It's Our Turn to Eat Read online

  In July, very abruptly, he stopped. ‘I suddenly hit a brick wall. I just couldn’t bear to go on.’ There were still hours of conversations to get through, but he had heard as much as he needed. Listless days followed one after another, but John was incapable of work, engulfed by lethargy. He had always been someone who embraced the night, working on long after others had retired to bed. Friends knew there was nothing strange about receiving a text message from him at 4.30 in the morning. Now the darkness was something he dreaded. He couldn’t work, but couldn’t sleep either, not for more than an hour or two. He felt exhausted, mentally and physically, but lay in bed with his mind racing, consumed by anxiety, listening to the traffic dying away on the Woodstock Road, the silence descending, and finally, after what felt like an eternity, the first liquid bird calls followed by a full-throttle dawn chorus as Oxford awoke. He went to see the college doctor, and asked for sleeping pills. He stopped going to the gym. A grey tide of depression had welled up and dragged him under, and there was no one on God’s earth he could share his anguish with.

  The crisis, a dark night of the soul that lasted two grim weeks, was a form of delayed reaction. However many times John might have noted in his diary that corruption in Kenya went to the top, his heart had never accepted what his brain told him. The Mzee could not be, must not be, the grand spider at the centre of State House’s web of corruption. And now, having examined all the evidence, John knew that scenario made no sense. Kibaki was not out of the loop, deceived by manipulative aides, scattily ignorant of the system of sleaze operating all around him. He was the system. Kibaki and his cronies had played him for a fool, and he–star pupil, plucky former hack and experienced NGO wallah that he was–had kindly obliged. The bitterness choked him.

  And with that came another terrifying realisation: ‘This thing will never go away.’ In his mind, up until then, John had managed to balance two parallel, if mutually exclusive, scenarios. Allow Anglo Leasing quietly to fade away, or clear his conscience and become one of the most famous–or infamous–Kenyans in history. What suddenly struck home was the understanding that it had to be one or the other, he could not have both. And it had to be the latter, with all it would involve in terms of public vilification and media hysteria, because of who he was. Character is destiny. ‘John has the kind of honesty that stems from not being able to live with yourself if you don’t do the right thing,’ Ali Zaidi, his former editor, once told me. As a moral actor and a devout Christian, his route was virtually preordained. ‘Initially, I never saw myself as a whistleblower. I had not thought it through to that point. Maybe part of me hoped all my work, my interactions with government people, would lead to internal changes that would be positive. But in the end I had to do the hard thing, the painful thing.’ Travelling on the Oxford double-deckers, he gazed at other passengers and experienced a fierce pang of envy for their ordinary lives, their mortgages, their prosaic worries about which school to choose and whether they could afford a new car.

  One dreary feature of this new life was clearly going to be an intimate acquaintance with various legal chambers. John already had a lawyer in Kenya, and as the months passed he would acquire additional lawyers in the United States and Britain. Thankfully, much of the work they did for him would be pro bono: he was the kind of high-profile client whose business added lustre to a chambers’ reputation. Hanging over him was Kenya’s Official Secrets Act. This catch-all legislation had long served as a curtain behind which government could conduct its affairs away from prying eyes. By chance, John had never been asked to sign it, although all his staff had done so. But that omission, in his own eyes, offered no real let-out–the keeping of state secrets had been implicit in his role. ‘I can’t in good conscience walk into a court and ask my lawyer to defend me on the basis that I didn’t sign it.’

  Before leaving Kenya, John had read up intensively on the Act, even asking a lawyer friend to draft a legal opinion. The question of whether it could be justifiable to divulge information acquired in the course of his professional duties–information clearly never intended for public ears–had haunted him since arriving in Britain. For John, this was not simply a legal issue, it was moral and spiritual. It bothered him so intensely that in the first months of exile he paid for an old friend, a devout fellow Catholic he had often prayed alongside, to fly from Nairobi to Oxford to serve as spiritual adviser. ‘He was in a quandary,’ remembers the friend. ‘He wanted to know whether information of corrupt dealings that had only come his way because of his appointment could be used for purposes for which it was not intended. I went away, thought about it and told him that this information, which involved the stealing of public money, did not belong to the president or the government. It belonged to the wananchi. He was very scrupulous, he needed to be morally sure.’

