It’s Our Turn to Eat

3 Starting Afresh

‘Youth gives all it can: it gives itself without reserve.’

JOSEMARÍA ESCRIVÁ, founder of Opus Dei

There's a certain sameness about presidential lodgings in Britain's former African colonies, and Nairobi's State House, the former colonial governor's residence, is no exception. Fall asleep in the waiting room and on waking you could, in that bleary moment of confusion, think yourself in State House, Zambia; State House, Tanzania; or State House, Uganda. Behind the white-pillared porticoes they present to the world, these buildings are resolutely dowdy, content to remain stubbornly out of touch with modern trends in interior design. No stark minimalism here, no streamlined vistas, no clever games with reflection and light. The décor is dark wood panelling, chintz sofas, red carpets and thick velvet drapes. The taste in pictures will usually be execrable: an anaemic watercolour of an English country scene, an uplifting motto urging the reader on to greater Christian efforts, an oil portrait of the incumbent so approximate it could have been sat for by someone else entirely. The carpet will be worn through in places, a clumsily carved piece of animal Africana will take up a great deal of space. The overall impression is of a dusty members' club crossed with a gloomy British country pub, and the effect is to make those indoors pine for the fresh green of the formal gardens outside, the only real area of beauty.

One of the peculiarities of Nairobi's State House is that it is invisible from the road, the only hint of its existence a formidable checkpoint and a challengingly high metal fence. Puzzlingly, this fence has repeatedly failed to do its job. In the wake of Moi's unceremonious exit, several solo intruders were discovered wandering the presidential grounds in the early hours. One was an Australian tourist, another a Ugandan. Arrested by the GSU, they could not satisfactorily explain what they were doing on the premises. After some initial headlines, they were never heard of again. Word spread amongst Nairobi's more superstitious residents. These mysterious visitors had been able to pass through State House's supposedly impregnable fence, then evaporated into thin air, because they were not men at all, but spirits. Jomo Kenyatta had refused to spend a single night in State House, convinced it was haunted by vindictive ghosts of the white administration. Moi, it was now said, had also left a malign parting gift behind, an evil genie, a curse which explained not only these night-time visitations but the variety of misfortunes – from Kibaki's near-fatal car crash to the death of his first vice president – that were to befall its new incumbents.

It was here, in an old bedroom converted into a study, that John set up base in early 2003. On his desk he placed a framed picture, a present from Bob Munro, a Canadian friend who ran a slum-based soccer-club scheme. It was a copy of a Charles Addams cartoon, showing a skier whose parallel tracks in the snow surreally divide and rejoin on either side of a pine tree. ‘That's going to be you,’ Munro joked, anticipating the impossible demands that would be made on the future civil servant. John had initially established an office outside the main building, within the State House compound. The president was having none of it. ‘No, no, no, I want you inside this building,’ Kibaki had said, insisting that the newly appointed anti-corruption czar should be virtually within shouting distance of his own office – just two doors and a foyer separated them. ‘Don't brief anyone but me, don't bother making appointments, just check that I'm free and come straight in.’ It seemed the president had taken John's message on board.

That physical proximity alone ensured John extraordinary influence. In a strong presidential system, being in a position to brush against the head of state in a corridor is worth a score of weighty-sounding titles. Whatever John's nominal grade, being granted free licence to update the president whenever he wished effectively placed him above many cabinet ministers in the pecking order. And Kibaki was true to his word. By the time he left, John calculated that he had given his boss sixty-six briefings, some of them stretching over two or three separate meetings. That walk-in access made him a player of huge interest to anyone wanting to cut through the layers of bureaucracy to reach the core of power. ‘People would give me information because they knew I could easily pass it on to the president.“You need to know this,” they would say.’

The first thing John did was to eliminate the traces of Kibaki's predecessor. Moi's official photo came down, replaced by a large one of Kibaki – ‘I was very proud of the president’ – and a calendar from the Japanese embassy. The civil servants assigned to the department his office replaced – run by a former Moi speechwriter – were sent packing. ‘I got rid of all the staff, with the exception of the driver. These guys' loyalties were clear. And in any case, I wanted to get some members of civil society in to lend a hand.’ John had an inkling of how institutions and structures can end up insidiously moulding behaviour, rather than the other way round. When the administration assigned him one of Moi's official cars, a dark-blue BMW, he tried driving it around for a day and then returned it, too ill-at-ease to continue.

