It's Our Turn to Eat (39 page)

Annan's peace deal catered for a series of commissions to probe not just the election's conduct but the deeper causes of the violence, including Kenya's festering land disputes, its human rights abuses and its off-kilter constitution. The work is long overdue and desperately needed, but Kenyans know their country has a history of commissions whose findings and recommendations are either watered down before released or simply ignored.
*

While businessmen talk bravely of rebuilding shattered town centres and ministers call on tourists to return, many suspect the damage done the national psyche cannot be repaired. It will take a generation, at least, for young Kenyans to forget the images of slaughter. ‘The generation that harboured that kind of ethnic hatred was dying away,' says John Kiriamiti. A former bank robber, he renounced crime to become a respectable newspaper publisher in Muranga, and now quails at the violence he once took in his stride. ‘Our children didn't know about it. But they have understood it now, and it will take a long, long time to vanish.' The myth of Kenyan exceptionalism–the notion that the chaos associated with other parts of Africa simply ‘didn't happen here'–has been forever laid to rest. Kenya has become a land where bruised ethnic communities, whether Luo, Kalenjin or Kikuyu, wallow in the conviction they have been supremely hard-done-by, while striking terror into the hearts of equally aggrieved ethnic rivals. ‘They have opened the Pandora's box and let all these issues out,' an Asian shopkeeper in Nairobi told me with a shake of his head. ‘It's hard to know how they can ever close it again.'

John Githongo has been proved correct in the most terrible way. Long before most of his Kenyan contemporaries, he recognised graft's awesome potential to destabilise and destroy a society. There could have been few more lurid illustrations of the fact that government corruption, far from being a detail of history, really does matter, than Kenya's post-election crisis.

On 16 July 2006, a young man died in a district hospital in Narok, a dusty town on the road to the Maasai Mara, Kenya's most frequently visited safari park. He was only thirty-eight, and the illness which killed him is treatable. But poor Africans, receiving only spasmodic medical care, often die of ailments that would be beaten off in Western Europe. He left behind a widow and three children.

The man's name was David Munyakei, and in a curious way he represented John Githongo's
alter ego
. Of a similar age, the two men met and shook hands only once, at a prize-giving ceremony held a few months before John went on the run. One wonders whether either, at that moment, sensed their strange kinship.

Like John, Munyakei was a whistleblower, a man whose rigid sense of right and wrong made it impossible, at a key point in Kenyan history, for him to remain silent, even if speaking out meant losing his job–and worse. Like John, his actions exposed a multi-million-dollar scam reaching to the highest echelons of government. But there the similarities end. Munyakei, unlike John, did not belong to Kenya's upper class. An illegitimate child, he was born in Langata women's prison, where his mother was employed by the Prisons Department. In contrast to John, a highly educated professional confident of finding well-paid employment wherever he chose, Munyakei spent his life worrying about money. While John was able
to flee abroad, Munyakei's horizons were necessarily smaller: he simply disappeared inside his own country. John, a natural charmer, could call in favours across the continents when he reached his point of no return. Munyakei, a diffident, not particularly likeable young man, found himself terribly alone, fighting forces poised to crush him. This was a man who had no safety net, no fallback position. And his eventual fate was far more typical of most African whistleblowers than John's.

Munyakei had considered enlisting in the army, but in 1991, when he was twenty-three, he joined Kenya's Central Bank instead. A bit of string-pulling brought the offer of a clerk's job, and he moved to the department responsible for pre-shipment export compensation. As part of a government scheme to increase foreign exchange reserves, exporting companies at that time benefited from a generous compensation scheme. The CD3 customs forms companies submitted to secure payment, declaring goods for export, went through Munyakei's hands, and he began noticing irregularities. ‘I could see that I was processing the same forms again and again. The numbers had been changed–they'd been whited over and filled in again–but everything else was the same. And the sums being paid out were enormous, enormous.' Billion-shilling payments were common, and the forms were arriving two to three times a week. The other thing that made Munyakei suspicious was the way his working routine changed. ‘These transactions used to take place at very odd hours–after five p.m., when no one else was around. The head of my division asked me to stay behind. He would present me with the documents and say, “I want you to work on this particularly.” I was not to go home until the respective accounts were credited.'

Munyakei was a tiny but vital cog in a machine that was eating up billions of shillings in taxpayers' money, supposed compensation for non-existent gold shipments. Processing the payments, he became increasingly uneasy. One Central Bank official, who had himself refused to sign off on the payments, warned him: ‘These things are not proper. You must take care.' Colleagues from other departments ribbed him–‘Mister, where exactly is the gold you seem to be clear
ing?' But his superiors fobbed off his enquiries. Instructions came from above, they said; these were not the concern of a lowly clerk.

