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  Daniel arap Moi–Kenya’s second president, in power for twenty-four years, retired in 2002

  David Munyakei–Central Bank clerk who blew the whistle on Goldenberg scandal

  Chris Murungaru–Minister for internal security in first NARC government. Dropped from cabinet in 2005

  Kiraitu Murungi–Justice minister in first NARC government, he ‘stepped aside’ after leaking of Githongo dossier. Energy minister in current coalition

  Francis Muthaura–Head of Kenya’s civil service David Mwiraria–Finance minister in first NARC government, he ‘stepped aside’ after leaking of Githongo dossier

  Raila Odinga–former Kibaki ally, went into opposition in 2005. Probable winner of 2007 elections. Prime minister in current coalition government

  Justice Aaron Ringera–Head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission

  George Saitoti–Education minister in first NARC government, now minister for internal security

  GLOSSARY

  askari–Kiswahili, ‘guard’.

  boda boda–Kiswahili, ‘taxi bike’.

  DfID–Britain’s Department for International Development, set up in 1997 by Tony Blair’s New Labour government to tackle poverty in the developing world. Before that, the Foreign Office was responsible for aid.

  GEMA–Gikuyu, Embu, Meru Association. Set up in 1971 to promote the interests of the Mount Kenya ethnic communities, it won Kenyatta’s disapproval and was disbanded in 1980. GSU–General Service Unit. Elite Kenyan paramilitary force, responsible for internal security, made up of highly trained police officers and special forces. Often deployed to quell civil unrest.

  KACA–Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority. Created by president Moi at the donors’ insistence, it was ruled unconstitutional by the Kenyan High Court in January 2001.

  KACC–Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission. KACA’s more robust replacement, was formed in May 2003. Headed by Justice Aaron Ringera.

  KANU–Kenya African National Union. Political party which ruled for nearly forty years. Largely made up of Luos and Kikuyus, KANU initially faced a challenge from KADU, a federalist party set up by the smaller tribes. In 1982, Kenya became a one-party state, a situation which lasted until December 1991, when the constitution was altered at the donors’ insistence.

  kijana–Kiswahili, ‘boy’, ‘my lad’.

  kitu kidogo–Kiswahili, ‘a little something’, i.e. a bribe. KNCHR–Kenya National Commission on Human Rights: independent watchdog set up in 2002 by an act of parliament.

  matatu–Kiswahili, ‘taxi bus’.

  mzee (plural wazee)–Kiswahili, ‘old man’.

  mzungu (plural wazungu)–Kiswahili, ‘white person’.

  NARC–National Rainbow Coalition. Coalition of parties which toppled president Daniel arap Moi in the 2002 elections. It originally included Luo leader Raila Odinga’s Liberal Democratic Party and fielded Mwai Kibaki as presidential candidate. ODM–Orange Democratic Movement, opposition party set up in 2005 by Raila Odinga after spearheading a successful campaign against a new constitution proposed by Kibaki.

  shamba–Kiswahili, ‘farm’.

  wabenzi– Slang, a member of the new African ruling class.

  wananchi (singular

  mwananchi)–Kiswahili, ‘citizens’, ‘the people’.

  wazungu–See mzungu.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is based on a score of interviews and conversations with John Githongo in London, Oxford and Guatemala City between February 2005 and December 2008.

  President Mwai Kwibaki and serving or former ministers David Mwiraria, Kiraitu Murungi and Chris Murungaru were all asked for interviews but none of them took up the offer.

  Particular thanks go to film-maker Peter Chappell, for so generously sharing his insights and patient moral support as we both pursued our tantalising prey.

  Andrew Hill was a constant sounding board. Kwamchetsi Makokha, Juliette Towhidi, Mutiga Murithi and my father, Professor Oliver Wrong, were all rigorous readers of the draft manuscript, alerting me to inconsistencies, errors and omissions. Mark Ashurst was a steady source of advice and encouragement.

  In Nairobi, I owe Andrea Bohnstedt, Mahmud Abdulla, Kiki Channa, Eliot Masters, Susan Linnee, Ilona Eveleens, Koert Lindyer, Marina Rini, Massimo Alberizzi and Andrew England heartfelt thanks for beds in their homes, places at their tables and seats in their cars.

  I thank Professor John Lonsdale for sharing his historical expertise, Professor Mutu wa Gethoi for his insights into Kikuyu culture, Professor Paul Collier for his political and economic analysis and Sheetal Kapila and Pheroze Nowrojee for their legal advice. I’m specially indebted to David Cornwell, better known as John le Carré, for his tactful recommendations and wise councel.