  Behind the Official Secrets Act lurked something even more alarming: a possible High Treason charge. High Treason carries the death penalty in Kenya, although such sentences are routinely commuted to life imprisonment. Crucially, it is a non-bailable offence, which meant that if John returned to Kenya he could be charged, immediately thrown into prison and–in a country notorious for the creeping pace of its judicial system and the squalid state of its jails–left there to rot virtually indefinitely.

  One way to sidestep these problems would be to testify before parliament. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was a cross-party group led by opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta, the man beaten by Kibaki in the 2002 elections. Anything said before the PAC would be privileged, protecting John from legal pursuit. He could not go to the mountain, so the mountain must come to him. If he could persuade Uhuru Kenyatta to bring the PAC to London, he would unburden himself before its members, satisfying his nagging desire to render account to the Kenyan people. When, in August, planning minister Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o raised the possibility of John testifying before the PAC, John responded with alacrity. He was ready to talk, he declared in his first press statement. He was simply awaiting a government invitation.

  The government reaction was a telling silence. It was the same story when John, hearing that Kibaki would be in London to meet East African investors, once again allowed himself, for a moment, to pin his hopes on his former boss. ‘I’ve been in touch with State House, suggesting that I present my evidence directly to the old man at the High Commission. I owe it to him,’ he told me. ‘If you do that, make sure someone else–me, Michael, anyone–goes with you,’ I emailed, suddenly convinced that if John entered the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place alone, he would never come out. I needn’t have worried. The president had no desire to talk to his troublesome former kijana, and John’s offer was not taken up.

  One of the elements miring him in his Slough of Despond was the grim isolation of his position. ‘When you effectively blow the whistle at that level, there’s no one you can speak to. There’s no one who can tell you what it’s going to be like, the opprobrium that is going to result, no one. There are no precedents.’

  Back in Kenya, Joe and Mary Githongo had withdrawn into their Karen villa, aware that many old acquaintances hesitated to be associated with a family which had produced such a wayward son. Their phone line had become so crackly, conversations were virtually impossible. Mrs Githongo had gone to complain at the Telkom Kenya office, but thought she knew the reason for the interference: the line was being monitored. There had been an unnerving episode when a Kenyan MP turned up at the residence–which Joe Githongo had used as collateral for a bank loan–claiming he had heard it was for sale. Two flustered, vulnerable old people were being used to send John a message.

  When I visited John’s parents in Kenya that August, I had a sense of a couple disconcertingly ignorant of what was to come, but hunkering down in cautious preparation for any eventuality. With his sons’ help, Joe was trying to settle his debts and sort out his tangled business affairs. Mrs Githongo, for her part, had sold a stretch of the land at the back of the plot where the family had until recently run a small fa
rm. She planned to do the same with several plots upcountry. Walking slowly, to allow an adored granddaughter to trot alongside, we inspected the empty chicken runs and livestock pens, which were being clucked over disconsolately by John’s aged wet-nurse and one of his aunties. ‘You know, Kikuyus and land, you never let it go,’ said Mrs Githongo, observing the women’s distress. ‘But look at Kenyatta, look at Moi–so much land, for what? Let others enjoy what we have.’

  The couple tried to keep their spirits up, tracing Christian parallels in their son’s tribulations. ‘Jesus came from Heaven and had to die for us all,’ said Mary Githongo. ‘Someone had to sacrifice his life for others.’ But they had no real grasp of how great that sacrifice was likely to be. John, they told themselves, would return once the crisis had blown over. Let him do a Masters, maybe take a job with the African Union, or go to work in the States. It was just a question of waiting things out.

