It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

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      So when Kenya, in the latter part of the Moi era, appeared to veer off course, the world pricked up its ears. Moi, admittedly, had been nothing like as crudely predatory as Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, Togo's Gnassingbe Eyadema or Cameroon's Paul Biya – contemporaries all. But as diplomats repeatedly told government officials smarting at their criticisms: ‘We hold Kenya to higher standards than other countries.’ And when measured against what it could have become, rather than against neighbouring basket cases, Kenya, by the turn of the century, was beginning to look desperately unimpressive, the model pupil turning sullen delinquent. The end of the Cold War, which had transformed the prospects of so many African states devastated by the superpowers' proxy wars, had delivered no obvious dividend here. Hopeful talk of an emerging group of ‘Renaissance’ leaders who would find ‘African solutions to African problems’ did not include Kenya, weltering in a political, economic and moral miasma. Once ranked a middle-income country, Kenya lagged towards the bottom of the international league tables, its early potential unfulfilled. At independence in 1963, average per capita income had been level with that of Malaysia; now Malaysia's was ten times as high.

      Moi liked to be known as the Professor of Politics, and the man dismissed by his enemies as a ‘passing cloud’ when he succeeded Kenyatta in 1978 had proved a remarkable survivor, riding out a shift to multi-party politics that many had assumed would unseat him. Yet in the process he had pauperised many of his thirty million citizens, of whom 55 per cent now lived on less than a dollar a day. In Nairobi's sprawling slums, the largest and most sordid in Africa, Western-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) provided basic services, not the state, of which nothing was expected. When Kenya marked forty years of independence in 2003, newspaper cartoonists could not resist highlighting the cruel trick history had played on the country. They captured its itinerary in a series of chronological snapshots: in the first, an ordinary Kenyan in a neat suit and shined shoes stands sulking under white colonial rule. In the second, a free man under Kenyatta leaps for joy, but his suit is beginning to look distinctly tatty. By the Moi era, the emaciated mwananchi is crawling, not walking. His suit is in tatters, he has lost his shoes, and, eyes crazed, he is begging for alms. The statistics made the same point, in drier fashion: living standards in the independent, sovereign state of Kenya were actually lower than when the hated British ruled the roost.

      Kenya might well boast, by African standards, a large middle class, but the gap between that group and those eking out a living in its teeming slums was the stuff of revolution. ‘Kenya is now one of the most disappointing performers in sub-Saharan Africa,’ ran an editorial in my own newspaper, the Financial Times, the day after the 2002 election. ‘There is barely an economic or social indicator that does not testify to the country's decline.’² Given that Kenya had never experienced a civil war, never been invaded, and had started out with so much in its favour, the fault must lie elsewhere. And everyone agreed where: in a system of corruption and patronage so ingrained, so greedy it was gradually throttling the life from the country.

      Whether expressed in the petty bribes the average Kenyan had to pay each week to fat-bellied policemen and local councillors, the jobs for the boys doled out by civil servants and politicians on strictly tribal lines, or the massive scams perpetrated by the country's ruling elite, sleaze had become endemic. ‘Eating’, as Kenyans dubbed the gorging on state resources by the well-connected, had crippled the nation. In the corruption indices drawn up by the anti-graft organisation Transparency International, Kenya routinely trailed near the bottom in the 1990s, viewed as only slightly less sleazy than Nigeria or Pakistan. From the increasingly strained relations between the country's tribes to the rising anger of its prospectless youth, Kenya exemplified many of Africa's most intractable problems.

      Which is why so many eyes now rested on Kibaki and his NARC government. If they could get it right on corruption, if Kenya could only find its way, then perhaps there was hope for the rest of the continent. Post-apartheid South Africa, post-military Nigeria and a revived Kenya could come to form the three points of a geographical triangle of success establishing Africa on firm, unshakeable foundations.

      The first announcements the new president made after unveiling his cabinet continued to send out the right signals. A brand-new post – Permanent Secretary in Charge of Governance and Ethics – was being created, Kibaki said. This anti-corruption champion, Kenya's version of Eliot Ness, would run a unit working out of State House and enjoying direct access to the president's office. And that key job was going to someone who seemed tailor-made for the role, a young, energetic Kenyan who had dedicated his considerable talents to the fight against graft. He just happened to be an old friend of mine.

      I had known John Githongo since moving to Nairobi in the mid-1990s, when he was an up-and-coming columnist and I was the Financial Times's Africa correspondent. Kenya's newspapers were good, among Africa's best, but their columnists suffered from parochialism. They didn't travel the region, they had little sense of Africa's position in the world, they sounded uncertain when tackling international issues. John, who wrote a think piece for the EastAfrican, a business weekly owned by the Aga Khan's Nation Media Group, was different. He had studied abroad, had travelled his own continent and had a sound grasp of geopolitics. His vision was sophisticated, his instincts compassionate, and he had the good journalist's ability, using colourful anecdote, to make complex arguments accessible to the ordinary reader. Limpid and articulate, his columns commanded one's attention, like a clear voice carrying across a room of cocktail chatterers.

      I asked him to lunch. A giant walked in. ‘The Wrestler’, he would later be dubbed by staff at Kroll, the London-based risk consultancy group. But for most of us, the tag that automatically sprang to mind on first meeting was ‘the Big Man’. Standing well over six feet, he had girth as well as height, the fifty-eight-inch chest and massive shoulders of the gym habitué, the V-shaped silhouette of a comic-book superhero. He was a gift to any caricaturist, but this exaggerated outline was built of muscle, not fat – squeezing one of those rounded shoulders in greeting was like kneading a well-pumped football: the fingertips left no impression behind. It was a bully's physique, but no bully ever walked with his tentative, splay-footed step, the step of a man anxious not to tread on smaller mortals milling below. He wore his hair very short, snipped to virtual baldness to reveal a bull neck and a formidable jaw, something of a family feature. Faces in the Githongo family, I would later discover, had the all-weather implacability of Easter Island sculptures. He was a Kikuyu, but his enemies would later claim that he didn't look as though he belonged: too big, too tall, too dark. He photographed supremely badly – I never saw a photograph of John that made him look anything but stolid, loutish, slightly thick. Still only in his thirties, he looked older than his years, thanks to the receding hairline, deep baritone and seeming gravitas. In fact, John was prone to fits of the giggles. An inveterate conspiracy theorist, intrigued by tales of plots and subterfuge, he loved a meaty gossip. ‘Is that SO? Is that SOOO?’ he would whisper in fascination on being passed a nugget of clandestine information, mouth forming a round ‘O’ of wonder, eyes growing big as he dwelt on some VIP's quirk of character, or the little-known story behind some public political clash. And it was hard to think of anything, or anyone, that didn't interest his questing mind. Blessed with insatiable curiosity, he gobbled up experiences and insights in the same way he embraced new acquaintances.

      He returned my lunch invitation by asking me along to a meeting of the Wednesday debating group, a serious affair where earnest young men in suits discussed topical issues. After that we saw each other only sporadically, but it always felt like time well spent. There was no hint of anything romantic, nor would there ever be. John was simply one of the most intellectually impressive young Africans I'd met, and each encounter left me optimistic for the country's future.

      These were the days when Kenya's opposition parties were trying to get a constitution weighted in Moi's favour changed. Mounted on horseback, the dreaded GSU, Darth Vader-like in shields and helmets, charged supporters who dared defy a ban on public rallies, lashing out with truncheons and pick-axe handles. I remember СКАЧАТЬ