It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ noticing the trend, soon coined a phrase for this circle, the real power behind the throne. ‘The Mount Kenya Mafia’, it called them, a reference to the mountain that dominates Central Province. The phrase was to prove more apposite than anyone could have guessed at the time.

      The group's influence was swiftly felt in a vital area. A new constitution had been one of the key promises NARC had made to an electorate exasperated at the way in which Kenya's colonial-era document had been repeatedly amended to place ever greater power in the president's hands. Kibaki had also, it emerged, secretly signed a memorandum of understanding with his NARC partners promising, amongst other things, that fiery Luo leader Raila Odinga would be given the post of executive prime minister under a future dispensation. Incapacitated by his car accident, Kibaki had depended on Raila to do his heavy lifting during the election campaign, and the younger man had done so indefatigably. The prime minister's post was to have been his reward. It was a promise that implied a radical trimming of powers in favour of a tribe that Kibaki's Kikuyu community had, since the days of Jomo Kenyatta and Raila's late father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, regarded as its greatest rival. After decades of marginalisation, during which they had seen their leaders assassinated, jailed and exiled, the thwarted Luos were itching to come in from the cold.

      But now, with Kibaki looking like the weak old man he was, all promises were off. The Mount Kenya Mafia felt too vulnerable for magnanimity. The very same men who had, as members of the opposition, tirelessly denounced a document that skewed the playing field in Moi's favour, suddenly found there was much to be said for this tilted arrangement. A national conference convened to hammer out the modern arrangement Kenya needed ground to a halt, as Kibaki's key ministers proposed changes that would, if anything, concentrate even more power in their man's hands. The Kibaki delegation would eventually storm out of the talks at the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village, and unveil a draft constitution which bore little relation to what had originally been proposed. The setting aside of ethnic rivalries, hailed as marking the Kenyan political class's coming of age, had outlived the elections only by a paltry couple of months. No sooner had the Mount Kenya Mafia climbed the ladder than they were kicking frantically away at it to ensure no one came up behind.

      In State House, the process of ethnic polarisation was palpable. Since starting his new job, John had made a conscious effort during working hours to use Kiswahili – the national language – not Gikuyu, as would feel natural with tribal kinsmen. He knew how easily non-Kikuyu colleagues could be made to feel boxed out. The Mount Kenya Mafia showed no such restraint, finding his self-discipline quaintly amusing. ‘We know you have a problem with this, John,’ they would laugh, lapsing into a throaty barrage of Gikuyu. John would shake his head at the message conveyed. ‘I used to warn them: “This talk will fix us.”’ He noticed how mono-ethnic State House had become. ‘When meetings took place, they would all be people from the same area. All the key jobs were held by home boys.’ The old tribal rivalry had returned – or rather, John realised, it had never actually gone away. ‘With the collapse of Bomas I realised we had never been serious about power sharing. Kiraitu Murungi, the very man who had written about the problem of ethnicity, was the first to use the term “these Jaluos” in my presence.’

      At a formal dinner in London several years later, I found myself discussing with John and a British peer of the realm, in light-hearted vein, what were the little signs that betrayed the fact that once-reformist African governments had lost their way. ‘My measure is the time a person who's agreed to an appointment keeps you waiting,’ said the Lord. ‘If it's half an hour or under, things are still on track; more than half an hour and the place is in trouble.’

      I quoted a journalist friend who maintained that the give-away was the moment a president added an extra segment to his name – ‘Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, ‘Daniel Torotich arap Moi’ – but added that I regarded the size of the presidential motorcade as the tell-tale indication that the rot had set in.

      John had been silent till then. Now he suddenly spoke up. ‘How about the time it takes for the man in charge to get a gold Rolex?’

      ‘But surely Kibaki already had a gold Rolex?’ I asked, surprised.

      ‘Yes, but this was a brand-new one. Very slim, with a black face and diamonds round the edge. It was so new it hadn't yet been measured to size, and it dangled off his wrist. That's why I noticed it, because it didn't fit.’

      ‘So, then, how long did it take?’

      ‘Just three months,’ John said, with a grim shake of the head. ‘Just three months.’

       6 Pulling the Serpent's Tail

      ‘KANU handed us a skunk and we took it home as a pet.’

      JOHN GITHONGO¹⁷

      In April 2004, Kenyan MP Maoka Maore received a mysterious phone call telling him that if he visited a fellow MP from the tea-producing area of Limuru, he might find some interesting paperwork there.

      Maore would subsequently discover that at least five other MPs were already in possession of the same documents, which someone – almost certainly a disgruntled corporate executive – was energetically leaking. Fearful of the implications, none had acted. But Maore, a cheerful scallywag with a taste for the limelight, was made of more daring stuff. Proud of the role he had played in a 1994 exposé of kickbacks paid during the construction of an airport in Moi's home town, he boasted that his name struck fear in government circles. Expose one scandal, he had discovered, and all sorts of people will approach you with incendiary information about others.

      The tip-off whetted his appetite. Rumours had been swirling around the Kibaki government for months, involving the procurement of AK47s, handcuffs and police cars. An administration which had vowed to crack down on graft had itself, it was said, begun ‘eating’. Once he got his hands on the papers, he immediately tabled them in parliament, not entirely certain himself what they revealed.

      The first document was a copy of a 2002 tender opened up by the previous government to supply Kenya with a computerised passport printing and lamination system. Nothing strange there – in the wake of Al Qaeda's 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, Washington had been pressing Kenya, seen as a soft target for Islamic extremists filtering in from Somalia, to upgrade its passport system and better monitor its borders. The highest bid for that tender had been made by De La Rue, a British company, while the lowest came from Face Technologies, an American firm. What was strange, if the second document Maore tabled was to be believed, was that the tender had gone to neither. A payment voucher showed a Central Bank down-payment to a British rival called Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Limited.

      This contract, which had never been put out to competitive tender, was a bloated, murky thing. For one thing, it was worth $34 million, nearly three and a half times as much as the lowest bid made back in 2002, which the government would ordinarily be expected to accept. What was more, the company awarded the contract, Maore reminded colleagues in the House, hardly boasted a savoury reputation. Six years earlier, under the former KANU government, Anglo Leasing had been blacklisted for supplying Kenya's police force with overpriced Mahindra jeeps – ‘a cross-breed between a tortoise and a snail’, in the words of a local newspaper – which broke down so regularly the police became a laughing stock. It looked as if officials at the ministry of home affairs had approved a contract inflated to the tune of at least $20 million. The whole deal gave off a sour, suspicious smell.

      As far as the public was concerned, Maore's parliamentary question marked the start of the Anglo Leasing affair, the Kenyan equivalent of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex. СКАЧАТЬ