It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