It’s Our Turn to Eat

My father, in contrast, was typical of a certain sort of law-abiding, diffident Englishman for whom a set of impartial, lucid rules represented civilisation at its most advanced. He was raised in a country which pluckily held out against the Germans during the Second World War and then set up the National Health Service in which he spent his career, and his trust in the essential decency of his duly elected representatives was so profound that he was shocked to the core by British perfidy during the Suez crisis, and believed Tony Blair when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When, as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl, I mentioned – with a certain pride – that I usually managed to get home without paying my bus fare, he explained disapprovingly that if everyone behaved that way, London Transport would grind to a halt. Remove the civic ethos, and anarchy descended. A logical man, he saw this as the only practical way of running a complex society. It also, conveniently for an Englishman awkward with personal intimacy, enabled him to engage with his fellow man at a completely impersonal level. Not for him my mother's instinctive charm, the immediate eye contact, the hand on arm. He felt no obligation to provide for nieces and nephews, and had a cousin come up for a job before one of the many appointment boards on which he sat, he would have immediately excused himself. Nothing could be more repugnant to him than asking a friend to bend the rules as a personal favour. What need was there for a rival, alternative sistema, if the existing arrangement of rights and duties already delivered?

My father's world view was typically northern European. My mother's characteristically Mediterranean approach would have made perfect sense to any Kenyan. In an ‘us-against-the-rest’ universe, the put-upon pine to belong to a form of Masonic lodge whose advantages are labelled ‘Members Only’. In the industrialised world, that ‘us’ is usually defined by class, religion, or profession. In Kenya, it was inevitably defined by tribe.

Western analysts have remarked on Africans' ‘astonishing ambivalence’ towards corruption,10 but it is not so surprising. Under the colonial occupiers and the breed of ‘black wazungus’ who replaced them, the citizen had learnt to expect little from his government but harassment and extortion. ‘Anyone who followed the straight path died a poor man,’ a community worker in Kisumu once told me. ‘So Kenyans had no option but to glorify corruption.’ In a 2001 survey, Transparency International found that the average urbanite Kenyan paid sixteen bribes a month,11 mostly to the police or the ministry of public works, to secure services they should have received for free. Added together, kitu kidogo – supposedly ‘petty’ corruption – accounted for a crippling 31.4 per cent of a household's income. Those paying out no doubt saw themselves as innocent victims of oppressive officialdom. But while chafing at the need to grease palms, ordinary Kenyans were also playing the system with verve. Which of them could put their hand on their heart and swear that they had never relied on a ‘brother’ for a bargain, a professional recommendation or a job? Who had never helped a distant ‘cousin’ from upcountry jump a queue or win special access? Aware of their own complicity, they hesitated to point an accusing finger.

Moral values can become strangely inverted in a harsh environment. ‘In Nairobi, around 50 per cent of the population is either unemployed or underemployed – they're selling shoelaces or picking up rubbish, not earning enough to survive. But this country doesn't have soup kitchens, and you don't see hordes sleeping rough,’ says Professor Terry Ryan, a veteran Kenyan economist. ‘That's because a senior civil servant or CEO typically picks up the school fees and hospital bills of roughly fifty of his kinsmen, while a headmaster or low-ranking civil servant will be supporting twenty-nine members of the extended family in one way or another.’ Propping up such vast networks made bending the rules virtually obligatory. The man who abided by the rules and took home no more than his salary seemed to his relatives a creep; the employee who fiddled the books and paid for his aunt's funeral, his niece's education and his father's hernia operation a hero. In a poor country, ethnic marginalisation does more than blight life chances. It can actually kill. A 1998 survey found that Kalenjin children were 50 per cent less likely to die before the age of five than those of other tribes, despite the fact that most lived in rural areas, where life is generally tougher.12 The statistic makes perfect sense. Under Moi, Kalenjin areas benefited from better investment in clinics, schools and roads. A worried Kalenjin mother would head for a well-stocked nearby clinic, child in her arms, along a smoothly tarmacked road. Her non-Kalenjin equivalent was likely to be tossed for hours in the back of a matatu struggling along a rutted track, only to eventually reach a clinic with nothing but aspirin on its shelves and watch her child die.

