It's Our Turn to Eat (10 page)

Picking up the documents was the tricky part. They met in bars at 2 o'clock in the morning, in the forecourts of deserted petrol stations, in private homes–always at night. When John resorted to couriers, they were individuals he knew and trusted, and instructions were
kept to a minimum. ‘If you go to this shop, you will find a certain document waiting for you there.' If the matter was really sensitive, he would wait for the civil servant to take annual leave, drive to his upcountry
shamba
, and pick up the document in person.

Only John knew the names of his informants, which were never written down. To protect them, their payments–recorded in a special book stored in his State House office safe–were listed under code names: A2, B1, D3…By the end, John was running a small stable of around twenty informants, their fees ranging from 50,000 to a hefty 200,000 shillings ($2,560) a month. It was a job that played to his talents, this man with a natural bent towards intrigue and an appetite for gossip. But it was not one he enjoyed; it made him feel shifty, tainted. ‘I was spying on my own colleagues, which didn't feel like an honourable thing to do.' He was angrily aware that had Kenyan intelligence been delivering, none of it would have been necessary. But as the reports came in, it was ever clearer that he had done the right thing in striking out alone. ‘Someone would tell me something. I'd ask the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate and the same thing would come up. Then the attorney general would investigate, and the same thing would come up again. So I would ask myself: how come only Kenya's four-billion-shilling-a-year intelligence service can't get this right? The intelligence service was part of the architecture of corruption, and I had no confidence in it.'

 

Since early March 2004, John's informants had been talking to him about the Anglo Leasing contract. Two businessmen with spotty reputations–Deepak Kamani, whose Kenyan Asian family had been linked with the Mahindra jeep débâcle, and Jimmy Wanjigi, son of a former cabinet minister–were being cited in connection with the deal. But the other names mentioned were worryingly highly placed. Top of the list came vice president Moody Awori, minister for home affairs, and Chris Murungaru, minister of internal security in the Office of the President. Two permanent secretaries' names were cited–Dave Mwangi at the ministry for internal security, and Joseph Magari at the ministry of finance–as was that of another top civil
servant: Alfred Getonga, Kibaki's personal assistant. Many of those named were the very men who had stepped forward after the president's stroke, effectively running the country during his illness. The roll-call went to the core of the Mount Kenya Mafia.

What was worse, John's sources were telling him something that Maoka Maore did not know. Anglo Leasing and Finance was no more than an address in Upper Parliament Street, Liverpool, an empty title; and since there was nothing behind that name, it seemed reasonable to assume that Kenya would never receive the tamper-proof, fraud-resistant passport printing systems Anglo Leasing had just been contracted, at inflated expense, to supply.

Before Maore addressed parliament, John had tried raising the matter with Moody Awori, in whose docket immigration, and anything to do with passports, fell. ‘Uncle Moody', a politician from western Kenya with a liking for flowing robes and wide hats, enjoyed the image of a kindly elder statesman. But he proved distinctly evasive, telling John he made a point of not knowing anything about such things. ‘Sticking his head in the sand,' John noted in his diary.

Anglo Leasing was not the only procurement deal John's informants had mentioned as suspicious. Another contract involved the construction in Spain of a frigate for the Kenyan Navy. Several companies had provided quotes, but the contract went to another outsider: a Cypriot of Sri Lankan birth called Anura Perera who had done a great deal of business with the Moi regime. Perera's tender had been far higher than any of the other companies', but he had nonetheless won the bid. The issue did not make a big impression on John until a week later, when the finance minister David Mwiraria pulled him aside at a conference to warn him that Murungaru was asking whether John had authorised an investigation into Perera's bank account. ‘Mwiraria whispered to me that Perera was a strong supporter of the president and had backed him for over ten years and had even paid the president's medical bills incurred in London following his road accident in 2002,' he noted.