  Apart from the Kenyans consulted and quoted in this book’s pages–many of whom will certainly disagree with my views–I owe thanks to John Kamau, John Ngumi, Mary Mwirindia, Eric Wainaina, Benson Riungu, Waithaka Waihenya and Chand Bahal, owner of Bookstop, the best bookshop in Nairobi.

  The Ford Foundation, whose Kenyan branch has played a pioneering role in the country’s fight against corruption, provided funding that made the three years I took to write the book less of a financial strain than they would otherwise have been.

  Julian Harty devoted far too much of his precious time to tackling my computer problems. Michael Holman nudged me to realise my original idea.

  But the book would never have seen the light of day had it not been for my commissioning editor, Mitzi Angel, who sadly moved on to a new publisher before the manuscript was complete, but did so much to improve it before she left.

  Finally, my biggest practical debt remains to Joseph Githinji, whose thirty-year-old red-velvet-lined Volvo and illuminating conversation have kept me cheerful and on the road during my time in Nairobi.

  MICHELA WRONG

  London, March 2009

  NOTES

  1 Jomo Kenyatta was not alone in regarding the word ‘Kikuyu’ as a European deformation of the more correct ‘Gikuyu’. However, ‘Kikuyu’ so predominates in both the Kenyan media and academic writing that using ‘Gikuyu’–now widely reserved for the language–to refer to the community strikes me as pretentious.

  2 ‘Kenya’s Chance for a New Beginning’, Financial Times, 30 December 2002.

  3 Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, Fourth Dimension, 1983.

  4 Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Book Two, James Currey Ltd, 1992.

  5 Wangari Muta Maathai, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story, Heinemann, 2004.

  6 Michael Blundell, A Love Affair with the Sun: A Memoir of Seventy Years in Kenya, Kenway Publications, 1994.

  7 Gerard Prunier, ‘Kenya: Histories of Hidden War’, www.opendemocracy.net, 29 February 2008.

  8 Karuti Kanyinga, ‘When Figures Count: Governance, Institutions and Inequality in Kenya’, Society for International Development (SID).

  9 ‘Ministers’ Home Areas Get Lion’s Share of Roads Cash’, Daily Nation, 20 July 2006.

  10 Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Beatrice Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa, African Issues Series, James Currey Ltd, 1999, p. 103.

  11 Transparency International–Kenya, ‘Kenya Bribery Index 2001’, www.tikenya.org.

  12 M. Brockerhoff and P. Hewitt, ‘Ethnicity and Child Mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Population Control, New York, 1998.

  13 ‘Public servants would have engaged in business covertly anyway if they had not been allowed to do so by regulation’: Duncan Ndegwa, Walking in Kenyatta Struggles: My Story, Kenya Leadership Institute, 2006, p. 498.

  14 By 1998, Kenya’s stock of pending bills stood at an estimated 22 billion shillings. As Transparency International reported in its 2002 report ‘Public Resources, Private Purposes’, ‘pending bills remain a slow time bomb that will explode in the face of Kenyan taxpayers’. Another useful paper on the various scams used throughout Kenyan history is Gladwell Otieno, ‘The NARC’s Anti-C
orruption Drive in Kenya: Somewhere Over the Rainbow?’, African Security Review, Vol. 14, No. 4,2005.

  15 Peter Warutere, ‘The Goldenberg Conspiracy: The Game of Paper, Gold, Money and Power’, Institute for Security Studies, Paper 117, September 2005; ‘Report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Goldenberg Affair’, Chairman Hon. Mr Justice S.E.O. Bosire, October 2005.

  16 ‘A Survey of Seven Years of Waste’, Centre for Governance and Development, Nairobi, February 2001.

  17 ‘If you take a skunk home as a pet willingly, it’s yours, together with its disturbing fragrance. It’s disingenuous of you to blame the person you took it from for the smell and it is equally dishonest for the person who gave it to you to point at you and scream that these days you smell’: John Githongo, East African Standard, 30 September 2006.

  18 Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, East African Educational Publishers Ltd, 1938. Other key publications on pre-colonial Kikuyu society are L.S.B. Leakey, Mau Mau and the Kikuyu, Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1952; Fr C. Cagnolo, The Agikuyu: Their Customs, Traditions and Folklore, 1933, revised edition 2006.

