It's Our Turn to Eat (26 page)

It was not a question, in Clay's view, of cutting aid. More subtle weapons were available, as his own high commission and the American embassy would later demonstrate when they started refusing visas to Kenyan politicians who saw shopping expeditions to Harrods and weekends in Manhattan as a right. The public humiliation cut the likes of Chris Murungaru to the quick. It was a question of engaging forcefully with the government and making clear, loudly and tactlessly if necessary, that Britain expected more than lip service from its African partners in the war on graft. It expected, at the very least, not to have to discuss development with ministers widely suspected of having had their fingers in the pie. ‘We should be less niminy-piminy and say what we think.' If he felt he owed it to British taxpayers, Clay also felt beholden to the Kenyans he met. Given the dangers faced by those trying to make government accountable–arrest, raids by the security services, legal writs–keeping quiet undermined those attempting to reshape their own societies, the very individuals donors claimed to want to encourage.

Most Kenyans blithely assumed that if the British high commissioner said something, it represented British policy, a thought-through position running from one end of government to the other, like the lettering in a stick of Brighton rock. Not so. Jarring with the upbeat mood music in the run-up to Gleneagles, Clay's call for a tough line on Kenyan graft set him at odds with DfID, his own bosses and a Downing Street operation famous for its control freakery. Tony Blair's administration was not one in which individual departments were supposed to break free from their moorings. Unbeknownst to Clay, Vomit One had already triggered an exasperated outburst in the unit drawing up the Africa Commission report, preparing to tout the line that a reformed continent was perfectly placed to benefit from increased aid. ‘Who is this guy?' spluttered an appalled senior Treasury official involved in its drafting. ‘Why aren't they reining him in?' No one wanted a repeat. The issue was not ‘scaleable', Clay was told by his superiors, meaning events on his patch could not be used as fodder for overarching government policy. ‘We were running up to
the Year of Africa and they didn't want someone pissing on their parade.'

 

The British New Year's Honours List for 2005 contained a knighthood for Clay, the ultimate compliment from an appreciative government. But he was becoming a little too pungent for his peers, both in London and in Kenya. Attending a conference on corruption in Nairobi a few months earlier, an event which attracted the usual crowd of badge-wearing NGO representatives, diplomatic envoys and Kenyan government ministers, I was nudged in the ribs by a journalist friend. He pointed to where Clay sat towards the back of the hall, looking determinedly cheerful but very much on his own. Arriving diplomats greeted him, but chose to sit elsewhere. It was as though he was possessed of an invisible aura repelling incoming bodies. ‘Look. No one wants to be associated with him now. He's become radioactive.'

He gritted his teeth and ploughed on, ignoring London's heavy hints. ‘I was doing the right job, with excellent material. I was buggered if I was going to be co-produced from abroad.' On 2 February 2005, Sir Edward chose a press awards ceremony funded by Britain as the occasion for Vomit Two. The ceremony at the Hotel Intercontinental, meant to recognise Kenya's investigative reporting, became an exercise in irony. Mutterings of embezzlement circulated the tables as it emerged that two competing lists of prize-winners existed. Vice president Moody Awori had graced the event with his presence, and the organisers must have sensed what was coming, for they did all they could to curtail Sir Edward's performance, packing the programme with extra speakers and knocking on the podium as he delivered his speech to try to bring it to a close. If Vomit One had marked a general sounding of the alarm, Vomit Two, Clay's second salvo in six months, was far more specific. His team had done their homework.

The ‘unpleasing substance' he had previously cited remained firmly stuck to the shoes of both Kenyans and the donors, Sir Edward told his audience. He had therefore handed to the Kenyan authorities
details of twenty suspect procurement deals. What all these arrangements shared was the customer–usually ‘the good old OP' (Office of the President)–and a certain kind of businessman. ‘At the back of all these questionable deals is a type of man whose companies travel under many colours and names, but who goes on, apparently forever. He is a man for all seasons of governments. He can find receptive palms in every political party, but you should count your fingers after you shake his hand. He finds changes of government no more alarming than changing his shirt. He has plenty of them; unlike poor Kenyans who lose their shirts.' As for apologising for Vomit One, he declared, in full Edith Piaf mode, that he regretted only three things about it: not having spoken earlier, underestimating the scale of the looting, and the moderation of his language. He concluded with a parody of another famous children's poem, this time T.S. Eliot's ‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat'.

It was another Clay barnstormer. Sir Edward's manner of expressing himself might have been as florid as ever, but he had clearly grasped the fundamentals of the Anglo Leasing deals: that they formed a continuum stretching across the 2002 elections; that Moi's elite had passed its appetites, habits and–most importantly–sleazy business contacts smoothly on to Kibaki's set.

The government frothed. A furious minister accused Sir Edward of being an ‘incorrigible liar' and drunk. Yet despite its more weighty content, Vomit Two would have far less impact than Vomit One. In the normal state of affairs, the Kenyan media would have run with
the story for weeks. But an upcoming event was about to seize their attention, banishing any other event to relative obscurity.

 

The months that followed John's non-transfer were not proving happy. The mysterious paybacks continued, and Anura Perera stepped up his efforts to secure a tête-à-tête John was determined would never take place. Even as he received ever more detailed information about the Anglo Leasing contracts–facts he dutifully passed on to his head of state–Kibaki delivered a series of speeches protesting that he could not take action against alleged government graft ‘without evidence'. The hypocrisy made John wince. What further proof could Kibaki possibly need?

With the passage of time, the Mount Kenya Mafia grew ever more careless, taking John's acquiescence as read. Its members moved with disconcerting ease from pretending to know nothing about Anglo Leasing to coolly presenting it as part of a ‘resource mobilisation' effort being pulled together by internal security minister Chris Murungaru and Alfred Getonga for Kibaki's DP party ahead of elections due in 2007.

