It's Our Turn to Eat (21 page)

There was another fishy thing about Anglo Leasing: the payment methods. These were all ‘turnkey' deals, in which suppliers offered not only equipment, but the funding arrangements a cash-pressed African government needed to pay for all this state-of-the-art hardware. The government signed a ‘credit supplier contract', under which it was loaned the money, undertaking to repay the credit via irrevocable promissory notes.

In the Moi era, when the IMF and the World Bank grew wary of funding Kenya, such special credit arrangements had a certain logic. But by the first year of the NARC regime, Kenya was receiving over half a billion dollars in aid from its foreign partners, much of it at interest of less than 1 per cent. The interest charged on the eighteen Anglo Leasing contracts, Mwai would later establish, ranged between 4 and 6 per cent. Despite its ready access to cheap money, the government preferred to borrow at a hefty premium. As for the use of irrevocable promissory notes, the practice simply stank.
²⁸
Backed by a legal opinion from attorney general Amos Wako, these notes were eternally binding. As good as cash, they could be bought and sold on international financial markets. If a Kenyan government subsequently tried disavowing them, it would do so at the price of its credit-worthiness and its reputation.

On an infrastructural project of any size, cautious customers usually insist on paying in tranches, checking that targets have been met and a certain quantity of equipment delivered before handing
over the next cheque. Not so with the Anglo Leasing deals, in which the government displayed a baffling eagerness to cough up, even initiating payment before the projects had actually begun. ‘In some cases, the full repayments of the credits were accomplished before the projects were completed,' wrote Mwai, logging one case in which the loan was fully repaid five months ahead of schedule.

At every step, the government seemed to place suppliers' interests before its own. And all for what, exactly? In its talks with foreign donors, the government routinely put education, the fight against malaria, the digging of wells and the fight against AIDS at the top of its agenda. These were surely the correct priorities in a developing African country where nearly half the population lived below the poverty line. Yet now, it seemed, one of the world's poorest governments deemed digital communications and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment so vital it was willing to put future Kenyan generations in hock to secure them. As the British high commissioner Edward Clay put it: ‘Why bid for all these sophisticated computerised programmes when your own official government strategy puts computerising far below things like anti-measles vaccinations?'

 

It didn't take a genius to work out what was really going on. The Anglo Leasing contracts were a crude device for extracting large wads of money from the Kenyan Treasury. Where the funds would eventually end up was anyone's guess, but it was safe to assume they would be split between those in government who authorised the deals and the entrepreneurs who provided the necessary camouflage by setting up a range of respectable-sounding shell companies and credit providers–‘looting pipes', John called them. The hope must have been that the confidentiality of these security contracts would muddy the waters long enough for the perpetrators to get away scot-free. Sometimes the suppliers at the end of the chain actually existed, although one had to wonder why any legitimate firm would agree to become embroiled in such intricate, shady deals. In other cases, the supplier was no more than a street address. Twelve of these contracts had actually been signed–if not activated–under KANU and six
under NARC, a detail which highlighted one of the most intriguing aspects of the scam. This was an apolitical money-making venture. The shady players who had originally sold the idea to the Moi administration had not let the change in regime put them off their stride. Supremely flexible, these amoral, shape-shifting pragmatists had simply made their pitch to State House's new incumbents.

The fact that many of these middlemen were of Asian origin had its roots in the country's colonial history. The white administration brought indentured coolies from the Indian subcontinent to Kenya to build the railway. Most returned to the subcontinent, taking word of the job opportunities opening up in East Africa, and their places were taken by skilled clerks, craftsmen and traders from the Punjab, Gujarat and Goa. The colonial authorities did not want these new arrivals buying land–that was for whites–and once Kenyatta Africanised the civil service, jobs in the public sector vanished. The one sector in which Asians could flourish unhindered was trade. From modest
dukas
in one-road towns, vast business empires grew, and with them a reputation for deals clinched with a nod and a wink. The emerging African elite felt little affection for the
wahindi
, seen as tight-fisted, snooty and brazenly colour-conscious, but its members knew they needed its business nous. With extended families stretching across half the world, only the Asians had the international contacts and backup to help a minister wanting to stash illegally-acquired funds abroad. Only they understood what legal hoops had to be jumped through to manipulate the import licensing process, establish a fraudulent bank or set up a shell company in the Canary Islands. Moi's Kalenjin, in particular, relied on Asian wheeler dealers like Ketan Somaia and Kamlesh Pattni–real-life models for the oleaginous anti-hero immortalised in M.G. Vassanji's novels–to hatch the strategies that would allow them to make their margins and hide the proceeds.