  19 Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary 1902–1906, Oliver & Boyd, 1957.

  20 Godfrey Muriuki, A History of the Kikuyu 1500–1900, Oxford University Press, 1974.

  21 Time magazine, 30 March 1953.

  22 David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005.

  23 E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, Mau Mau and Nationhood, James Currey Ltd, 2003, p. 46.

  24 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, op. cit., Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, Jonathan Cape, 2005, and Lotte Hughes, Moving the Maasai, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, are the most notable examples.

  25 Blundell, A Love Affair with the Sun, op. cit.

  26 Society for International Development, ‘Pulling Apart. Facts and Figures on Inequality in Kenya’, October 2004.

  27 Kenya National Audit Office, ‘Special Audit Report of the Controller and Auditor-General on Financing, Procurement and Implementation of Security Related Projects’, April 2006.

  28 Mars Group Kenya GAP Report No. 2, ‘Illegally Binding: The Missing Anglo-Leasing Scandal Promissory Notes’, www.marsgroupkenya.org.

  29 NARC’s Assistant Justice Minister Njeru Githae, ‘New Plan to Recover the Looted Billions’, Daily Nation, 16 July 2003.

  30 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 109.

  31 Stephen Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa: How Foreign Donors Help to Keep Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi in Power’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 5, 2001, pp. 725–39.

  32 Bronwen Maddox, ‘Cracks Under Surface of the £5bn Labour Mission for World’s Poor’, The Times, 19 March 2007.

  33 Department of Institutional Integrity, World Bank, ‘Kenya Detailed Implementation Review Report’, 10 January 2007. This strictly confidential report was published on the website of the Wall Street Journal (‘Kenya and the World Bank’) on 6 March 2008.

  34 Richard Beeston and Xan Rice, ‘Regime is Told to Clean up its Act or Pay Price’, ‘Watchdog Muzzled by his Master Prepares to Bark’, The Times, 21 January 2006.

  35 ‘Exclusive: The Anglo Leasing Truth’, Daily Nation, 22 January 2006.

  36 The Kenyan government commissioned an inquiry into the Artur brothers saga, dubbed the Kiruki Commission. In April 2007 the government announced that its findings would not be publicly released for reasons of ‘national security’.

  37 Public Accounts Committee, ‘Report on Special Audit on Procurement of Passport Issuing Equipment by the Department of Immigration, Office of the Vice-president and Ministry of Home Affairs’, Kenya National Assembly, March 2006.

  38 UNDP, 5th Kenya Human Development Report, 2006.

  39 British aid to Kenya rose from £24.9 million in 2002–03 to £64.2 million in 2005–06, according to DfID’s annual reports. Despite talk of contracts with British companies being cancelled under Kibaki, UK exports to Kenya were £214.98 million in 2006, compared to £158.86 million in 2002, the last year of the Moi presidency, according to the UK Department of Trade and Industry. With £1.5 billion in investments, the UK remains by far the largest foreign investor in Kenya.

  40 ‘Ethnicity and Violence in the 2007 Elections in Kenya’, Afrobarometer Briefing Paper No. 48, February 2008; Roxana Gutierrez Romero, Mwangi S. Kimenyi and Stefan Dercon, ‘The 2007 Elections, Post-Conflict Recovery and Coalition Government in Kenya’, Improving Institutions for Pro-Poor Growth, 26 September 2008.

  41 Well-researched reports on the 2007–08 election crisis include: ‘Still Behaving Badly’, Second Periodic Report of the Election-Monitoring Project, December 2007; Kenya National Commission on Human Rights; ‘Kenya in Crisis’, Africa Report No. 135, Crisis Group, 21 February 2008; and ‘Ballots to Bullets: Organised Political Violence and Kenya’s Crisis of Governance’, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 20, No. 1 (A), March 2008.

  42 David Anderson and Emma Lochery, ‘Violence and Exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley, 2008: Predictable and Preventable?’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 2008.

  43 Britain’s 2005 Commission for Africa report, ‘Our Common Interest’, makes this point in its ‘Culture’ chapter, quoting academics Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar: ‘No more than anyone else do Africa and Africans have an authentic, unchanging culture that is transmitted from one generation to another, or ought to be.’

  44 cf Bayart, Ellis and Hibou, The Criminalisation of the State in Africa, op. cit., p. 101: ‘Special anti-corruption units and commissions exist essentially to attack political and economic rivals, while at the same time placating aid donors.’