Researching this book, I repeatedly asked Kenyans for examples of how ethnic favouritism had personally affected them. ‘Oh, every Kenyan has a story like that,’ I was always told. Yet few volunteered details. It was easy to guess why. If they had lost out because of tribal patronage, they risked looking like whiners; if they had benefited, they'd be admitting to collaborating in a system that fostered incompetence.

I'd seen one example myself, at a Kenyan newspaper where I briefly worked as a subeditor. The East African Standard was being revamped after many years in the doldrums. The details of its ownership had always been kept deliberately murky, but the fact that the Moi family quietly pulled the levers was widely known, and had alienated readers, while management's habit of giving jobs to barely literate Kalenjins was blamed for a general collapse in standards. Now a new chief executive was poaching talent from rivals, with promises of an imminent takeover by a South African company. After my first few weeks at the paper, I went for lunch with one of the senior writers.

‘So, what do you think of the staff?’ he asked.

I ran through my various colleagues. Some had better training than others, some were more enterprising, but the goodwill was undoubtedly there. With one exception. The man in question, I said, turned up late or not at all, lounged at his desk playing music while the others hammered at their keyboards, and was often rude to his fellow workers. Robert – let us call him – was one of those rare, dangerous subeditors who could take a perfectly decent story and insert fresh mistakes. When I'd pointed one of these out, he'd given me a look of such astonished contempt that I'd realised criticism was something he rarely heard. In a surprisingly short space of time I'd come to detest him, and it was clear to me that many staff felt the same, although they were strangely mute in his presence. The man should obviously be fired.

The journalist gave me a long look, enjoying his moment.

‘You'll be interested to hear that I expect that individual to either take my job very shortly, or be made editor.’

Robert, he explained, was a close relative of one of the newspaper's top executives. Both men were Kalenjins. No matter how incompetent or unpleasant, Robert knew his career was assured – hence his arrogance and his co-workers' resentful silence.

‘Good Lord,’ I said. It was so crude I could barely believe it. ‘You know, where I come from, the boss's son often works twice as hard to make sure people don't accuse him of exactly this form of nepotism.’

He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

‘How about sending him on a training course so that, at the very least, he learns his trade?’

‘Oh, that's been done. Few people at the newspaper have received more training. He's even gone on one of those journalism courses in the UK. He never gets any better. It's a question of attitude.’

Having written about ethnic patronage for years, this was the first time I'd seen up close its insidious impact on a workplace. Since that lunch, many of the people we discussed that day – including my lunch companion and the chief executive who had dangled the hope of a South African takeover – have left the newspaper, which remains in Moi's control. They had been mis-sold the notion of a meritocratic, non-tribal, politically independent company, and with that promise went much of the incentive for staying. Robert, in contrast, has been promoted, just as predicted.

That was my story. But I wanted to hear someone else's.

Eventually I found him. His name was Hussein Were. He was forty-two when we met, and his boyishly unlined face jarred with the methodical manner of a much older man. Deliberate and self-contained, he spoke at perfect dictation speed – no rushing or interruptions permitted – and his sentences, peppered with ‘albeit’s and ‘pertaining to’s, were redolent of the legalistic world of depositions and affidavits, in which people pause before speaking and are careful to say what they mean.

His first job, he told me, had been with a firm of quantity surveyors, where he spent more than ten years. The boss was a Kamba and a Christian, Were a Muslim and a Luhya, but that didn't stop them working well together. So well, in fact, that when Were tendered his resignation, explaining that he had won a scholarship for a Masters at the University of Nairobi, his boss persuaded him to stay on, juggling his day job with his studies. But when Were returned to full-time professional life, he noticed that things were changing. The company was expanding, and every new arrival, he registered with quiet dismay, was a Kamba. ‘The assistant was Kamba, the secretary was Kamba, the receptionist was Kamba. It was becoming a single-ethnic organisation.’ His relations with these staff were cordial. They shared lunches, knew each other's families. But Were began feeling excluded in subtle ways. ‘In those situations, people begin to segregate into groups. They regard you as different and don't want to share certain things. They set up informal networks, channels inside the office.’ He did not understand the language in which the others communicated, and as a Muslim he would not be included in any Friday-evening trip to a local bar.