  John’s brothers, with whom he exchanged constant emails, were far more aware of what was in the offing, and nervous with it. His departure had altered the shape of their lives, too. Younger brother Mugo had also noticed problems with his phone. He tried to keep a step ahead of his shadows by regularly buying new SIM cards, switching email accounts and changing the locks to his apartment. But a low profile felt like the best precaution. This was no time, he said, to go drinking at night in Nairobi’s bars. ‘My social life has stopped. I’m very wary. I don’t go out.’ It was too easy, in a city notorious for violent crime, for a political hit by someone wanting to get at John via his family to be camouflaged as a random mugging. Mugo never wore his seatbelt in the car these days, he let slip, because he wanted full freedom of movement in case of sudden incidents on the road ahead.

  Gitau also seemed in sombre mood. We met for a beer next to the swimming pool of my one-star hotel. Evening was drawing in and the first bats were darting out from the palm trees as the light died, skimming the pool for midges. Although he was in fact the second Githongo son, Gitau was often mistaken for the oldest sibling. He had the same bull-neck, solid jaw and sheer heft as John. He was the one who had got lumbered with the family firm, and if Mugo was the T-shirt-wearing radical puppy of the family, Gitau, grave and balding, looked the accountant he had become, conservative and cautious. He had many friends in the business community, and they took a distinctly pragmatic view of Anglo Leasing, he told me. As long as they were making money, they could tolerate sleaze. ‘They’re telling me: “In whose interest is it for the government to fall? Let these tenpercenters have their 10 per cent, what we care about is stability.” What you have to realise is that Kenyans don’t really believe in democracy.’

  If he fretted about the explosive impact of his brother’s revelations, Gitau also worried, quixotically, about the precise opposite. ‘What if John spills all, everything he knows–and nothing happens?’ The media in Kenya were increasingly complicit, the political class supine, and what did the donors’ reaction–if there was any–matter when China stood ready to lend to African governments, no questions asked?

  We walked together to his car, a classic old Mercedes the colour of dull gold. Before saying goodbye, Gitau halted and turned to pose a question that had clearly been preying on his mind.

  ‘Has anyone else ever done this?’

  ‘Watergate?’ I suggested.

  He shook his head. ‘I mean in Africa.’

  I thought for a bit, but couldn’t recall a single occasion in which a government official of John’s stature had blown the whistle on an African administration. There were no examples pointing the way ahead. Gitau nodded gravely, a worry confirmed, and got in his car.

  By early September 2005, John had compiled a ninety-one-page, 40,000-word dossier. Should Anglo Leasing ever come to trial, it was the kind of document any prosecutor would fall upon with cries of appreciation, half his job done for him. Reading, in many ways, like a real-life thriller, the dossier followed the course of John’s growing enlightenment chronologically, incident by incident, conversation by conversation, weaving in quotes from his diaries, citing numbered tape recordings and supporting official documents. He would keep adding nuance and detail to this report as the months went by, but the bulk of his evidence was now in place. In his own mind, John had finally crossed his ‘t’s and dotted his ‘i’s.

  Yet while he’d been working on this dossier, events back in Kenya conspired to flummox him.

  In mid-September, Kenya’s electoral commission named 21 November 2005 as the date for the country’s long-promised referendum on a new constitution. What Kibaki had pledged to deliver in the first hundred days of his presidency had taken nearly three years, and the final version was a world away from what the Kenyan people had once envisaged. It was true that on issues such as land ownership, women’s inheritance and the role of religious courts, the proposed constitution offered radical change. But in the eyes of its critics–who happened to include six members of the NARC cabinet–it failed to deliver on the critical issue that had blighted politics in Kenya since independence. Whereas the first Bomas draft had proposed dividing executive powers between a president and an executive prime minister, the final version included a non-executive prime minister, subservient to a still-supreme president. For Luo leader Raila Odinga, this was the ultimate betrayal. Once again, the wily Kikuyu had shown that they could not bear to share. The Memorandum of Understanding signed on the eve of the 2002 election had been violated, the faultline at the heart of a hastily assembled coalition exposed. And if much of the rest of the country felt distinctly nervous about the idea of Raila as prime minister, they were far from happy at NARC’s sleight of hand. A historic opportunity to place the country’s system of government on a more equitable footing had been missed. Both the cabinet and the country divided along ethnic lines, with the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu rallying behind a ‘Yes’ vote, symbolised by a banana, while every other community called for a ‘No’, represented by an orange.