So here, then, was the supposed justification for a million-dollar con being perpetrated on the Kenyan taxpayer. Elections cost money, as any political party knows. Moi's twenty-four years at the helm had given KANU every opportunity to build up a vast war chest, the argument went. If NARC was to stand any chance of blocking KANU's return in the polls, it needed cash. It was unsavoury work, but someone had to do it. ‘If your pig gets stuck in the mud you have to jump in and extract it, even if that means getting dirty,' Kiraitu Murungi told John.

John knew enough about his colleagues' appetites not to give their explanation any credence. ‘With these kind of arrangements, only 30 per cent ever goes on political finance and 70 per cent goes on personal spending. It wasn't about electoral funding. It was about BMWs and mistresses.' NARC's 2002 election win, after all, had been built on authentic popular support, not bought votes and war chests. And what appalled him were the terms in which the argument was
couched. ‘What staggered me was that the justification was put in ethnic terms. It was: “We need to protect ourselves from the Luos.” “Who is ‘we'?” I'd say. It was always implicit. It meant “We Kikuyu, Meru and Embu.”' Since independence, Kenya's various elites had used the clarion call of ethnic solidarity–‘We're doing this for you, our brothers!'–to camouflage grotesque levels of personal enrichment. Once again, tribal rivalry was being used as the cover for theft. By late October, he had calculated that the suspect contracts could amount to over $1 billion, for behind the eighteen Anglo Leasing cases lay other, even more secret and even murkier projects. The scam just kept growing. ‘I'm worried that we will have another Goldenberg scandal before the elections,' confided a clearly uneasy Kiraitu Murungi. Part of John watched himself, horror-struck, marvelling, as he joked with the justice minister–that macho joshing again–about the ‘Goldenberg scandal of 2006', speculating about whether they would appear as suspects or witnesses in the inquiry.

In every individual's life there are areas that remain permanently off limits to the biographer, defying explanation. Tracking John's itinerary, there's something mystifying about the sheer time it took him to recognise the obvious. The dossier he eventually produced can read like a log of a year-long refusal to face the truth. How many times did John Githongo, a man of no mean intelligence, need to be told that his closest colleagues had hatched Anglo Leasing on the pretext of election fundraising before he believed it? Time after time he recorded conversations in which he was told exactly that in his little black Moleskine diaries, concluding in despair: ‘I must now prepare to leave the administration.' Two weeks later, an almost identical exchange would be recorded, with a touch more emphasis: ‘I really MUST make arrangements to leave.'

His family's welfare preyed constantly on his mind. But the problem went further than that. John was always ready to admit that procrastination, which follows on from the need to control events as night follows day, was one of his character flaws. ‘I haven't even started procrastinating yet. I'm going to start tomorrow,' he used to joke, poking fun at his own failing. His girlfriend dubbed the reflex, a
tendency to flagellate every decision to the point of near-extinction, ‘analysis paralysis'. Friends saw this Hamlet-like irresolution as the expression of a perfectionism that had characterised John since school. If the unexamined life is not worth living, the over-examined life can become a terrible burden. ‘If you aren't free to make mistakes, you aren't free to act. No mistakes are tolerable to him, and that accounts for the inaction,' says Mwalimu Mati.

But that was not the only reason for the foot-dragging. John's slow mental churning, so baffling in retrospect to the clear-eyed outsider, was also a form of mourning. ‘It sounds almost comical, like I'm describing someone in a relationship. But I honestly think John's heart was dented,' says former colleague Lisa Karanja. Like an accident victim sitting dazed in Accident & Emergency, John needed to go through the necessary stages of disbelief and denial before he could digest his loss. The time it took–not months, but years–was a testament to the depth of his belief, in that bright post-election dawn of 2003, that NARC could break with Moi's grubby ways. For John, who like so many Kenyans had believed he was taking part in an ethical rebirth, this really was a grieving process, and it could not be hurried. The oedipal aspect of the ordeal made it all the more painful. A young man who had enjoyed a filial relationship with the president was being forced to realise that Kibaki had feet of clay, just as he had once registered with his own father. When acceptance finally set in, affectionate belief would be replaced by cold fury.

By October, John was setting his affairs in order, still not entirely certain how far he was willing to go. Whatever happened to him, he did not want his staff to bear the brunt. Quietly he downsized his unit, sending civil servants back to the departments from which he had poached them.

There was to be one last betrayal, in the course of one of the sparring conversations that had become a surreal feature of his working life, during which deadly-serious matters were alluded to between guffaws of phoney laughter. Following a 4 November meeting to discuss NARC's governance strategy, Justice Aaron Ringera, head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, stayed behind for a private
chat. Fraught, craving support, John ruefully confessed to the colleague whose career he had done so much to further that he had realised State House only wanted him to go through the motions of his job: ‘Mine is the shock of a personal realisation.'

Ringera nodded in agreement. ‘So you stay there, you are a little wiser and you know that you are there!' And then this refined man of the law, John's trusted friend, made crudely explicit the sheer horror of his predicament. ‘You can't, in fact, afford to make any move. That's when you will really be killed.'

So, joked a dismayed John–attempting, as ever, to clothe the abnormal in palatable language–the message from his superiors was: ‘That's far enough.'

Ringera nodded, and added a diabolical twist: ‘If you wanted to resign and go today, that's when they would kill you.' It was the classic predicament of those who climb onto the merry-go-round of power, only to find themselves whizzing around so fast they cannot jump off.

The two chortled cynically together as John sketched aloud a twee scenario in which the hulking anti-corruption chief drove around in his ‘little car', doing meaningless errands while sending out reassuring messages on the government's behalf. If Ringera was right, John was a prisoner in his job, damned if he tried to do it, damned if he resigned.