It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  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 high-profile 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, wonderfu
l,’ Leakey told John. ‘But be careful. This is a tough one.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.

  After that, we rarely met. I was busy writing a book in London, John was a man in a hurry. After a lull, I started getting the occasional, worrying bulletin: he had made some powerful enemies, and travelled around Nairobi with two bodyguards; new scandals were surfacing; John had been moved sideways, then reinstated. That didn’t sound good. It got worse: a journalist friend returning from Nairobi said John had told him that ‘if anything happened’ he had left instructions for both of us to be sent certain packages, an ominous sign if ever there was one. And his hitherto unblemished reputation was taking its first hits. Nairobi’s chattering classes were complaining that the anti-corruption chief wasn’t delivering. Whether through ignorance or impotence, they said, he was complicit in the new government’s misdemeanours. He was going down the route the cynics had always traced for him, from superhero to flawed mortal.

  Then, on a visit to Kenya in late 2004, John joined a meal I was having in a French restaurant with four Western correspondents, veteran Africa writers all. His arrival was a welcome surprise, for John –always prone to the last-minute cancellation–had become outrageously unreliable since joining government, as notorious for his no-shows as a Hollywood diva.

  ‘So, John, when are you going to resign?’ asked one of my colleagues, and John chuckled ruefully, shaking his head in defeat.

  As we prepared to leave, I turned to him on sudden impulse. He had not said as much, but under the ebullient cheerfulness that was his customary public face, I thought I glimpsed a certain dismay. He seemed buffeted, a man no longer in control of his destiny.

  ‘I’ve just moved into a larger flat in London, John, with a separate guest room. If you ever need a base’–the phrase ‘bolt hole’ was on the tip of my tongue–‘somewhere to rest up, just give me a call.’

  The response came a few months later. A call from Davos, where John was attending the World Economic Forum. ‘I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of a room?’ He gave no hint of how long he planned to stay or why he needed a place for the night when presumably, as a government VIP, he enjoyed the pick of London hotels. When he called again, this time from Oslo, where he was attending a conference, I asked whether his visit was something I could mention to journalist friends in London, always keen to see him. ‘Er…Probably best not. If you don’t mind, just keep it to yourself for now.’

  Something, clearly, was up. And on the morning of 6 February 2005, when the capital was wrapped in a cold white cocoon, he arrived on the doorstep of my London flat, let in by a genteel elderly lady from down the hall who seemed, to John’s quiet amusement, to find nothing remotely suspicious about a huge black man in a KGB-style black leather jacket, herding a pile of luggage so large it was clear that this would be no weekend stay. As he deposited the various bags in my guest room, which suddenly looked very small and cramped, John’s mobile phones trilled and vibrated, like a chorus of caged starlings. How many did he actually have: three? four? more? He asked for a glass of fruit juice, took a deep breath, and gathered his thoughts.

  ‘One of the first things I need to do,’ he said, ‘is resign.’

  He was on the run, he told me. In best espionage style, he had summoned two taxis to the London hotel where he had been staying with Justice Aaron Ringera, head of Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Commission, paid one to drive off in any direction and taken the second. Whatever I might have fondly liked to think, his appearance on my doorstep at this moment of crisis was scarcely a tribute to the intimacy of our friendship. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was there precisely because so few people in Kenya knew we had ever been friends.

  ‘They told me it was them,’ he said, pacing the floor. ‘These ministers, my closest colleagues, sat there and told me to my face that they, they were the ones doing the stealing. Once they said that, I knew I had to go.’

  2

  An Unexpected Guest

  ‘If you’re walking in the savannah and a lion attacks, climb a thorn tree and wait there for a while.’

  Kamba proverb

  He came bearing toxic material. A nervous tremor scurried along my spine as he explained that he had done the unthinkable, wiring himself for sound in classic police informer style, taping the self-incriminating conversations of the ministers who were supposed to be his trusted workmates. The explosive contents of those recordings had been systematically downloaded onto his computer, which now sat quietly in my spare bedroom. ‘It might be an idea,’ he said, ‘for me to find a third party to take the computer while I work out what I’m going to do.’

