ingrained, so greedy it was gradually throttling the life from the country.

Whether expressed in the petty bribes the average Kenyan had to pay each week to fat-bellied policemen and local councillors, the jobs for the boys doled out by civil servants and politicians on strictly tribal lines, or the massive scams perpetrated by the country's ruling elite, sleaze had become endemic. ‘Eating’, as Kenyans dubbed the gorging on state resources by the well-connected, had crippled the nation. In the corruption indices drawn up by the anti-graft organisation Transparency International, Kenya routinely trailed near the bottom in the 1990s, viewed as only slightly less sleazy than Nigeria or Pakistan. From the increasingly strained relations between the country's tribes to the rising anger of its prospectless youth, Kenya exemplified many of Africa's most intractable problems.

Which is why so many eyes now rested on Kibaki and his NARC government. If they could get it right on corruption, if Kenya could only find its way, then perhaps there was hope for the rest of the continent. Post-apartheid South Africa, post-military Nigeria and a revived Kenya could come to form the three points of a geographical triangle of success establishing Africa on firm, unshakeable foundations.

The first announcements the new president made after unveiling his cabinet continued to send out the right signals. A brand-new post – Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics – was being created, Kibaki said. This anti-corruption champion, Kenya's version of Eliot Ness, would run a unit working out of State House and enjoying direct access to the president's office. And that key job was going to someone who seemed tailor-made for the role, a young, energetic Kenyan who had dedicated his considerable talents to the fight against graft. He just happened to be an old friend of mine.

I had known John Githongo since moving to Nairobi in the mid-1990s, when he was an up-and-coming columnist and I was the Financial Times's Africa correspondent. Kenya's newspapers were good, among Africa's best, but their columnists suffered from parochialism. They didn't travel the region, they had little sense of Africa's position in the world, they sounded uncertain when tackling international issues. John, who wrote a think piece for the EastAfrican, a business weekly owned by the Aga Khan's Nation Media Group, was different. He had studied abroad, had travelled his own continent and had a sound grasp of geopolitics. His vision was sophisticated, his instincts compassionate, and he had the good journalist's ability, using colourful anecdote, to make complex arguments accessible to the ordinary reader. Limpid and articulate, his columns commanded one's attention, like a clear voice carrying across a room of cocktail chatterers.

I asked him to lunch. A giant walked in. ‘The Wrestler’, he would later be dubbed by staff at Kroll, the London-based risk consultancy group. But for most of us, the tag that automatically sprang to mind on first meeting was ‘the Big Man’. Standing well over six feet, he had girth as well as height, the fifty-eight-inch chest and massive shoulders of the gym habitué, the V-shaped silhouette of a comic-book superhero. He was a gift to any caricaturist, but this exaggerated outline was built of muscle, not fat – squeezing one of those rounded shoulders in greeting was like kneading a well-pumped football: the fingertips left no impression behind. It was a bully's physique, but no bully ever walked with his tentative, splay-footed step, the step of a man anxious not to tread on smaller mortals milling below. He wore his hair very short, snipped to virtual baldness to reveal a bull neck and a formidable jaw, something of a family feature. Faces in the Githongo family, I would later discover, had the all-weather implacability of Easter Island sculptures. He was a Kikuyu, but his enemies would later claim that he didn't look as though he belonged: too big, too tall, too dark. He photographed supremely badly – I never saw a photograph of John that made him look anything but stolid, loutish, slightly thick. Still only in his thirties, he looked older than his years, thanks to the receding hairline, deep baritone and seeming gravitas. In fact, John was prone to fits of the giggles. An inveterate conspiracy theorist, intrigued by tales of plots and subterfuge, he loved a meaty gossip. ‘Is that SO? Is that SOOO?’ he would whisper in fascination on being passed a nugget of clandestine information, mouth forming a round ‘O’ of wonder, eyes growing big as he dwelt on some VIP's quirk of character, or the little-known story behind some public political clash. And it was hard to think of anything, or anyone, that didn't interest his questing mind. Blessed with insatiable curiosity, he gobbled up experiences and insights in the same way he embraced new acquaintances.