What his bosses hadn't catered for, just as John's colleagues never spotted it, was the element of sheer mulishness in Munyakei's character. He might not have attended some expensive Western university, but he was nobody's fool, and he didn't appreciate being treated like a patsy.

One got a glimpse of that streak of truculence within seconds of meeting him. Maybe the long years of being snubbed were to blame, but there was no conversational give-and-take with David Munyakei. Ignoring all interjections, he talked fixedly at you, finger jabbing the air, eyes locked unblinkingly onto yours, frowning in concentration. One sensed that he might not have been an unmitigated joy to work with. Slight, with badly pocked skin, he came across as prickly and awkward, the kind of civil servant who would be a stickler for detail, whose professional inflexibility might drive more easygoing workmates to distraction. This, most definitely, was not a man who would simply shrug his shoulders and mutter the words used to justify wrongdoing from time immemorial: ‘I was only following orders.'

The scandal exploded into the public arena in April 1993, when the
Daily Nation
published a series of articles about Goldenberg, the company benefiting from this generous compensation, and shady dealings at the Central Bank. Munyakei was arrested at work and taken to CID headquarters. A week later he was charged with violating the Official Secrets Act. He was not the only employee unhappy at what was going on, but his superiors had decided he was responsible for leaking Kenya's largest ever officially-sanctioned financial scam, photocopying sensitive documents and spiriting them out of the Central Bank. On hearing the news, Munyakei's shocked mother suffered a stroke, dying without regaining consciousness.

‘I did it as a patriotic citizen,' Munyakei protested. ‘I knew what I was doing'–a touch of pride there. ‘I was not guessing, I had the evidence. I thought I was doing the government a favour. Instead we got arrests, court cases, threats and dismissals.'

Five months later, the attorney general ruled that Munyakei had no case to answer. But his ordeal had only just begun. The Central Bank sacked him, and refused to give him references, making future employment in the banking sector impossible. As the government sought to placate outraged donors by going through the motions of investigating Goldenberg, Munyakei started receiving threatening anonymous phone calls. ‘I would meet people from the bank, and they would say to my face: “It's better if you disappear from Nairobi completely. If you keep pressing the bank to reinstate you, you may not live long.”' He fled with a cache of sensitive documents to Mombasa, where he reinvented himself, taking a new name, converting to Islam and marrying a local girl. Eventually the jobs ran out, and Munyakei moved his new family upcountry, to the shack his mother had built on a windswept homestead in Maasai country. The white-collar worker became a gum-booted subsistence farmer, eking a pitiful living from the dry land, just as his ancestors had done. The Goldenberg scandal simmered inconclusively on, with donors nagging president Moi for action. Kenya had forgotten about David Munyakei.

Then came the 2002 election, and NARC's establishment of the Goldenberg Commission. It felt as though fate had reached out and tapped Munyakei on the shoulder. Testifying before the Commission's judges, lawyers and financial experts, he finally won his moment in the sun. A lawyer remarked that if ten witnesses could only be of an equal standard, the Commission's work would soon be done. There were hotel receptions and photographs, the Transparency International award ceremony at which he met John Githongo. The reverberations rippled all the way back to Narok, where Maasai elders materialised on his doorstep asking for a share of the booty. He had to show them the door. None of this notoriety brought in any money. Back home he was still just a peasant, hoeing his plot and struggling to pay his girls' school fees. The one thing Munyakei really wanted–his Central Bank job back, with compensation for years of lost earnings–remained out of reach. He had betrayed his colleagues, he was told, and they would never work with him again.

With the release of the Bosire report into Goldenberg, his hopes briefly lifted, only to be dashed. ‘Did you see how few mentions there are of me?' he said, jabbing the report. ‘Did you see? I'm very disappointed.' The report noted that there was no legislation protecting whistleblowers in Kenya, but did not suggest how this lacuna could be addressed. There was no reference to compensation. ‘The people who face prosecution are very rich and powerful. They could do anything to ensure people don't give evidence in court. We've seen this before in Kenya. Not one of the witnesses in the Ouko murder case is living now. They all died mysteriously. I feel very insecure, now, very much demoralised.'

But my impression was that what really dismayed Munyakei was not his personal security, but the fear of going down in history as a fool. He craved a ruling that would validate his act in his own eyes and those of his community. ‘I thought as a whistleblower you should be treated with high esteem. But it appears,' he scowled, ‘that when you do such a thing no one appreciates it. If nothing is done for me, no one will come forward and expose corruption in future. They will look at me and say, “Munyakei did it, and what did he get? He ruined his life.”'

