It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

The Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s finally exposed the unsustain-ability of the colonial carve-up. In the run-up to independence in 1963, the regulations that had shaped a sense of separate identity were scrapped, as Africans were granted the right to grow what crops they pleased, to buy land outside the reserves, and to campaign on national issues. But ethnic straitjackets, once tailored, cannot so easily be unstitched. Like so many black leaders of the 1960s, first president Jomo Kenyatta dedicated his energies not to overturning but to inheriting the system left behind by the colonial powers. Only this time it would be his Kikuyu ethnic group, rather than Kenya’s departing white tribe, that would benefit from the ‘matunda ya uhuru’–the fruits of independence. While generously helping himself–he taunted former Mau Mau veteran Bildad Kaggia for having so little to show for his liberation war–he made sure his Kikuyu kinsmen got served first when it came to constituency funding, procurement contracts and white-collar jobs in the administration. The fact that no single tribe accounted for more than about a fifth of Kenya’s population meant marriages of convenience with at least two other large ethnic groups were always necessary. But priorities were clear. ‘My people have the milk in the morning, your tribes the milk in the afternoon,’ the president told non-Kikuyu ministers who complained.

  When Moi took over on Kenyatta’s death in 1978, the approach was perpetuated. Because his Kalenjin ethnic grouping was a smaller, more diverse and less economically powerful group than the Kikuyu, Moi was forced to draw the magic circle a little wider. But Moi’s focus remained his own tribesmen, who suddenly found key jobs in the civil service, the army and state-owned companies that had hitherto been closed to them. Ask middle-aged Kenyans today what they consider the root causes of their generation’s ethnic wariness, and most point to the education quotas introduced in 1985, which obliged schools to take 85 per cent of their pupils from the local area. The policy was aimed at improving educational standards amongst the Kalenjin, but its impact was to erect even higher walls between communities. Under Kenyatta, at least the tribes learnt mutual tolerance in the playground and classroom. Under Moi, the first time a member of one tribe rubbed up against another was often at university, by which time prejudices had already taken root.

  Bullied by Western donors into introducing multi-party politics in 1992, the leader who had done so much to entrench ethnic rivalry presented himself as a national unifier attempting to keep his population’s primitive urges in check. ‘The multi-party system has split the country into tribal groupings. I am surprised that Western countries believe in the Balkanisation of Africa…Tribal roots go much deeper than the shallow flower of democracy.’ But if Moi had wilfully reversed cause and effect, he was correct in predicting that the new politics, built on a foundation of rivalry laid by his predecessor and himself, would take ethnic shape. In competitive political systems, argues Paul Collier, parties look for the easiest way to establish their superiority in voters’ eyes. Providing services like health, schools and roads is one way of winning approval, but such things are very hard to deliver. Another way is to play the ethnic identity card: ‘And that,’ says Collier, ‘is incredibly easy.’

  Analyst Gerard Prunier has christened Kenya’s post-independence system of rule a form of ‘ethno-elitism’.7 A pattern of competing ethnic elites, rotating over time, was established which made a mockery of the notion of equal opportunity. This was viewed as a zero-sum game, with one group’s gain inevitably entailing another’s loss. In Francophone Africa, the approach is captured in one pithy phrase: ‘Ote-toi de la, que je m’y mette’–‘Shift yourself, so I can take your place.’ In Anglophone Africa, the expression is cruder, bringing to mind snouts rooting in troughs: ‘It’s our turn to eat.’ Given how unfairly resources had been distributed under one ethnically-biased administration after another, starting with the white settlers, each succeeding regime felt justified in being just as partisan–it was only redressing the balance, after all. The new incumbent was expected to behave like some feudal overlord, stuffing the civil service with his tribesmen and sacking those from his predecessor’s region. When no one shows magnanimity, generosity dries up across the board.

  It’s actually possible to quantify the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ approach in terms of parliamentary seats, ministerial positions and jobs in the state sector, as each regime doled out appointments to those deemed in the fold. According to one study, during the Kenyatta era, the Kikuyu, who accounted for 20.8 per cent of the population, claimed between 28.6 and 31.6 per cent of cabinet seats–far more than their fair share–while the Kalenjin, accounting for 11.5 per cent of the population, held only between 4.8 and 9.6 per cent. With Moi’s arrival, the Kikuyu share of cabinet posts fell to just 4 per cent, while the Kalenjin’s share soared to 22 per cent. It was a similar story with permanent secretaries, where the Kikuyu went from 37.5 per cent under Kenyatta to 8.7 per cent under Moi, while the Kalenjin went from 4.3 per cent to 34.8 per cent.8

  In theory, of course, a particular ethnic group could hold the lion’s share of key government jobs without it distorting national policy. In fact, the entire arrangement was premised on the pork-barrel principle. Hoeing their Central Province plots in bare feet and ragged hand-me-downs, a minister’s constituents might feel they had little, individually, to show for their community’s pole position. The top men stood at the apex of frustratingly inefficient pyramids of dispersal. But what was the alternative? ‘The grassroots perception is, if we elect a member of our elite, he can at least talk to the elites of the other tribes,’ says Haroun Ndubi, a human rights campaigner. ‘People will say: “This is someone who can speak English with the others.”’ And if a local hero consistently failed to pass at least a fraction of what came his way along the chain, he could expect to be unceremoniously dumped come the next election.

  The difference being on the right side made was illustrated when the ministry for roads and public works published estimates for spending on road-building in July 2006. Regions whose MPs formed part of Kibaki’s inner circle got far more than was allocated to areas whose leaders were in opposition. Once Nairobi and the tourist hub represented by the Maasai Mara were excluded, allocations to the home constituencies of vocal government critics were nearly 320 times less generous than those to constituencies of trusted presidential aides.9 The parliamentarians made some barbed remarks when this extraordinary gap was exposed, but passed the road budget without amendment. This, they knew, was the way the game was played.

  Where does each individual draw the limits of his or her compassion, beyond which duties of kindness, generosity and personal obligation no longer apply? I was raised in a household where my parents drew them in totally different places, according to their very different characters and backgrounds.

  As an Italian, my mother grew up in a country whose government had given birth to Fascism, formed a discreditable pact with Hitler, and launched itself on a series of unnecessary wars which left Italy occupied and battle-scarred. There then followed a seemingly endless series of short-lived, sleaze-ridden administrations. The experience left her utterly cynical about officialdom. Although she dutifully voted in every election, the malevolence of the system was taken for granted, and she would happily have lied and cheated in any encounter with the state had she believed she could get away with it. But no one worked harder for her fellow man, for in the place of the state she maintained her own support network. An instinctive practitioner of what sociologists call ‘the economics of affection’, my mother had a circle of compassion drawn to include a collection of needy and lonely acquaintances. She visited their council flats bearing cakes, sent amusing press cuttings to their prison cells, queued at the gates of their psychiatric hospitals. Hers was a world of one-on-one interactions, in which obligations, duties, morality itself, took strictly personal form, and were no less onerous for it. The glow she radiated was life-enhancing, but its light only stretched so far, and beyond lay utter darkness. Protecting one’s own was vital, for life had taught her that the
world outside would show no mercy. She was not alone in her ability to get things done without the state’s involvement. ‘Il mio sistema’ Italians call it: ‘my system’. Italy is, after all, the birthplace of the Mafia, the ultimate of personal ‘sisteme’, and my mother’s mindset was instinctively mafioso.

  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–includi
ng 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.