He returned my lunch invitation by asking me along to a meeting of the Wednesday debating group, a serious affair where earnest young men in suits discussed topical issues. After that we saw each other only sporadically, but it always felt like time well spent. There was no hint of anything romantic, nor would there ever be. John was simply one of the most intellectually impressive young Africans I'd met, and each encounter left me optimistic for the country's future.

These were the days when Kenya's opposition parties were trying to get a constitution weighted in Moi's favour changed. Mounted on horseback, the dreaded GSU, Darth Vader-like in shields and helmets, charged supporters who dared defy a ban on public rallies, lashing out with truncheons and pick-axe handles. I remember venturing out behind John on a day when the oniony smell of tear-gas was still wafting along the city centre's deserted streets, and noting how nimbly he darted along the pavements and peeked round corners. His caution made me nervous. If a man his size was worried about running into the GSU, I thought to myself, then I should really watch out.

I began quoting John in my articles. Other Western journalists were also discovering him. Soon the name ‘John Githongo’ was cropping up in more and more media stories as a pundit. Then he'd left journalism to revive the local branch of Transparency International, an organisation established by his own father and a group of like-minded Kenyan businessmen disillusioned with Moi. He had found the perfect platform from which to hold a morally bankrupt government to account. John knew instinctively how the media could be mustered and energised to contribute to the democratic reform process – he'd been a journalist, after all. TI's carefully researched reports finally quantified Kenya's amorphous corruption problem, giving the media something solid to get their teeth into. John cultivated contacts, put out feelers, and sailed so close to the wind he found himself being offered political asylum by concerned fellow delegates after telling an anti-corruption conference in Peru what he knew about president Moi's portfolio of investments. The foreign governments who funded many of TI-Kenya's activities loved it. Here was concrete proof of how donor aid, cleverly directed, could bolster accountability in Africa.

While working at TI, John was also in discreet contact with the Kibaki team. He'd kept that side of things quiet, for the organisation was officially neutral, and had to be seen to remain above the political fray. But when Kibaki's aides approached, asking for concrete suggestions on how to build the opposition's anti-corruption strategy, he could hardly refuse. And in truth, at this stage in Kenya's history it was almost impossible to imagine that any idealistic young Kenyan could fail to wish NARC anything but success in the forthcoming contest.

In the wake of the 2002 inauguration I tracked John down with a fellow journalist, keen to hear his thoughts. We found him in frenetic mode, simultaneously hyped, exhilarated and exhausted. He had been part of the election-monitoring effort pulled together by the human rights bodies and advocacy groups that constituted Kenyan civil society, and was fielding a series of calls from reporters in search of quotes, repeating the same phrases again and again. Halfway through the conversation, he revealed another reason why he was so distracted. The Kenyan businessmen who sat on TI-Kenya's board, old friends of both his father and Kibaki, had been in touch. ‘The wazee [old men] have put my name forward as someone to lead the fight against corruption.’ His laugh was half-embarrassed, half-excited. ‘It looks as though the new team is going to offer me a post in government.’

My heart sank. I could see exactly why any new government would want John. No Kenyan could rival his reputation for muscular integrity, or enjoyed as much respect amongst the foreign donors everyone hoped would soon resume lending. In co-opting him, the incoming administration would be neatly appropriating a highprofile symbol of credibility, proof personified that it deserved the trust of both the wananchi and its Western partners. But I remembered all the other shining African talents I'd seen warily join the establishment they had once attacked, persuaded that finally the time was ripe for change, only to emerge discredited, beaten by the system they had set out to cure.

‘Don't take it,’ I said. ‘You'll lose your neutrality forever. Once you've crossed the line and become a player, you'll never be able to go back.’

He listened, but my advice, it was clear, was being given too late. Effectively, he explained, he wasn't being given a choice. The old guys – Joe Wanjui, former head of Unilever in Kenya; George Muhoho, head of the Kenya airports authority; and Harris Mule, former permanent secretary at the finance ministry – had done the deal in his absence, taking his acquiescence as read. He'd gone round to Wanjui's house and found the wazee drinking champagne, celebrating the forthcoming appointment. They had ribbed the young man over the fact that he probably didn't even own a suit for his meeting with Kibaki, offering to lend him one. ‘They'd all cooked it up together. I drove away stunned. It was a great honour.’ In later years, he would think back over that day and detect an unappetisingly sacrificial element to the whole episode. These men he had grown up with, who had known him when he was nothing but a small boy running around in shorts, had trussed him up and delivered him to his fate.

