BOOK OF THE DAY: MARY RUSSELLreviews It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan WhistleblowerBy Michela Wrong, Fourth Estate 354pp, £12.99
WHEN MWAI Kibaki came to power in Kenya in 2003 after 24 years of rule by Daniel arap Moi there was dancing in the streets: Kibaki rode to victory, pledged to end corruption and, to show he meant business, appointed an anti-corruption chief, John Githongo.
Githongo, a charismatic global networker, set to work gathering information and following leads, but above all reporting personally to his mentor Kibaki. What he uncovered was a murky path strewn with brown envelopes, nepotism, shady bank deals and development aid rip-off. Nothing new there, you’ll say, except that the path led straight to the cabinet of the new, squeaky-clean government.
Michela Wrong, formerly the Financial Times’s east Africa correspondent, combines a mix of dogged research and creative narrative to tell the story of how colonialism propelled the various Kenyan tribes to act in a confrontational way where before they had existed in relative peace. And underpinning this story is the power struggle between the small Kalenjin tribe, led by Moi, and the much larger Kikuyu tribe, led by Kibaki.
The problem for Githongo was that he was a Kikuyu and as such was expected to put tribal loyalties before all else.
Michela Wrong is uncompromising in her reading of the IMF, the World Bank, international election missions and donor governments who adopt a patronising attitude to corruption in African countries.
She quotes Githongo: “The British in particular have long held the quietly racist, patronising view that Kenyan affairs are being managed as well as anyone could expect . . . in other words, that Africans simply don’t have the intelligence or sophistication to manage very well.”
Added to that is her view that the World Bank and the IMF see themselves as agents to fight poverty, not corruption, so that aid kept pouring in but was rarely monitored. She documents the saga of Anglo Leasing – a finance company based in a nondescript house in Liverpool – engaged in deals with the Kenyan government which involved multi-million pound contracts centring on a fleet of faulty police jeeps, high-tech passport equipment and high-end forensic laboratories. How was it, asks Wrong, that these things were thought to be of importance in a country where almost 50 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line? It seemed, she writes, one of the world’s poorest governments deemed digital communications and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment so vital that it was willing to put future generations in hock to secure them. It was this dodgy procurement deal that Githongo set out to unravel.
Wrong’s book reads like the thriller it is, moving from plush Kenyan hotels to international airports, to a trendy Oxford restaurant, to Githongo’s hasty flight from Nairobi, to the arrival of Thames Valley Police in Oxford with advice for him to find more secure lodgings, and finally to the story of a bank clerk who had blown the whistle on an earlier scam – and had paid dearly for it.
Wrong has her critics and her descriptions of Githongo are at times cloying, but there is ironic humour here too. Wrong, daughter of an Italian mother and a British father who believed his beloved Labour Party’s line on WMD in Iraq, has a cruel but accurate view of the whimsicality at which English of a certain class and education excel and the self-deprecation that often goes with it – another very English characteristic that is in fact a form of intellectual arrogance. She reveals how some wily Kenyan politicians could be every bit as arrogant as their former masters.
Mary Russell is a journalist and author. She has a Master’s in conflict resolution from Bradford University’s school of peace studies