It's Our Turn to Eat

by Michela Wrong

  Conrad Marc Akunga, who I met in early 2006, was one example of the young iconoclasts springing up in modern Kenyan society. Tall and skinny, with the awkwardness of an overgrown swot, he looks exactly what he is: a computer geek with an instinctive empathy for the world of gigabytes and downloads. A blogger on Kenyan affairs, he met up with Ory Okolloh, a female graduate of Harvard Law School, in the wake of the 2002 elections, as disillusionment set in. Together they decided to set up www.mzalendo.com, a website aiming to make Kenya’s parliament more answerable to voters. One of the incoming MPs’ first acts was to hike their own salaries, making them among the best-paid parliamentarians in the world, let alone Africa. Furious civil society groups pointed out that while the lawmakers benefited from monthly earnings 270 times the average, Kenya’s parliament, in terms of days attended and bills passed, was one of the least productive on the planet. ‘Ory and I used to get together and rant: it was “these guys, these guys, these guys”,’ says Marc. ‘It got to the point where over breakfast one day we agreed to take action. The first thing we needed was information about who “these guys” were.’ Out of the desire to do something other than whinge, the idea for Mzalendo–‘patriot’ in Kiswahili–was born.

  Originally modelled on the Westminster system, Kenya’s 222-seat parliament is in theory transparent to the public. One form this openness is supposed to take is the Kenyan version of Hansard, the written transcript of parliamentary proceedings. In fact, parliamentary officials treat access to Hansard as a privilege rather than a right, and the paper transcript is, of course, of little use to rural voters wanting to know what their MP gets up to in the capital. ‘These guys talk loud in public, but what they do inside that chamber isn’t known,’ says Akunga. ‘Some have never once spoken in parliament. It’s your right, as a voter, to know that.’ The website gave, when it could, profiles of MPs, a rundown of their educational qualifications (often a sensitive subject), details of which committees they sat on and which motions they proposed. It provided telephone numbers and postal addresses, allowing dissatisfied constituents to pester their elected representatives in person.

  Its two founders launched the project with only token assistance from donors. With no staff and no premises, Mzalendo didn’t actually need money, Akunga told me, demanding instead time and commitment. Akunga, whose day job was with a Nairobi software company, provided the technical knowhow. Ory, who had moved to South Africa, focused on content, cajoling parliamentary officials into providing back copies of Hansard.

  Mzalendo, it has to be said, will never be a You Tube favourite–it is far too worthy to make for gripping reading. But in the duo’s eyes, the four-to-six-hundred daily hits the website gets justify its existence. The two hope to counteract what they see as a national tendency to tut-tut briefly over human folly, give a resigned shrug, and move on. It is a characteristic that gave exploiters an easy ride, allowing a small group of players to circulate like soiled clothes in a washing machine. Jumping from party to party, campaigning against policies they championed until recently, politicians rely on general amnesia to survive one scandal after another. ‘Kenyans tend to forget easily and forgive easily; it takes just a few weeks. We hope the website will work against that.’

  Most MPs have done their best to ignore the website. That indifference reinforced Akunga’s cynicism towards lawmakers, who he blames for a steady poisoning of the political climate. ‘If Kenya is ethnically polarised today, it is these guys who are at the root of it. You grow up in Nairobi and you play with everyone and then at university you suddenly start hearing people say, “They’re out to get us.” If the MPs just shut up, we’d sort it out, but instead they keep fanning the flames. Even educated fellows, professors, say the most unsavoury things quite openly. They seem to forget that microphones have memories.’

  The project was an example of how one expectation feeds another, furtive hopes mutating into strident demands as the citizen’s sense of what is his due expands. Akunga got his first heady taste of political activism in the 2002 elections, when the boss of his software company designed a programme to collate the results, a plan hatched to prevent vote-rigging. Party officials rang in from the constituencies with the tallies, and staff immediately typed them into the computer. ‘We worked all through Christmas, working till 4 o’clock in the morning, working so hard we didn’t even have time to go out and vote ourselves,’ recalls Akunga. ‘I remember when the votes came in and we saw the final result, I had this amazing feeling: that we had played our part in bringing that about, we had done our bit. There was this incredible sense of euphoria.’ That intoxicating experience had carried all the emotional force of a religious conversion. Mzalendo.com was Akunga’s attempt to keep the novel sensation of being part of something bigger and better than himself alive.