The key question for John was: where did the president stand in all of this? John's best-connected informants were painting a picture of a vacillating head of state, being pulled in one direction by the Mount Kenya Mafia and in the other by his conscience. John clung to that
scenario. His boss might be weak, he told himself, but he was fundamentally decent. And if a war of influence was taking place inside State House, then John, the persuasive charmer, was determined to win it. ‘I was advised to move even faster, as the political sharks were rounding against me, and I had to get to the president before they did.'

The fuss John had whipped up over the first two Anglo Leasing contracts was producing results. On 11 June, finance minister David Mwiraria stepped into his office to announce that Anglo Leasing had returned all the money it had been paid on the forensic laboratories contract. He was joined by justice minister Kiraitu Murungi, and together the two men urged John to back off, insisting that this was what the president had requested and warning that if he continued pursuing the case, the government was likely to fall, so many of ‘our people' were involved. Four days later, John learnt that Infotalent Ltd, a company which had won a police security contract, had returned 5.2 million euros. By the end of June, almost a billion shillings had been repaid by bogus companies on the eighteen-item list. Some frantic back-pedalling was taking place.

It did nothing to allay John's fears. The civil servants concerned claimed to have no idea who was returning all this money: that blank-faced ghost making his appearance once again. Yet, in a moment of indiscretion, finance minister Mwiraria let slip that he had arranged Anglo Leasing's refund by instructing a member of staff to call Asian businessman Deepak Kamani. If Mwiraria already knew Kamani was behind Anglo Leasing, it made a mockery of the investigations being conducted by the KACC and the auditor general. The same haziness hovered around the figure of Merlyn Kettering, an American consultant whose name kept surfacing in connection with the eighteen deals. John's informers told him Kettering attended high-level meetings in the office of the president at which sensitive military and communications projects were discussed. Yet Dave Mwangi, permanent secretary for internal security, denied Kettering's involvement when quizzed in front of the president.

As he stumbled on lie after lie, John continued briefing the president on what he was learning. On the morning of 18 June, noting that
Kibaki seemed in high spirits, John decided the time had come to make his pitch. Circumstantial evidence kept pointing to the same players, he told the president over breakfast. Given the shambolic nature of Kenya's judicial system, the matter could not safely be left to the law. A political gesture was necessary; heads must roll.

He had overreached himself. Looking across at the man he admired, John caught an expression he had never seen before: Kibaki seemed, well,
sheepish
. Like a boy caught with his hand in a biscuit tin. The president urged John to slow down. Above all, he was not to hand the files he was compiling on the roles played by the two permanent secretaries to the attorney general. ‘In essence, I was stopped. I had been put on ice,' he recorded in his diary: ‘The war against corruption is in State House, and I have lost the president's support. H.E. has let me down.' He had entered the room full of energy. He left it with his weightlifter's shoulders slouched, his morale in his shoes. It was time to go, he told himself.

He was beginning to feel unbearably dirtied. He had learnt so much about Anglo Leasing, who was behind it, the sums involved. He was the anti-corruption chief, appointed to protect the Kenyan people from predatory politicians, yet in his own eyes he was virtually sitting on his hands, smiling, chatting and cracking jokes with the looters in the interests of keeping the peace. ‘I was complicit. There was no doubt, I was complicit.' For someone who had imbibed the Opus Dei lesson that work is a means to sanctification, professionalism a form of godliness, nothing could have been more abhorrent. Sometimes he hated himself.