Were gritted his teeth. He had hoped for better – ‘Maybe I'm naïve’ – but he felt no real surprise. ‘I had come of age learning about the working environment in this country. I knew Kenya was full of one-ethnic companies. I thought, “I'll live with it.”’ His ambitions remained high. After ten years in the job he had every reason to expect to be made partner. Then professional rivalry began to undermine his reputation for efficiency. ‘If I was registering certain successes, my colleagues wouldn't want them to reach the boss. But negative things would immediately be brought to his attention.’ Were, who had once been his boss's second-in-command, noticed that key information was now passing him by. He was being written out of the script. ‘Colleagues would mention things that concerned me directly that they had been discussing separately with my boss, chats which were probably taking place during visits to construction sites.’ At that stage, Were resigned. ‘I saw the whole thing was untenable.’

He didn't bother to explain why he was going. ‘I never raised it directly with my boss, because I realised he was encouraging it. I just said I needed to progress my career.’ Like many Kenyans caught in such circumstances, he expresses not anger, but resignation at what he knows to be a commonplace experience. ‘There are lots of people in this country who have never sat a job interview or even know what one is. They have been whisked by their tribespeople from school to job. I believe in fighting my own way.’ Friends tell him his problem was not being ‘anchored’ by a network of friendships and family relationships that would have made it impossible to ‘detach’ him from his place of work. But he has no intention of developing these limpet-like muscles. At the consultancy he has now set up, he's proud of the fact that not a single one of his current projects comes from a fellow Luhya. ‘There are people who feel like me, who do not subscribe to that kind of thinking,’ he insists. ‘I wouldn't pack a company with my people.’

Were's experience, and that of my colleagues at the Standard, was the most benign manifestation of the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture. Its other forms were much uglier, and their impact far more damaging. So few Kenyans identified with any overarching national project, their leaders felt free to loot state coffers, camouflaging crude personal enrichment in the prettifying colours of tribal solidarity.

Decade by decade, practices that had flourished under the colonial administration – itself no stranger to high-profile corruption scandals – were fine-tuned and pushed to ever more outlandish lengths. What they all shared were a reliance on the political access and inside knowledge enjoyed by either a minister, an MP, a civil servant or a councillor, and their target: the public funds and national assets on which every Kenyan citizen depended for education, health and the other basic necessities for a decent life.

The command economy of the post-independence years made self-enrichment for the well-connected a fairly simple matter. What could be easier for a minister than to slap an import quota on a key commodity, wait for the street price to soar, and then dump tonnes of the stuff, thoughtfully stockpiled ahead of time by one of his companies, on the market? A 1970–71 parliamentary commission helpfully authorised government employees to run their own businesses while holding down civil service jobs (‘straddling’, as it was called), a ruling its chairman later justified on the grounds that there was no point banning an activity that would persist whatever the law decreed.13 A post in a state-run utility or corporation, which could hike prices ever upwards thanks to its monopoly position, offered untold profit-taking opportunities. Similarly, who was better placed to benefit from foreign exchange controls which created a yawning gap between black market and official rates than an insider with excellent banking and Treasury contacts?