In came the new team: seven specialists in human rights, governance and the law, picked to roughly reflect Kenya's ethnic diversity. ‘Our office was very young. John was the oldest, and he was barely forty,’ remembers Lisa Karanja, a barrister and women's rights expert recruited from Human Rights Watch's New York office. With youth, recalls Karanja, came irreverence, absence of hierarchy, and a deliberate adoption of the informal working practices of the non-governmental world from whence so many of the staff hailed. ‘We were like an NGO at the heart of government. People would get very shocked, coming into the office, to see John making me a cup of coffee. Here was this powerful man – because he did hold a position of huge influence – and we were calling him “John”.’ The contrast between these new arrivals' breezy directness and other government departments – male-dominated, obsequious and bound by etiquette – was swiftly felt. ‘You'd go to meetings with government officials and it would be “your honourable this”, “your honourable that” and “all protocols observed” before every speech, all this bowing and scraping,’ remembers Karanja. ‘I was ticked off at one point for not showing enough respect when I corrected someone who made a legal point I knew was wrong. John had to intervene and say, “Look, she's not here just for decoration. She's not a child.”’

The NARC government, in those heady early days, was ready to try something new, opening itself up to its traditional critics. With Moi's departure, thousands of well-qualified Kenyans were returning from the diaspora, ready to put their professional skills at the service of the state. Transparency International, the newly established Kenya National Commission on Human Rights – headed by the outspoken Maina Kiai – civil society groups and human rights organisations were all invited to State House to exchange ideas and offer advice. ‘We were sitting down with ministers, and discussing laws. It was unprecedented,’ says Mwalimu Mati, who worked at TI-Kenya at the time. ‘The only other time there had been anything remotely similar was after independence, when returning students came back to help Jomo Kenyatta's government.’

But there were risks inherent in John's approach, which he would only later learn to appreciate. By surrounding himself with outsiders and failing to cultivate the old guard, he separated himself from the system. When State House colleagues slapped him on the back and joked about ‘you and your crazy NGO wallahs’ they were underlining a difference that would come to bother them. The policy might insulate John from the sleaze of the previous era, but it also left him dangerously exposed.

There was another failing which John would come to regret: the ambiguity of his job description. ‘The first mistake I made was not to sit down and draft precise terms of reference.’ He would try repeatedly to pin down his exact role, going to see the president on three separate occasions with ever more explicit definitions, but the initial error could not easily be rectified. His job, as envisaged by Kibaki, was not to formally investigate suspected corruption, nor did he have any powers to prosecute. Those tasks remained with the police force and the attorney general. His role was purely to advise the president – an interesting insight into the extraordinarily centralised nature of power in Kenya – but that duty, in his own view, gave him both the right and the obligation to prod and to poke, to nudge and to pressurise, in any area that seemed to merit attention. ‘When people asked about my remit, I would say,“The president asks questions, and I answer them.” My job was to pick up the phone and call ten people who could put together a picture allowing me to tell the president what was going on. Essentially, my job was to act as a catalyst.’ Such vagueness would be an advantage when he enjoyed the boss's blessing. But it would leave him adrift when things were no longer moving in his direction.

Abandoning lodgings on Lower Kabete Road, in Nairobi's Westlands, John rented a house in the woody suburb of Lavington, close enough to State House to be able to get to work at a moment's notice, however congested the Nairobi traffic. He probably could have claimed a government property – he now had a bodyguard and a small fleet of cars assigned to his office, after all – but he did not want to go down that route: ‘If you live in a government house, they own you.’ Instead, he found his own place, an elegant villa with a large garden perfect for a pack of bounding, scruffy mongrels he had acquired, specimens of the breed ironically dubbed ‘Kikuyu pointers’.

But he never really spent enough time there for it to feel like home. Always a workaholic, John now paused only to sleep and eat. ‘We have an eighteen-month window of opportunity before the old, shadowy networks re-establish themselves,’ he told reporters, and he was constantly aware of the clock ticking. Here was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to put everything he had preached into effective practice, and if it failed, it would not be for want of effort on his part. ‘He worked all the time,’ says Lisa Karanja. ‘It wasn't just late nights, or part of the weekend. He worked all the time. So much so that I worried about his health, because he'd had some problems with high blood pressure, and the way he was living didn't seem likely to help.’ The dividing line between work and play blurred as John methodically extended an already enormous social circle to include any players with the insights and experience that might help him in the Herculean task of cleaning out Kenya's Augean stables.