This was not exactly encouraging news for the man whose job was to liaise with the president in the fight against sleaze. It was with a
distinctly uneasy mind that John briefed the president the day after Maore's parliamentary performance. Anglo Leasing, he warned his boss, was likely to prove the first big case of graft within the NARC administration. Given the level of unhappiness created by the botched constitutional review process, which left NARC vulnerable to charges of ethnic favouritism, it was vital the government demonstrate that it was devoting as much energy to pursuing graft within its own ranks as it had to exposing sleaze under Moi. Kibaki seemed unsurprised by both the scam and the names being mentioned, but agreed the Kenya Anti-Corruption Authority (KACC) should be activated. The structures to which NARC had pinned its anti-sleaze credentials were about to be put to the test.

The president had little choice, for parliament was now on the case, KANU MPs licking their lips at the scent of NARC blood. The head of the National Security Committee, David Mwenje, arrived in John's office and announced that he intended to summon various politicians and officials to give evidence. He was carrying a stash of documents, whose contents–relayed by John's spy network–were already familiar to the anti-corruption chief. Someone had been leaking with abandon.

Having set the ball rolling, John left with Mwiraria and Kiraitu for London, where he had an appointment at the offices of Kroll, the risk-consultancy group investigating Goldenberg on the Kenyan government's behalf. While the three Kenyans were there, John took the opportunity to ask for British records to be checked for evidence of Anglo Leasing. The checks, conducted on the spot, confirmed what John's sources had said: Anglo Leasing was not a legal entity. Aside from an address in Liverpool, there was, in fact, a baffling absence of information about the mysterious company which had had so many dealings with the Kenyan government. The blatancy of the scam seemed to embolden justice minister Kiraitu, who was in take-no-prisoners mode on the plane returning to Nairobi. ‘The time has come for big heads to roll,' he declared. John was delighted. ‘If we act firmly on this, the rest of our term will be a free ride politically. We will occupy the moral high ground,' he told his colleague. Stamping
out graft was not only the right thing to do, it made political and electoral sense.

The return to Kenya was like a cold shower. Fired up, John couldn't wait to clear airport immigration to get things moving. He rang the head of the KACC from the VIP lounge at Jomo Kenyatta. The news was grim: the head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura, was refusing to cooperate with investigators until parliament had completed its own inquiry. Buoyed by his defiant stance, the permanent secretaries at Finance and Home Affairs were also stonewalling, with the former refusing to give the KACC a copy of the original Anglo Leasing contract. Chris Murungaru, minister for internal security, was also cutting up rough.

But a 2 May exchange with the president reinvigorated John. Kibaki, in fighting spirit, said he knew that Alfred Getonga, Murungaru and Jimmy Wanjigi were all involved in Anglo Leasing. The money was probably already ‘eaten', he acknowledged, but John must press ahead as fast as he could. ‘Proceed without mercy,' Kibaki ordered. His anger at the gathering revelations certainly seemed to confirm the scenario of a high-minded leader betrayed by shifty aides, a scenario John was more than happy to embrace. With Kibaki apparently backing him to the hilt, John redoubled his efforts. All further payments to Anglo Leasing, he wrote to Magari, must be stopped.

John had not expected his zeal to endear him to his ministerial colleagues, given the extent of the network his informers had sketched. It was just as well. On 4 May, vice president Moody Awori invited him for a lunch of stew and chapattis at the vice president's villa in Lavington, where they were joined by Kiraitu and Murungaru. Once the guests had arrived, ‘Uncle Moody's' genial expression suddenly vanished and he turned on John. ‘Now, what's all this about?' There was no need to investigate Anglo Leasing further, he insisted–he had already explained the matter in a statement to parliament. When John disagreed, a tense discussion ensued. Recording the encounter in his diary, John had a surreal sense of priorities being inverted. Anglo Leasing, for these men, was not the issue.
He
was the ‘problem' they had all gathered to resolve.

Perhaps the element of the lunch that pained him most was the new stance adopted by Kiraitu. John knew enough about the Harvard-educated minister's background to hold him in considerable respect. Kiraitu had been one of a group of pro-opposition lawyers who had braved the wrath of the Moi regime in the 1980s, fighting for multi-partyism, defending political detainees. A member of what the media had dubbed the Young Turks, he had been harassed, monitored and followed before finally going into exile in the United States. There was something about Kiraitu's face, with its soft and fleshy lips–lips that would have been alluring on a woman but looked slightly repellent on a man–that suggested weakness, and in many of his public statements he had revealed a startling crudeness. His long friendship with Chris Murungaru, whose name surfaced with monotonous regularity every time Anglo Leasing was mentioned, was also a source of concern. But Kiraitu still stood for much that John believed. What had happened to the enthusiasm he had shown on the flight home from London?