The structural adjustment programmes pushed on Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which loosened the Kenyan government's stranglehold by making aid conditional on privatising bloated parastatals, dropping currency controls and opening markets to international trade, complicated things, but the ‘eaters’ quickly vaulted that hurdle. The privatisation process itself, it turned out, provided all kinds of openings for the entrepreneurial fraudster, including ruthless asset-stripping. It was funny how often the politically-connected banks in which state corporations chose to deposit their proceeds collapsed, swallowing up public funds as they expired. And so many other routes remained open. Import goods duty-free as famine relief, or claim they are in transit, then sell them locally, undercutting the competition. Take out a state loan you never intend to repay. Bid for a government tender your contacts at the ministry tell you is about to come up, then get them to ensure that your ridiculously inflated offer is the one approved. It doesn't matter if your firm can't deliver: the invoice will join Kenya's huge stock of ‘pending bills’, carried over from one government to another, and eventually settled with the issue of trade-able treasury bonds, no questions asked.14

By the early 1990s, Western executives flying in with plans to invest in Kenya quickly realised that their companies would never thrive in the country's supposedly free-market environment unless a slice of equity was discreetly handed over to a firm owned by a Moi relative, trusted henchman or favoured minister. Frank Vogl, who runs a communications firm in Washington, caught the flavour when he was approached to set up a presidential press unit. Summoned by Kenya's finance minister to discuss the idea, he flew to Nairobi and went to the minister's offices. ‘It was so full I could barely squeeze in the door. The entire reception area was jammed with about twenty or thirty people, who were all trying to reach the secretary sitting at reception. I finally managed to catch her attention and said: “I have a 10 o'clock appointment with the minister.” “So does everyone else,” she said. “You'll have to wait your turn.” These were all businessmen waiting to have their one-on-ones with the minister – and you can imagine just what was going on during those conversations. It was no longer a secret by then: if you wanted to do business in Kenya, you had to do a deal with the top man concerned.’

And spanning every regime was land-grabbing, which pushed so many African buttons. Swathes of supposedly protected game parks, plots already owned by state-run corporations and municipal bodies, prime sites on the coast, chunks of gazetted virgin forest lusted after by timber merchants, were snatched, fenced off and sold on again. The practice was so widespread that even the leaders of Kenya's churches, mosques and temples – society's supposed moral arbiters – joined in. The grabbers did not hesitate to seize plots set aside for national monuments or already used as cemeteries, simply throwing the bodies onto the street. The phenomenon peaked before every election, as the president of the day thanked his cronies in advance for their support. Inquiries would reveal some 300,000 hectares of prime land to have been seized since independence, with only 1.7 per cent of the original 3 per cent of national territory gazetted as forest remaining – jeopardising a thirsty nation's very water table.

But ‘eating’ surely touched its nadir with the Goldenberg scandal, the Moi presidency's crowning disgrace. Dreamt up by Kamlesh Pattni, a Kenyan Asian with a lick of glossy black hair and the over-confidence of a twenty-six-year-old millionaire, this three-year scheme was once again a reflection of its times.15 Launched in 1991, it tapped into the government's hunger for foreign exchange, threatened by aid cuts from Western donors determined to see multi-party elections in Kenya. Pattni's firm, Goldenberg International Ltd, started by claiming – under a government compensation scheme meant to encourage trade – for exports of gold and diamonds Kenya did not produce and the firm never actually carried out. Approved by Central Bank staff, Pattni's fraudulent export forms – the infamous ‘CD3’s – only marked the start of this multi-layered scam. Setting up his own bank, he used the leverage granted by his finance ministry contacts to mop up available foreign exchange under a pre-shipment finance scheme. He bought billions of shillings in treasury bills on credit and cashed them in as though they had been paid for, and borrowed money from a range of complicit ‘political banks’ to place on overnight deposit.

The various schemes not only enriched senior officials, they provided slush funds for what the ruling party knew would be fiercely contested elections. Pattni ploughed his profits into the construction of the Grand Regency, a five-star hotel in central Nairobi as gilded and ornate as Cleopatra's boudoir. The ordinary Kenyan, for his part, lost anywhere between $600 million and $4 billion as his country's foreign exchange reserves, rather than being boosted, were systematically hoovered up by the well-connected. Goldenberg pushed the country's inflation into double digits, caused the collapse of the Kenya shilling and a credit squeeze so severe it led to business closures and mass sackings, and left the government unable to pay for oil imports and basic health and education. The resulting recession was still being felt fifteen years later.