Since childhood, John had possessed a talent for bonding with people from different spheres. Thrusting Kenyan yuppies and world-weary Asian lawyers, doddery white leftovers from the days of colonial rule and impassioned activists from Kenya's civil society, lowly taxi drivers and puffed-up permanent secretaries: they might not be able to talk to one another, but they could all, somehow, talk to John. He might not have the hormonal magnetism that allows a man to electrify a crowd, but when it came to the one-on-one encounter, few were more beguiling. Researching this book, I would at first be taken aback and then quietly amused to discover just how many people I spoke to were convinced they enjoyed a special bond with John, sharing unique intimacies and confidences. ‘Take it from me, it's you and a thousand others,’ I was tempted to tell them. But in a way, they were not fooling themselves. The Big Man had a Big Reach and a Big Appetite. His interest, affection and trust in them were only rarely exaggerated or faked, as far as I could see. It was just that they weren't on exclusive offer. Like a woman of astounding beauty, John was always more loved and desired than he could ever love in return.

It was an instinctive sociability that served his masters well, turning him into a form of national mascot, the acceptable face of the Kibaki regime. John's State House office became a magnet for foreign ambassadors, whose governments picked up its incidental running costs. ‘They made it very clear John and our unit were their darling. There wasn't a donor group that came through Kenya that didn't drop in on the office,’ remembers Lisa Karanja. For aid officials who had decided to throw their weight behind the Kibaki government's good governance programme and the Western investigators assigned to help it recover Moi's looted assets, a visit served as a refreshing pick-me-up. ‘When I came out of my first meeting with John, I felt like I was walking on air,’ said one, not normally the type to gush. ‘With someone like that in charge of anti-corruption, working for the government, what could possibly go wrong?’

It was impossible to engage with the man and not be won over. Like all charmers, he held up a mirror to those with whom he interacted, and in it they saw a version of themselves. Meeting Kenyan friends his own age he showed his African side: boisterous, loud, irreverent. With the wazee, you would think him a son of the soil. When he met with foreign donors, he was more analytical, he knew how to talk the development language of empowerment, benchmarks and governance. ‘I never cease to be amazed by the love affair you wazungus all seem to have with John Githongo,’ Kenyan businessman and columnist Wycliffe Muga once sardonically remarked. But why should he be surprised? John was the perfect dragoman, the go-between who held a pass into two very different universes, Africa and the West. He had lived in both, and could explain Africa's ways to Westerners and the West to Africans. Of course the wazungus lapped it up. And State House, looking to donors for renewed funding, was happy to encourage the love affair.

During this period John's family virtually lost sight of him. His parents' hearts might swell with pride every time they saw him on television, but they were worryingly aware that these glimpses afforded their only real insight into what he was doing. ‘You wouldn't see him from one month to another,’ remembers younger brother Mugo. And when he did turn up, he might as well not have bothered, so seriously did he take the need for professional discretion. ‘John is usually a great gossip and storyteller. But at family lunches he would sit and say nothing, just raising one eyebrow,’ remembers Ciru, his younger sister. ‘It was unbearable. We lost him then, we lost him to the state.’

Old friends still invited John round, but now did so automatically, never expecting him to turn up. His acquaintances, in any case, had long ago coined the term ‘to do a Githongo’, or ‘to be Githongoed’, to encapsulate the frustrations that went with being one of John's friends. ‘Being Githongoed’ meant to be stood up by the Big Man. It meant to be given heartfelt assurances that he would be there, to realise with dawning horror that one had been played for a sucker (again), to sulk a bit, and finally to forgive all when the Big Man resurfaced, so contrite would be his apologies, so rewarding the conversation. ‘Githongoing’, an area in which all who knew him agreed the otherwise impeccably behaved John regularly performed disgracefully, puzzled me for a while. It wasn't possible, I thought, for a man as rigorous and disciplined as John to confuse his appointments as often as this. Then I realised that his unreliability was in fact the expression of a form of greed: the greed of the intellectual omnivore. When a refreshing new encounter loomed on the horizon, John could not bear to say no. He collected new acquaintances the way others collect stamps, and those joining the collection couldn't help but feel aggrieved on registering that, having once been objects of Githongo fascination, they had been relegated to the category of known quantities, whose exposure to the Big Man would henceforth be strictly rationed.

But John was too busy to worry about such bruised feelings. While overall responsibility for coordinating the anti-graft war rested with the Ministry of Justice, his office would be involved in virtually all of NARC's early efforts to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya's corruption problem. It was a task only a team as young and absurdly optimistic as John's would embrace with enthusiasm, for it meant probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation, from the haphazard creation of a British colony to the tortured foundation of an independent state.