  45 David Pallister, ‘Fraud Office Inquiry into UK Links to Kenyan Cash and Arms Scandal’, Guardian, 1 October 2007.

  46 Niels Tobiasen, Danish managing director of a Wiltshire security firm, was given a suspended five-month sentence in September 2008 for bribing a Ugandan official in order to win Ugandan army training contracts ahead of a Commonwealth summit in Kampala. Also cf Transparency International Progress Report 2008, ‘Enforcement of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials’.

  47 ‘Did Kamani Meet Kibaki?’, Nairobi Star, 18 May 2008.

  SEARCHABLE TERMS

  Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

  (JG indicates John Githongo)

  a’Nzeki, Archbishop Ndingi Mwana 221

  Achebe, Chinua 42, 132

  Africa Commission 206, 212

  Akunga, Conrad Marc 153, 154, 155, 158, 334

  Al Qaeda 78, 258–9, 277

  Ali, Major General Hussein 256

  Anderson, David 107, 232, 308

  Anglo Leasing and Finance Company Ltd 129, 162, 206; British investigation into 328; contracts with Kenyan government 85, 164, 165, 166, 169, 173, 180; cost of Kenyan government contracts with 165–6, 169, 174, 210, 216; elections, money from deals used to fund NARC campaigns (‘resource mobilisation’) 215–16, 219–20, 243; foreign donors’ reaction to scandal 260–4, 266, 267; forensic laboratory contract 164, 173; ‘ghost firms’ sue Kenyan government for breach of contract 328; JG investigates 79, 80–97, 135, 163–6, 233–45, 248–54, 268–9; JG releases details of investigation into 248–54; KANU and 77–9; Kibaki and 219, 220, 222, 234, 235–6, 238, 244–5, 251, 265–6, 268, 273; Maore reveals scandal 77–9, 85, 86; media coverage of scandal 240, 245, 248–54, 255–6, 269–70; ministers involved with 84–97, 118, 165, 166, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 223, 245, 250–1, 268; Moi and 165, 171–2; NARC and 79, 84–97, 118, 165, 166, 171–2, 173, 177, 179, 215–16, 217–20, 222, 233–6, 241, 242–3, 245, 250–4, 261, 268, 269–74; navy frigate contrac
t 165, 180; passport printing and lamination contract 78–9, 84–7; payments to 164–5, 170–1, 173, 219, 268, 328; police Mahindra jeep contract 78, 84; classic procurement scam 168–72; ‘Project Nexus’ 165; shadowy nature of 171–2

  Annan, Kofi 314, 315

  Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act 66, 285

  Artur brothers 256–60

  Asians, Kenyan 139, 146, 168, 172, 173, 270, 281, 303, 316

  Awori, Moody 84, 85, 87, 213, 245, 250, 251, 268, 301

  BAE Systems 276–7, 334

  Bellamy, William 193–4, 222–3, 224, 250, 259

  Benn, Hilary 267, 276

  Biwott, Nicholas 301

  Blair, Tony 54, 194, 200, 206, 212, 276

  Bland, Simon 267

  Blixen, Karen 8–9, 121

  Blundell, Michael 50, 112

  Bomas of Kenya 73, 74, 241

  Bono 205, 266

  Bosire Commission 65, 268, 321

  British High Commission, Nairobi 194, 195, 198, 202–3, 253, 268, 296

  Brown, Stephen 188

  Bruce, Colin 260, 263, 275, 278, 333

  Bush, George W. 262, 263, 275, 277

  Buwembo, Joachim 306

  Cameron, James 109

  Castle, Barbara 109

  Central Bank, Kenya 62, 78, 93, 164–5, 259, 318, 319, 320, 322

  Central Province, Kenya 52, 73, 99, 102, 108, 113, 114, 117, 127, 147–8, 243, 280, 282, 297, 298, 301, 304

  Charterhouse Bank Ltd 259–60

  China 209, 240

  Christian Aid 160, 205

  Churchill, Winston 105

  CIA 82–3

  Clay, Sir Edward 71, 171, 183, 194–204, 210–15, 224, 225, 254, 259, 267, 277, 333–4

  Collier, Professor Paul 31, 51, 185–6, 232, 326

  Collier, Val 326

  Cornwell, David (John le Carré) 23

  Daily Nation 63, 68, 91, 119, 131, 202, 222, 247–51, 253, 282–3, 291, 298, 319