In John's mind, Kibaki was no longer an inspiring abstraction. He had become a man whose personal qualities–or rather, failings–were of huge, immediate significance. But one could swiftly drive oneself crazy trying to work out who the president really was, or what he genuinely believed. Kibaki's survival, John increasingly realised, was based on his very amorphousness. ‘Because he's so enigmatic, people see in him what they want to see. People will tell you, “He's incredibly wishy-washy,” others say, “He's very indecisive,” others say, “He's actually very cruel.” He's everything to all men. I can't say I was
immune.' Craving a reformer, he had persuaded himself Kibaki was that man.

Yet John stayed his hand. Concern for his family was one factor. His father had been almost financially ruined when he had fallen out of political favour once before, and John had no desire to force him to repeat the experience. The old man was not in the best of health, nor was John's mother: they had reached an age where they deserved some peace of mind. His brothers and sisters were all building their lives, starting young families, moving into new apartments. If he fell from grace, if the Githongo family name became politically toxic, how would it affect the people he loved?

In Kenya, as in most African nations, the moneyed, well-educated upper class forms a numerically tiny group. The political elite, business elite and social elite are one and the same thing. Rubbing up against one another at private schools, in clubs and at high society weddings, its members share an incestuous intimacy. ‘In Kenya,' one young woman explained to me at a dinner party, ‘it's not so much six degrees of separation, as one and a half.'

If a sociologist were to try to capture the various
milieux
featured in this book in the form of a Venn diagram, he would find the circles overlapping each other so heavily the categories became almost indistinguishable. One large circle, labelled ‘St Mary's school', would include John himself, presidential aide Alfred Getonga, wheeler dealer Jimmy Wanjigi, anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati, opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta and David Kibaki, the president's son. Another circle, intersecting the first in unexpected ways, would be labelled ‘Received medical treatment from Dr Dan Gikonyo'; it would include John, his father Joe, Kibaki and Nobel Prize-winner Wangari Maathai. A circle branded ‘Membership of Muthaiga, Karen, Limuru, Kiambu and Nyeri golf clubs'–Kibaki; TI board member and University of Nairobi chancellor Joe Wanjui; George Muhoho, head of the Kenya Airports Authority; Matere Keriri, former State House comptroller; future defence and transport ministers Njenga Karume and John Michuki–would take a huge bite out of the circle marked ‘Democratic Party founding members', and
would virtually swallow up two others labelled ‘TI-Kenya Board' and ‘GEMA'. A circle labelled ‘Practising Catholics' would overlap with all the smaller circles. All this before the circles for ethnicity were even drawn.

It was all very cosy. When things went well, of course, these networks were a great source of strength, a safety net stretched out in anticipation of life's shocks and reverses. But for anyone out of tune with the times, each link felt like one of the slender ropes the tiny citizens of Lilliput used to tether the giant Gulliver to the ground. As soon as John tried to lift an arm or raise a foot, he became aware of a delicate cobweb of expectations, obligations and duties tying him down.

 

As June ticked by, his relations with colleagues grew ever more strained.

Listening to the recordings John taped around this period, what's jarring is the laughter. Missing the undercurrents, unable to see the darting eyes and uneasy body language, an outsider would be forgiven for assuming these are old pals having a whale of a time. Underhand methods are explored, violent outcomes hinted at to a steady chorus of Santa-Claus-like ‘ho, ho, ho's. Blackmail may be attempted, death threats pronounced, but anyone would think it was all some great, back-slapping joke, a delightful exercise in male bonding. A friend of John's would instantly have recognised these as the baritone chuckles John produced when he was nervous or mentally on the run, a world away from real humour. But it was laughter nonetheless.

‘I would always respond by trying to make a joke of it,' acknowledges John. ‘It was the only way. If you fell silent and the room went quiet, then…' He pauses.