  Akunga’s irreverence was magnified twenty times in another Kenyan who seemed to represent what was to come. I’d first heard of Caroline Mutoko at a lunch in Muthaiga. A guest was complaining about a verbal lashing a colleague had been subjected to on Kiss FM, one of the capital’s popular radio stations, by what sounded like a razor-tongued virago. A government minister joined in: he too had borne the brunt of the harridan’s ire. He enjoyed a reputation as something of a progressive, so I was surprised to hear him casually mention that he had tried, without success, to persuade Kiss’s management to take the presenter off the air. He shook his head. ‘It’s beyond a joke. She simply goes too far. The woman has to be stopped.’ This Bitch from Hell, I thought, was definitely someone I wanted to meet.

  I told Mutoko the story when I met her, and she gave a mirthless laugh. ‘There’s not a politician who likes me. Not one.’ She shrugs. ‘And I don’t mind. They are all extremely charming when they meet me in person, but I know that behind my back they’re saying: “Oh my God, get her oesophagus.”’

  Manicured, carefully coiffed and sporting the very latest thing in sunglasses–a ‘parasite’ model which clung to the face rather than hooking round the ears–Mutoko carried with her the near-visible aura of celebrity. She is not a big woman, but gives off an air of ineffable self-confidence, much of which can be traced to the timbre of her voice. Many Nairobi broadcasters speak a very Kenyan form of English, with the stress placed on syllables no Briton emphasises. Not Caroline. Her English has the crisp precision of a Kenyan Joanna Lumley, a quality she attributes to the Irish nuns at her school who made their pupils read long passages aloud. As warm as chocolate, low, smooth, self-assured, hers is a voice perfect for radio, letting her listeners know they are among friends.

  It is such a purr that the violence of the sentiments it expresses are doubly shocking. Mutoko talked, over a lit cigarette, about wanting to slap politicians in the face, of being ‘pissed off’ by the powers that be and of ‘butchering’ those who dared repeat ‘the same old crap’ on her programme. Transposed to the airwaves, the approach, in a country hamstrung by etiquette, has won her the status of one of America’s ‘shock jocks’. Like them, she sometimes appals even her most fervent fans. Like them, she is simply too entertaining to miss, and her Big Breakfast Show is one of Kenya’s most popular.

  She’d migrated to Kiss FM after becoming exasperated by the triviality of her job at rival Capital FM, where she was ‘an expert on Robbie Williams, and there was nothing I didn’t know about the Spice Girls’. Neither Capital nor Kiss would exist had it not been for Moi’s reluctant liberalisation of the airwaves in the mid-1990s, a move which marked the waning of the deference my piqued fellow guests in Muthaiga felt was their due. ‘We live in a country where people in power don’t realise they are actually public servants,’ says Mutoko. ‘When you’re a politician in Kenya you’re used to grovel, grovel, “honourable”, “honourable”. You expect to be treated like a demigod, so it’s very hard when people say, “Screw you.” This is a scary time for politicians.’

  Talking to Mutoko, one sensed a roiling, restless fury, a huge impatience finding expression after years of control. She sees herself a
s mouthpiece for an entire nation whose patience has snapped. ‘This country is on such an amazing high it can’t be stopped. Kenya is awakening. I can hear it in the phone calls we get. People ring and say, “This road has been worked on since September, it’s now March”…They call in to bitch about not having water for three days, not having power. That never used to happen before. We’ve become a whole lot more questioning. You can’t sell me shit.’

  Like Mzalendo’s founders, much of Mutoko’s bolshiness lies in her awareness that Kenyans, through their passivity, have contributed to their downfall. ‘Half our problem in the media was that we self-censored. You self-censor and then you wake up one day and realise the way things are is your fault.’