 

It was about this time that John systematically stepped up a practice he had initiated the year before. This activity would later trigger his critics' most vitriolic abuse and leave even otherwise sympathetic Kenyans shaking their heads: he began secretly taping conversations with his colleagues. Why did he enter into what he would subsequently acknowledge was ‘morally disastrous territory, the worst form of betrayal, the most discomfiting thing I've done in my entire life'? Initially–how ironic this would come to seem–it was simply in order to be able to prove his
bona fides
to the boss. In the first year of his tenure, the most contentious material he heard came from businessmen passing through his office. Without any paperwork to prove his claims, he realised that if he relayed these gobbets of information to the president, only for those who had provided them to think better of their frankness, he could be made to look either a villain or a fool. The systematic taping would prevent him from being stitched up in front of the president. Things said in John's presence could not later be denied. He had told the
Mzee
what he was doing from the
start, leaving it to Kibaki to decide whether to pass that information on to other State House players. The president had reacted in his usual laid-back fashion. ‘He just laughed.'

But as the Anglo Leasing scandal began to unfold, the motives behind John's taping subtly changed. It was no longer merely a question of convincing his employer, but of justifying himself before history. As the disconcerting admissions piled up and his suspicions about his closest colleagues mounted, the cold realisation of just how much he stood to lose–reputation, credibility, employability–dawned. Listening to the Goldenberg hearings he had helped engineer, John had imbibed a pertinent lesson: throughout Kenyan history, civil servants had always served as scapegoats, fall guys, when high-profile financial scandals came to light. The elected politicians who issued the orders had always walked free, the size of their ethnic constituencies, in a world of political alliances, coating them in Teflon. To his own ears, the hints that were now being dropped were so shocking in their implications no sane person, he felt sure, would believe him if they did not hear the words for themselves. He would be mocked as a paranoid fantasist, a Walter Mitty character whose mental instability had, sadly, not been spotted by his recruiters. The recordings–his ‘wires', as he called them–were all that stood between him and ignominy. ‘By 2004 I knew the wires would be the only thing to save me.'

If he found what he was doing repugnant, there was a sense in which he was using what small and idiosyncratic weapons he had to combat vastly superior forces. The Mount Kenya Mafia might have a huge network of civil servants, intelligence agents, generals and police chiefs to do their bidding, but there were areas in which they were surprisingly weak. The kind of man who gets nerdish pleasure from keeping up with the latest computer software, music gadgetry and mobile phone special features, John had no trouble working out how to download digitalised sound, set a tape recorder onto time-delay voice-activation or encrypt his internet traffic to shield it from prying eyes. Many of those he was dealing with belonged to a generation of technology-allergic old-schoolers who prided themselves on
barely being able to type–that was a secretary's job–hardly grasped the concept of voicemail and stared at their mobile phones in bemusement when they bleeped. ‘I had an advantage. I'm a technology geek and these were guys who had trouble sending an SMS.'

There was another side of John to which the taping appealed. Since his schooldays, he had been recording his own life with a scientific thoroughness more typical of a zoologist than a diarist. He had taken to heart Socrates' maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. The wires were just another ingredient in the process of existential reckoning being conducted by this accountant's son. Who, in his mind, would eventually tot up the pluses and minuses and come up with a definitive balance at the end of his turbulent life story? God? John himself? The Kenyan public? Future historians? There was no clear answer, but that didn't make him feel any less compelled to log and note. Capturing events on paper and on tape was the one way he could impose order on the chaos of events swirling around him. Just as it was the old timers' misfortune to be dealing with a technogeek, it was also their bad luck–in a political world which relied for its protection on word-of-mouth instructions, whispered consultations and the absence of a paper trail–to have recruited a man who felt compelled to record every daily incident for posterity.