But it was obvious that John was more than a pawn in a deal done by his father's friends. He was the kind of man who believed it was up to every Kenyan – especially to someone blessed with his education and social advantages – to pull the country out of the mire. He had dedicated his brief career to fighting corruption. Now along came an administration that had won an election promising to do just that. It was asking for his expertise, inviting him into the inner sanctum, and he knew in his heart that there probably wasn't a single Kenyan better placed to wage that campaign. How could it be legitimate to criticise if, when you were explicitly asked to quit the sidelines and join the fray, you refused? ‘We discussed whether he should take it and concluded he didn't have a choice, morally speaking,’ remembers economist David Ndii, who had worked alongside John at TI. ‘If he didn't, he would always wonder if he could have made a difference.’ There comes a time in a man's life when fate offers him a chance to do something significant. It is rarely extended twice. Accepting the job was not just an exciting career opportunity, it was a patriotic duty.

Leaving John that day, I felt a deep tinge of melancholy. Working in Africa, I'd grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on wilful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends'. When visiting a former Congolese prime minister, sitting in a villa whose bougainvillea-fringed gardens stretched across acres of prime real estate, I knew better than to ask if his government salary had paid for all this lush beauty. Staying with a friend in Nigeria, whose garage alone dwarfed the family homes of many Londoners, I took it for granted that his business dealings wouldn't stand up to a taxman's scrutiny. And when I shared a beer with a Great Lakes intelligence chief befriended in a presidential waiting room, I knew that one day I'd probably come across his name in a human rights report, fingered as the man behind some ruthless political assassination. Life was complicated. The moral choices needed to rise to the top were bleaker and more unforgiving in Africa than those faced by Westerners. It was easy for me, born in a society which coddled the unlucky and compensated its failures, to wax self-righteous. I had never been asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, never had relatives beg me to compromise my principles for their sakes, never woken to the bitter realisation that I was the only person stupid enough to play by the rules. If I was to continue to like these men and women – and I did like these men and women – it was sometimes necessary to focus on the foreground and wilfully ignore the bigger picture.

But not with John, never with John. Through the years of knowing him, I had never caught a glimpse of any sinister hinterland, territory best left unexplored, and God knows I had asked around. What you saw seemed to be strictly what you got, and he was the only one of my African friends of whom that felt true. I looked at him that day and thought: ‘Well, that's over. In the years to come, I will pick up a Kenyan newspaper and spot an item in a gossip column about his partnership with a shady Asian businessman, the large house he is having built in a plush Nairobi suburb. Then there'll be a full-length article, a court case in which the judge finds against him but which goes to appeal, so I'll never know the truth. And one day, I'll be chatting to someone at a diplomatic party who will say: “John Githongo – isn't he completely rotten?” and I'll find myself nodding in agreement …’ Oh, I would still like him – who could not? But what had once been clear-cut and simple would have become qualified and murky. And already I mourned our mutual loss of innocence.

There was one last hoop to jump through before his appointment was confirmed – an interview with the man who had just become Kenya's third president. At that first encounter on 7 January 2003, watched over benevolently by the wazee, his three mentors, John listened, humbled, overawed, as Kibaki outlined his ambitions and expectations. But he plucked up just enough courage to make a remark that went to the heart of the matter. If his time at TI had taught him one thing, he said, it was that since corruption started at the top, it could only effectively be fought from the top. ‘Sir,’ he told the president, ‘we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anti-corruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is “eating”, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.’

Among the many calls John received in those hectic days, as excited friends rang to congratulate him, one was more sobering than the rest. It was from Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who, after years in opposition, was taken on by Moi in the late 1990s to reform Kenya's civil service. Leakey was no stranger to adversity – he had been hounded by the security forces, bore the scars on his back from a vicious police whipping, had lost his legs in a plane crash some suspected of being a botched act of sabotage. An experienced scrapper, his efforts to clean up the public sector had nevertheless eventually been rendered futile by Moi's Machiavellian strategies. ‘If you can pull it off, wonderful,’ Leakey told John. ‘But be careful. This is a tough one.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.