It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anti-corruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is “eating”, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.’

      Among the many calls John received in those hectic days, as excited friends rang to congratulate him, one was more sobering than the rest. It was from Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who, after years in opposition, was taken on by Moi in the late 1990s to reform Kenya's civil service. Leakey was no stranger to adversity – he had been hounded by the security forces, bore the scars on his back from a vicious police whipping, had lost his legs in a plane crash some suspected of being a botched act of sabotage. An experienced scrapper, his efforts to clean up the public sector had nevertheless eventually been rendered futile by Moi's Machiavellian strategies. ‘If you can pull it off, wonderful,’ Leakey told John. ‘But be careful. This is a tough one.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.

      After that, we rarely met. I was busy writing a book in London, John was a man in a hurry. After a lull, I started getting the occasional, worrying bulletin: he had made some powerful enemies, and travelled around Nairobi with two bodyguards; new scandals were surfacing; John had been moved sideways, then reinstated. That didn't sound good. It got worse: a journalist friend returning from Nairobi said John had told him that ‘if anything happened’ he had left instructions for both of us to be sent certain packages, an ominous sign if ever there was one. And his hitherto unblemished reputation was taking its first hits. Nairobi's chattering classes were complaining that the anti-corruption chief wasn't delivering. Whether through ignorance or impotence, they said, he was complicit in the new government's misdemeanours. He was going down the route the cynics had always traced for him, from superhero to flawed mortal.

      Then, on a visit to Kenya in late 2004, John joined a meal I was having in a French restaurant with four Western correspondents, veteran Africa writers all. His arrival was a welcome surprise, for John – always prone to the last-minute cancellation – had become outrageously unreliable since joining government, as notorious for his no-shows as a Hollywood diva.

      ‘So, John, when are you going to resign?’ asked one of my colleagues, and John chuckled ruefully, shaking his head in defeat.

      As we prepared to leave, I turned to him on sudden impulse. He had not said as much, but under the ebullient cheerfulness that was his customary public face, I thought I glimpsed a certain dismay. He seemed buffeted, a man no longer in control of his destiny.

      ‘I've just moved into a larger flat in London, John, with a separate guest room. If you ever need a base’ – the phrase ‘bolt hole’ was on the tip of my tongue – ‘somewhere to rest up, just give me a call.’

      The response came a few months later. A call from Davos, where John was attending the World Economic Forum. ‘I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of a room?’ He gave no hint of how long he planned to stay or why he needed a place for the night when presumably, as a government VIP, he enjoyed the pick of London hotels. When he called again, this time from Oslo, where he was attending a conference, I asked whether his visit was something I could mention to journalist friends in London, always keen to see him. ‘Er … Probably best not. If you don't mind, just keep it to yourself for now.’

      Something, clearly, was up. And on the morning of 6 February 2005, when the capital was wrapped in a cold white cocoon, he arrived on the doorstep of my London flat, let in by a genteel elderly lady from down the hall who seemed, to John's quiet amusement, to find nothing remotely suspicious about a huge black man in a KGB-style black leather jacket, herding a pile of luggage so large it was clear that this would be no weekend stay. As he deposited the various bags in my guest room, which suddenly looked very small and cramped, John's mobile phones trilled and vibrated, like a chorus of caged starlings. How many did he actually have: three? four? more? He asked for a glass of fruit juice, took a deep breath, and gathered his thoughts.

      ‘One of the first things I need to do,’ he said, ‘is resign.’

      He was on the run, he told me. In best espionage style, he had summoned two taxis to the London hotel where he had been staying with Justice Aaron Ringera, head of Kenya's Anti-Corruption Commission, paid one to drive off in any direction and taken the second. Whatever I might have fondly liked to think, his appearance on my doorstep at this moment of crisis was scarcely a tribute to the intimacy of our friendship. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was there precisely because so few people in Kenya knew we had ever been friends.

      ‘They told me it was them,’ he said, pacing the floor. ‘These ministers, my closest colleagues, sat there and told me to my face that they, they were the ones doing the stealing. Once they said that, I knew I had to go.’

       2 An Unexpected Guest

      ‘If you're walking in the savannah and a lion attacks, climb a thorn tree and wait there for a while.’

      Kamba proverb

      He came bearing toxic material. A nervous tremor scurried along my spine as he explained that he had done the unthinkable, wiring himself for sound in classic police informer style, taping the self-incriminating conversations of the ministers who were supposed to be his trusted workmates. The explosive contents of those recordings had been systematically downloaded onto his computer, which now sat quietly in my spare bedroom. ‘It might be an idea,’ he said, ‘for me to find a third party to take the computer while I work out what I'm going to do.’

      Suddenly, I was plunged into an unfamiliar world – of covering my tracks, watching what I said. In this world of subterfuge, even the simplest procedure grew vastly complex. Sitting at my computer, John wasted no time in typing out his resignation letter. He drafted it slowly and carefully. While he did not want to give anything away that might constrain his actions later on, he was also determined to make it clear to the careful reader – and he knew State House, the intelligence services and the media would be analysing every word – that he was not leaving happy in the knowledge of a job well done. There would be no ‘spending more time with my family’ clichés. The circumstances of his resignation alone, announced on a one-way trip into exile, must at this stage do the rest for him, sending a damning message about the true nature of the NARC regime.

      He was in a hurry to cross that Rubicon; the letter needed to be faxed immediately to State House. But whose fax machine to use? If I used my own, his location would immediately be revealed. My parents' fax would be no better – given my family's unusual surname, it would immediately lead anyone with half a brain back to me. Nearby Camden Town was full of little newsagents willing to fax documents for customers. But in my experience, most were run by sulky Asian shopkeepers who had no truck with international calls. In any case, a Camden Town telephone number would once again point Kenyan investigators in my general direction. In the end, despairing of getting it right, I walked into an independent bookshop I regularly patronised and asked the owner – a laid-back, gently humorous man who had done me many favours over the years in return for my loyal custom – to fax the letter, hoping he wouldn't notice its recipient (‘President's Office, State House, Nairobi’) as it passed through his hands. He was a Jewish émigré's son. His father had fled the Nazis and saved himself from the concentration camps; I told myself he should understand about life lived under the radar.

      The resignation was splashed across the front pages of Kenya's newspapers in three-inch capitals the next day, the only topic of conversation on the FM radio stations, morning chat shows and Kenyan websites. ‘STATE HOUSE SHOULD BE CONDEMNED NOW! PARLIAMENT SHOULD BE CLOSED! TAXPAYERS, STOP PAYING YOUR TAXES, IMMEDIATELY!’ ran one typical blogger's entry. The one that followed quietly summarised the national СКАЧАТЬ