He got up to leave. Could I give him something, he asked, for the taxi fare at least, or the cost of his Nairobi hotel? Times were tough in Narok, he explained. The drought was killing crops and cattle. The man belatedly hailed by government ministers as a national hero was struggling to make ends meet.

I had planned to visit him in Narok, but left it too late. His nervousness proved misdirected. Future Goldenberg prosecutions were robbed of a key witness not by a hired assassin but by an ordinary African killer: pneumonia.

The tale of David Munyakei reads, in many ways, like a practice run for the John Githongo story. John was able to improve on Munyakei's dress rehearsal in part because of his status and birth. Munyakei could not muster journalists in Kenya and Britain to publicise his cause, could not tap a network of academics, foreign institutions and VIPs for succour and sympathy. But John had also learnt
explicit, valuable lessons from his predecessor, in particular when it came to collecting the evidence that proved he was no fantasist. ‘Can you imagine how I would look now if I hadn't taped those conversations?' says John. ‘Just some loony in Oxford making crazy claims.'

In that progression lies a clue to Africa's future.

Both men set out to end Kenya's long tradition of impunity by making a ruling regime accountable for a major corruption scandal. Neither succeeded. To date, only the lowly have faced legal pursuit. In Anglo Leasing's case, three permanent secretaries and three junior civil servants prosecuted in 2005, on John's watch, have yet to be tried. Justice Ringera says that until investigators Kenya asked for help in France, Switzerland, Britain, the United States and the Netherlands have provided details of the foreign firms and bank accounts involved–and, sadly, that may take some time–he cannot send his files to the attorney general for prosecution. With Goldenberg, the dropping of charges against high-profile figures continues: former Central Bank governor Eric Kotut is the latest to be exonerated. Since the suspected perpetrators of both scams hold key positions on either side of the political divide, each faction can effectively blackmail its rival. The culprits are likely to spend the rest of their lives being driven around by chauffeurs, relaxing in Nairobi's wood-panelled clubs and strolling the lush fairways of its golf clubs.

But prosecutions are not, actually, the point. What is remarkable is that first David Munyakei and then John Githongo chose to launch their respective Missions Impossible at all, taking on their own society's ‘Our Turn to Eat' culture and defying the rule which dictated that loyal employees might know exactly what tricks their bosses were up to, but could always be relied upon to remain silent. The contents of John's dossier and Munyakei's testimony matter far less than the fact that they emerged in the first place to challenge the system. As the playwright and Czech president Vaclav Havel said: ‘Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.'

Mention John Githongo and his dossier to an educated Kenyan
and you will often get a raised eyebrow and a sardonic look which suggests that Westerners would do well to abandon their naïve fixation on lone heroes. ‘What he did is of no significance. None,' a yuppie businessman proud of his opposition sympathies surprised me by saying. Even admirers will tell you that the number of Kenyans who think like John is so small and atypical their words and actions can have no fundamental impact on larger society. Their scepticism is shared by a school of Western analysts who see sleaze in Africa, intertwined as it is with cultural respect for the extended family and ethnic loyalty, as part of the continent's very haemoglobin. In these commentators' view, the grand corruptors will always be able to remodel their looting techniques to keep one step ahead of those trying to purge the system, in part because they enjoy as much public admiration as they do opprobrium.

They are wrong to be so dismissive, or so despairing. Cultural values are not immutable; they shift all the time, as the West's own history–witness, for example, the view our courts take today, as opposed to fifty years ago, of a woman's rights in marriage, or of racism in the workplace–amply demonstrates.
⁴³
The dramatic changes Africa has experienced in the last hundred years, hurling its citizens from herding livestock on the
shamba
to lunchtime at the cyber café, shows the continent is no bizarre exception, impervious to the trends and processes that affect the rest of humanity.

John Githongo is no saint, as his many exasperated friends can attest. But the fight against graft in Africa is not to be settled in one battle, or by one person. It is being waged in stages, step by step, with many a sideways shuffle and backwards totter, by many individuals. By doing what he did, John, like David Munyakei before him, permanently shifted the debate's parameters. Altering expectations of how a civil servant under pressure could behave, he made it possible not only for others to follow in his wake but to move beyond him. Everyone needs role models, helping them see the way ahead. ‘I'd like to throw a small spanner in the works,' John says. ‘I'll do my little bit and the next time it'll be someone else and someone else and someone else. At the very least, it should never again be possible for civil servants and
politicians to get together in a room and discuss how to rip off the Kenyan people.'