  These were violent times in Kenya, as the Orange and Banana camps clashed on the campaign trail. Bombarded with information from his sources, John felt pulled this way and that. This, he finally decided, would be the worst possible time to come out with a corruption dossier. If he went public before the referendum, it would be seen as a blatant political move, aimed at boosting the Orange campaign. It was frustrating, but he did not want his dossier reduced to campaign fodder. He stowed it in a safe deposit box and prepared to wait the referendum out.

  Unaware of this decision, the Mount Kenya Mafia extended an agitated feeler. Lands and settlement minister Amos Kimunya and Dr Dan Gikonyo, Kibaki’s personal physician, turned up in Oxford to negotiate a quiet understanding. A smooth-talking Kikuyu, Kimunya was regarded by diplomats as a representative of a promising breed of young statesmen rising through the ranks in Kenya. A US-trained Kikuyu cardiologist, Gikonyo was a doctor with a political profile. He had always been close to the Democratic Party, patching up opposition activists beaten by security forces during the Moi years, and had been constantly at Kibaki’s side since his near-fatal campaign car crash. His practice had thrived, and he was about to open a 102-bed, four-storey private hospital in Karen, boasting state-of-the-art scanners and TVs in every room. Coincidentally, Gikonyo was also physician to Joe Githongo and, via that association, to John himself. That no doubt explained why he had been sent with Kimunya to woo John–who but a priest can rival a doctor for leverage over a trusting patient?

  They booked a table at Brown’s, one of Oxford’s most popular restaurants, a few minutes’ walk from St Antony’s. The evening started cordially, with broad smiles all round, but deteriorated when the emissaries began delivering their message. As voices rose, the waiters exchanged glances and lifted eyebrows, wondering whether the evening might end in blows. Kimunya and Gikonyo were there to make sure John did nothing to blow the referendum campaign off course. ‘They kept saying, “SWEAR to us, SWEAR that you won’t spill the beans before the referendum. You must swear, John.”’ Sensing resist
ance, Kimunya made the mistake of appealing to John’s supposed ethnic loyalties. ‘Do you really think uncircumcised people can rule Kenya? We are going to sack all these Jaluos in government, replace them with other Jaluos and Kenyans will just forget.’ Kimunya had just encapsulated the thought process–that Kikuyu assumption of a divine right to rule–that repelled the rest of Kenya. ‘These were guys who went to university,’ says John, ‘educated people with international experience, not uneducated villagers from the sticks, talking like that. I lost my cool, I admit, I got very emotional.’ Kimunya followed up the crude tribal rallying cry with a stark reminder of the reality of Kenyan politics. Break your silence, said the minister, and ‘Your grandchildren will regret.’ It was a traditional Kikuyu way of saying, ‘If you don’t cooperate, there won’t be any grandchildren to succeed you.’

  The encounter left a sour taste in John’s mouth. With the referendum less than a month away, it was too late now to spring into action. But he hated the sense that, through his inaction, he had played into these men’s hands. ‘I felt very angry. I said to myself, “What have I done? I’ve quit the stage and left it to these buggers.”’

  The delegation to Oxford might have got what it wanted, but it made no difference to the referendum result. Nor did the vast sums of stolen Anglo Leasing money spent attempting to secure the vote. Referendum day became a poll on the very principle of Kikuyu rule. John stayed up to monitor the various Kenyan newspaper websites updating their results throughout the night. To his delighted amazement, Kenyans showed that while they were willing to be paid, they could not be bought. In the privacy of the polling booth, they cheerfully voted against those who had bribed them. Over 58 per cent rejected the new constitution consolidating the presidency’s supremacy. Out of eight provinces, only one–Central Province, GEMA’s heartland–voted ‘Yes’. The country had delivered a stinging slap to an ethnic group whose leaders believed themselves born to rule. The text messages from excited friends back in Kenya came so thick and fast, John’s mobile gave up the ghost. ‘I think it just melted. It couldn’t take any more,’ he chuckled.