It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong
Once, when I was crossing Mali by bus, it took three days to go 100 yards. This was not because of the condition of the road, but because three sets of officials — the army, the police and the douaniers — insisted upon extracting their pound of flesh from the passengers (except for me), and would not let them go until they had duly paid up.
The passengers took it all with a good-humoured resignation that both surprised and moved me. Perhaps their resignation derived from an understanding that, had the boot been upon the other foot, they would have behaved in the same way. Such a degree of self-understanding is rare in the world.
Perhaps this also explains why, when dictatorships and presidencies for life are overthrown in Africa, the successor regimes, nominally more democratic, seem often to be not much better, at least in point of corruption. In this book Michela Wrong, who wrote a marvellous account of Mobutu’s Zaire, In Mr Kurtz’s Footsteps, tackles the Kenya of President Kibaki, who attained the presidency by defeating the old dinosaur of Kenyan politics, Daniel arap Moi, in an election the latter had been forced to concede, much against his inclination, after 24 years in power. Initially there were high hopes that Mwai Kibaki would clean out the Augean stable of Kenyan corruption; but before long, the Augean stable was simply under new management, albeit somewhat more economically efficient.
The author uses the life and experiences of a Kenyan whistle-blower, John Githongo, to recount the collapse of the high hopes roused by arap Moi’s defeat. Githongo, a scion of a well-to-do Kikuyu family, had long studied the corruption under Moi, and was asked by the new government to head a department dedicated to exposing and preventing further corruption. He took his work with deadly seriousness, and had the ear of the president; but gradually the realisation dawned that it was all a public relations exercise, and that the new regime was just as rotten as the old.
Githongo collected huge quantities of compromising information about ministers, and even recorded conversations with and between them that proved their complicity in large-scale financial scandals. Githongo came to the conclusion that the corruption started at the very top, with the president whom he had previously much admired; and eventually, fearing for his life, he fled to Britain.
Wrong weaves the various strands of Kenyan history and politics into the story, which is not quite strong enough to stand on its own, with special emphasis on the ethnic divisions of Kenyan society. The result is a competent book that is not nearly as good as In Mr Kurtz’s Footsteps, perhaps because it is harder to make ordinary, everyday corruption by essentially normal men as fascinating as the bizarreries of Mobutu’s Zaire. Moreover, the book is written in the mid-Atlantic prose that so many British journalists now adopt, consciously or unconsciously.
Among the strands in the book is the reaction of what is called ‘the international community’ — the concatenation of diplomats, aid donors, sanctimonious ageing pop stars and allegedly non-governmental organisations — to the corruption of the new regime. The Blair regime couldn’t quite make up its mind about this: not only did it stop the police investigation of British Aerospace bribes to Saudi Arabia, but it made legalised corruption the very essence of its economic policy. It was not in a strong position to read lectures to others on this subject, and there was nothing so ridiculous as Mr Blair in one of his fits of morality. The Kenyans, no fools, sensed this.
The ironies of aid to Africa — the means by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries — are hinted at in the book, as are the deeply condescending attitudes upon which the supposed need for such aid is based. But the author is not sceptical enough to see the absurdity of aiming aid, as she suggests, at the police forces and judicial systems of the continent in order, supposedly, to bring about the rule of law under which economies can flourish. This aid would result in a lot of very fat policemen and judges: in my experience, they are quite fat enough already.