Goldenberg captured the very essence of Kenyan corruption. For if only a tiny elite got obscenely rich on the back of it, the sleek Pattni carefully shored up his enterprise with a liberal distribution of gifts: a form of insurance. The astonishing extent of wider Kenyan society's complicity would only be exposed in 2004 when investigators published a list of those alleged to have benefited from Pattni's largesse. Gado, the Nation's brilliant cartoonist, captured the moment with one of his sketches. ‘Anybody who has not received Goldenberg money, please raise your hand,’ runs the caption. Below, a variegated cross-section of Kenyan society stares at the reader, boggle-eyed, uncomfortable, shifty: a bewigged lawyer, a Muslim preacher, a portly mzungu, a stout matron, a notebook-wielding journalist, a uniformed nurse, a scruffy panhandler. No one moves. All, at one point, have benefited from Goldenberg. The ‘list of shame’, as it was dubbed, ran to 1,115 entries.

5 Dazzled by the Light

‘Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power. Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.’

JOHN GITHONGO, Executive magazine, 1994

Working alongside the director of public prosecutions and a brand-new ministry of justice – an institution phased out under Moi – John Githongo had the job of digging down through this purulent history, sorting through the layers of sleaze.

The judiciary, which had become stuffed over the years with bribable magistrates ready to do Moi's bidding, must be purged: scores would eventually be publicly denounced, dismissed or encouraged to retire. Ministry departments needed to be cleansed of a generation of bent senior procurement officers who had for decades used public procurement as a source of illicit wealth, stealing, one study estimated, $6.4 billion between 1991 and 1997.16 An inquiry, the Bosire Commission, was launched to probe the Goldenberg scandal. Another, the Ndung'u Commission, probed the land-grabbing phenomenon. Yet another was established to investigate the scandal of pending bills. In a grand gesture of good faith, Kenya also became the first country in the world to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption.

Then there were the two pieces of legislation Kibaki had announced on the lawns of State House soon after his inauguration: the Public Officer Ethics Act, which spelt out a code of conduct for public officers and obliged them to declare their wealth; and the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, which created the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), a doughty successor to the anti-corruption authority set up but rapidly neutered under Moi.

John helped ensure that the directorship of the new institution, which he eventually hoped to see given prosecutorial powers, went to Justice Aaron Ringera, whom he had befriended during his time at TI-Kenya on a long-haul flight to a World Bank meeting. Convinced that this former solicitor general was the perfect candidate for the job, he went in person to lobby the various political party leaders – not all of whom shared his enthusiasm for Ringera – to support the appointment. ‘I put my reputation on the line, without hesitation or equivocation. I had complete faith in Ringera.’ John was also partly responsible for the KACC director being granted one of Kenya's most generous civil service pay awards. The bigger the salary, the easier it would be for the holder of this key institution to resist temptation, he told the sceptics.

In NARC's flurry of law-making, one thing, however, was made clear. These inquiries would not go to the very top of the chain. Moi's lieutenants might be vulnerable to prosecution, but the former president himself would remain beyond pursuit. The new administration justified this stance on the grounds that ordinary Kenyans, grateful for Moi's tactful withdrawal from the political scene, would be revolted by the sight of a venerable elder being hounded through the courts. It was an argument John endorsed. He should have been more alert to the gesture's underlying message. Even in the new-look, squeaky-clean, corruption-phobic Kenya, the really big players could expect to get off scot free, while the smaller fry would be held to account.

As he put in his endless working days, friends from the old days noticed with concern that John, originally taken on as a consultant, now spoke in terms of ‘we’ when referring to State House. It was ‘our government’, ‘our administration’, and when cynics expressed scepticism, he grew annoyed, for it meant doubting John himself. Having decided that NARC represented Kenya's best chance to tackle a deep-rooted blight, he had deliberately failed to install a safety net. Some saw this as a step further than was wise, or was warranted by his job description. ‘He was using the language of government, when he should have seen himself as someone who had been seconded to government,’ says anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati. ‘He should have retained an intellectual distance, seen himself as an adviser, a specialist.’