  Convinced that an ossified political class was trailing far behind its public, Mutoko, when I interviewed her in April 2006, was encouraging young people with no previous experience to stand in the next elections. Prospective candidates, including youngsters from Nairobi’s slums, were invited onto Kiss FM to explain their manifestos. It was a high-risk strategy: ‘But I would gamble anything on difference. I already know what your track record is,’ she said, rhetorically addressing a member of the old guard, ‘and it’s crap. Your track record is garbage.’

  A Kamba by birth, Mutoko should in theory have been rooting for Kalonzo Musyoka, former foreign minister, presidential aspirant, and a fellow tribesman. ‘People stand next to me in bars and whisper: “If Musyoka gets in, you know as a Kamba you could get a good position, because it’s our time.”’ In fact, she scorned an approach which would have made a nonsense of the meritocratic principles on which she had based her career. ‘The whole “our time to eat” line is the worst thing that ever happened to Kenya. You’d like to find the first person who ever used it and drive a stake through their heart.’

  It was impossible to separate Mutoko’s political stroppiness from what was, essentially, a feminist itinerary, one that appeared to have largely despaired of the African male. Single and childless, she was immensely proud of the fact that she lived in a house paid for by her salary and boasted a share portfolio built from her earnings. ‘I’m a Nairobi woman who has finally found my feet and my voice. I’m not looking for anyone to complete me.’

  Leaving Mutoko that day, a sudden image came to mind: of a tightrope walker who has never experienced a serious fall, stepping forward without a net. Chin up, back straight, the acrobat gazed into the middle distance, never looking down. ‘The day I give in to the fear, I might as well resign,’ she had told me when I asked about a court case a minister had brought against the station. The velvet-toned presenter, I suddenly realised, was one of the few people I’d met who simply didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word.

  By demanding that Kenya’s multi-party democracy should possess substance as well as form, Mutoko, Akunga, Okolloh and their ilk were taking on an entire school of political thought about Africa. Their convictions challenged those cynics who dismissed John Githongo’s anti-corruption efforts as the naïve projection of inappropriate ‘mzungu’ values onto an African nation where they were doomed to fail. If John was a ‘coconut’, he certainly wasn’t the only coconut in Kenya.

  Could John, then, be relied upon by his colleagues to keep quiet, given what he represented? At first glance the notion of a challenge to the establishment emerging from within the upper class, the very social group that benefited most from the status quo, might seem counterintuitive. But the aristocratic scion who chooses to live as a pauper, the class rebel whose antagonism towards his peers is based on the most intimate of understandings, is a well-established historical phenomenon. Discussing why someone of John’s lofty caste might choose a ‘deviant’ path, Dr Tom Wolf, a US analyst living in Kenya, cites the examples of Lenin and Fidel Castro, ‘both from well-established, upper-middle-class families…who nevertheless re-engineered themselves into the most ferocious of revolutionaries’. Mahatma Gandhi came from a long line of statesmen, Che Guevara was of aristocratic descent, John and Robert Kennedy were born into a family of immense wealth, much of it shadily acquired. Growing up close to power, Wolf argues, probably ensured that John was ‘less in awe of those wielding it’ than a Kenyan contemporary from a more humble background, anxious to assimilate. ‘In that sense, his “class” heritage encouraged independence of thought and action, rather than sycophantic loyalty.’ ‘Less in awe’ is putting it mildly. ‘Generational contempt’ might be a more accurate term. ‘My parents’ generation are the reason we are in a mess,’ Mugo Githongo, John’s brother, once told me. ‘We have nothing to learn from them.’

  There was also a specifically Kikuyu shape to John’s revolt, and it took outright oedipal form. With the oil crunch of the 1970s and 1980s, which coincided with Moi’s abandonment of any attempt to win the acceptance of the business elite, many Kikuyu heads of families lost their jobs. Patriarchs who had grown fat on the cream of the Kenyatta regime, bragging about their deals in the bar, suddenly found themselves out of work, disrespected at home and with time on their hands. ‘In the Kikuyu community you are raised hearing ponderous voices saying “the family is this, the family is that”. But as you grow there’s a straining of the social contract, it begins to crack,’ says Martin Kimani. ‘You become aware of this tension in the house, this anger between your mother and father.’ Just as Kikuyu women took the helm in the absence of their menfolk during the Mau Mau Emergency, these church-going mothers came to the family’s rescue. Working as nurses, running milk-trading schemes and sewing circles, they counted the pennies as their husbands wasted pounds on beer, mistresses–who gave the men the respect they no longer received at home–and deals that failed to miraculously revive the family fortunes.