  Suddenly, I was plunged into an unfamiliar world–of covering my tracks, watching what I said. In this world of subterfuge, even the simplest procedure grew vastly complex. Sitting at my computer, John wasted no time in typing out his resignation letter. He drafted it slowly and carefully. While he did not want to give anything away that might constrain his actions later on, he was also determined to make it clear to the careful reader–and he knew State House, the intelligence services and the media would be analysing every word–that he was not leaving happy in the knowledge of a job well done. There would be no ‘spending more time with my family’ clichés. The circumstances of his resignation alone, announced on a one-way trip into exile, must at this stage do the rest for him, sending a damning message about the true nature of the NARC regime.

  He was in a hurry to cross that Rubicon; the letter needed to be faxed immediately to State House. But whose fax machine to use? If I used my own, his location would immediately be revealed. My parents’ fax would be no better–given my family’s unusual surname, it would immediately lead anyone with half a brain back to me. Nearby Camden Town was full of little newsagents willing to fax documents for customers. But in my experience, most were run by sulky Asian shopkeepers who had no truck with international calls. In any case, a Camden Town telephone number would once again point Kenyan investigators in my general direction. In the end, despairing of getting it right, I walked into an independent bookshop I regularly patronised and asked the owner–a laid-back, gently humorous man who had done me many favours over the years in return for my loyal custom–to fax the letter, hoping he wouldn’t notice its recipient (‘President’s Office, State House, Nairobi’) as it passed through his hands. He was a Jewish émigré’s son. His father had fled the Nazis and saved himself from the concentration camps; I told myself he should understand about life lived under the radar.

  The resignation was splashed across the front pages of Kenya’s newspapers in three-inch capitals the next day, the only topic of conversation on the FM radio stations, morning chat shows and Kenyan websites. ‘STATE HOUSE SHOULD BE CONDEMNED NOW! PARLIAMENT SHOULD BE CLOSED! TAXPAYERS, STOP PAYING YOUR TAXES, IMMEDIATELY!’ ran one typical blogger’s entry. The one that followed quietly summarised the national feeling: ‘Shit.’ Even the international media ran hard with the story, realising this was an event likely to damage relations between the Kenyan government and its new-found foreign friends. After only two years in his post, the living, breathing symbol of Kibaki’s good intentions had thrown in the towel, the shining white knight had fallen off his horse. Who could remember a similar event in African, let alone Kenyan history? Permanent secretaries never surrendered their jobs, they were either ignominiously sacked or, if they were lucky, allowed to present token resignations. Had John resigned in Nairobi, it would already have been remarkable. The fact that he had chosen to do so from self-imposed exile–indicating he believed his life would be in danger if he stayed in Kenya–made it one of the hottest African stories of the year. In Britain’s House of Commons, a Labour MP tabled a private member’s motion expressing his ‘deep concern’, while the missions of the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Japan and Switzerland called in a joint statement for Kibaki to take swift action to restore his government’s credibility.

  In the days
that followed, the Kenyan government mounted a quiet manhunt. As Special Branch descended on John’s house in Nairobi–‘It was just like the old days,’ a friend who lives in the same district later told me, ‘with police cars drawing up in the night, neighbours woken, dogs barking’–staff at the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place scoured London. They checked the addresses of John’s known friends, people he had grown up and gone to school with. Nothing. They canvassed the roads around Victoria Station, an area of cheap lodgings patronised by Africans who can’t afford the top hotels. No luck. No one thought to check the home of Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent of the Financial Times.

  But the pitfalls inherent in a life of deceit were swiftly becoming obvious to me. I’d had colleagues who had crossed the invisible line of journalistic neutrality and become part of their own story, giving succour to African asylum-seekers, paying their legal fees, sneaking money and papers across borders. But it had never happened to me. And, it turned out, I wasn’t much good at this stuff. David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, a veteran of subterfuge, later told me that a cover story only works if prepared ahead of time, its structure and corroborative detail laid down well in advance. But I had had no time to prepare my ‘legend’. I was reacting on the hoof, and within hours, not days, I was tripping myself up.