4 Mucking out the Augean Stables

‘The shocking rot of Nairobi's main market was exposed yesterday when it was revealed that 6,000 rats were killed in last week's cleanup exercise – and an equal number made good their escape. Wakulima Market, through which a majority of Nairobi's three million residents get their food, had not been cleaned for thirty years. So filthy was it that traders who have been at the market daily for decades were shocked to see that below the muck they have been wading through, there was tarmac. More than 750 tonnes of garbage was removed and more than seventy tonnes of fecal waste sucked out of the horror toilets.’

East African Standard, 4 January 2005

In his youth, John had written a Kafkaesque short story about a man who wakes one morning to discover a giant pile of manure has been dumped outside his house. Puzzled, he sets out to establish where it came from and, more importantly, how to shift it. Oddly prescient, the story was a harbinger of John's future task.

Rather than a pile of manure, corruption in Kenya resembled one of the giant rubbish dumps that form over the decades in Nairobi's slums. Below the top layer of garbage, picked over by goats, marabou storks and families of professional scavengers, lies another layer of detritus. And another. With the passage of time the layers, weighed down from above, become stacked like the pastry sheets of a mille-feuille, a historical record no archaeologist wants to explore. Each stratum has a slightly different consistency – the garbage trucks brought mostly plastics and cardboard that week, perhaps, less household waste and more factory refuse – but it all smells identical, letting off vast methane sighs as it settles and shifts, composting down to something approaching soil. The sharp stink of chicken droppings, the cabbagy reek of vegetable rot, the dull grey stench of human effluvia blend with the smoke from charcoal fires and the haze of burning diesel to form a pungent aroma – ‘Essence of Slum’, a parfumier might call it – that clings to shoes and permeates the hair.

As Kenya has modernised, so its sleaze has mutated, a new layer of graft shaped to match each layer of economic restructuring and political reconfiguration. ‘In Kenya, corruption doesn't go away with reform, it just migrates,’ says Wachira Maina, a constitutional lawyer and analyst. But under all the layers, at the base of the giant mound, lies the same solid bedrock: Kenyans' dislocated notion of themselves. The various forms of graft cannot be separated from the people's vision of existence as a merciless contest, in which only ethnic preference offers hope of survival.

If, in the West, it is impossible to use the word ‘tribe’ without raising eyebrows, in Kenya much of what takes place becomes incomprehensible if you try stripping ethnicity from the equation. ‘A word will stay around as long as there is work for it to do,’ said Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe of this taboo noun,3 and in Kenya, just as in so many African states, ‘tribe’ is still on active duty. Ask a Kenyan bluntly what tribe he is and he may, briefly, ruffle up and take offence. But the outrage dissolves immediately upon contact with daily life. ‘Typical Mukamba, useless with money,’ a friend mutters when a newspaper vendor fumbles his change. Another, arriving late at a café, explains: ‘I had to straighten up the car because the askari was giving me a hard time. Best not to mess with these Maasai.’ And when another is fined for parking illegally, he explains: ‘I begged with the policeman, but he wouldn't let me off. He was a Kalenjin.’

Any Kenyan can reel off the tags and stereotypes, which capture the categorisation of the country's society. Hard-nosed and thrusting, the Kikuyu are easily identified by their habit of mixing up their ‘r’s and their ‘L’s, the cause of much hilarity amongst their compatriots. When an official warns you, ‘There may be a ploblem,’ a member of civil society denounces ‘ligged erections’ or an urchin tries to sell you a week-old ‘rabradol’ puppy, you know you are dealing with either a Kikuyu or his Meru or Embu cousin. Their entrepreneurialism has won them control of the matatu trade, and they run most of the capital's kiosks, restaurants and hotels. A Luo, on the other hand, is all show and no substance. His date will be wined and dined, but she'll pick up the tab at the end of the evening. Born with huge egos, the flashiest of dress sense and the gift of the gab, the Luo excel in academia and the media. Luhyas are said to lack ambition, excelling as lowly shamba boys, watchmen and cooks. Stumpy, loyal, happy to take orders, Kambas are natural office clerks, soldiers and domestic servants; but watch out for potions, freak accidents and charms under the bed – these are the spell-casters of Kenya. Enticing and provocative, their women dress in eye-wateringly bright colours and often work as barmaids. In contrast, the cold, remote Kalenjin care more about their cows than about their homes. Macho and undomesticated, the proud Samburu and Maasai make for perfect recruits to the ranks of watchmen, wildlife rangers and security guards. And so on …