  Kikuyu sons, who traditionally enjoy a special bond with their mothers, absorbed their anger at wastrel husbands, the humiliation as rumours of girlfriends and illegitimate children drifted back to the family home. Like doting gangster bosses who send their daughters to convent schools, only to be horrified when the girls turn judgemental on them, many Kikuyu fathers endured the final irony of seeing their offspring turn against them, rejecting their entire code of behaviour. ‘The generation that sent its sons to schools where they got a good Catholic education were hoist by their own petard. The NGO values, the desire to build a better, more virtuous Kenya, were all sown at home,’ says Kimani. ‘It’s a very complex family drama.’ The children in these families often only grasped the full extent of a paterfamilias’s perfidy at his funeral, when they would discover, standing at the graveside, a previously unknown second family, complete with second widow, grieving children and claims to the estate.

  If these were some of the broad trends that meant John’s allegiance could not be taken for granted, there were also some simple pragmatic reasons why a man of his background might choose to act with unprecedented recklessness.

  Under both Kenyatta and Moi, the government’s hold on the Kenyan economy–whether in terms of civil service jobs, parastatal posts or contracts up for grabs–was so vast that alienating the president virtually meant financial ruin, as Joe Githongo and many Kikuyu entrepreneurs knew only too well. You could be firmly entrenched in the private sector and still be crushed by the hostility of the powers that be. Centralised systems of power are like onions: each layer faithfully mimics the core. Make an enemy in the top echelons of government, and business mysteriously dried up, public tenders no longer went your way, your goods took an age to clear customs, your phones were never connected and the tax inspectors took a sudden, obsessive interest in your accounts. There was simply no getting away from State House. Fall foul of the president or one of his cronies and the only thing to do was to hide yourself away and pray for either a change of regime, however long that took, or eventual forgiveness.

  Scoured by the brisk winds of economic liberalisation in the 1980s, the Kenyan state shrivelled. Once a bright graduate would have automatically regarded a job in a government ministry, with its grading structure, pension scheme and subsidised h
ousing, as the summit of his ambitions. Although structural adjustment reforms were often met with horrified cries from the likes of Oxfam and Christian Aid, the expansion of the private sector, the birth of a vibrant civil society and the blossoming of the media opened up a range of interesting new job opportunities. Who cared about keeping on the right side of State House when it was possible to join a South African research institute, work for a Nairobi-based multinational, or set up an NGO to garner well-paid consultancy work for foreign donors? John’s experience at Transparency International had taught him there was life outside the state sector. Joining government had been a choice, not a necessity. What was more, the lucky fact of his birth in the United Kingdom meant that he enjoyed automatic residency there, and could work anywhere in Europe. That prospect seemed intriguing rather than appalling to a man who felt himself to be a citizen of the world. In the shape of John Githongo, the Mount Kenya Mafia was dealing with the first generation of Kenyans whose members were financially free to follow the dictates of their conscience.

  And then there were the individual peculiarities of the man himself. Ever since his childhood, John had come under huge pressure from those he loved: to excel academically, to join the family firm, to get married to a nice Kenyan girl, have kids, get involved in politics. He had ducked and swerved with skill, charting a highly individual path through the expectations of others. As a result he found himself that strangest of beings: a forty-year-old African bachelor with neither wife, household nor children. By the conventional standards of macho Kenyan society, John Githongo was weird, little short of a freak. In pre-colonial Kikuyu society, where only those regarded as having achieved something of lasting worth in their lives were honoured with burial, the bodies of unmarried men were carried outside the homestead and left for hyenas to devour. Dying incomplete, they might never have existed. Yet John was willing to defy those norms rather than neglect what really made his heart beat faster: the life of the mind.