It's Our Turn to Eat (29 page)

Even as he was carrying out these preparatory tasks, the equivalent of a surgeon laying out his scalpels, John received a call from Kiraitu, phoning while on a trip to Germany. His colleagues, said the justice minister, thanked him for keeping his counsel. His discretion had been noted. Given the task on which John was engaged, the conversation held a certain irony.

Working his way steadily through the material, John was aware that his perceptions of the recent past were shifting. In Nairobi, the adrenalin of unfolding events had kept him on his toes, but the excitement had obscured his vision. Swept along, he had recorded conversations without absorbing their full implications. ‘I'd been too close, too close.' Spreading the events of the last few years before him like a map of his life, John now matched entries in the black notebooks with photocopied documents and the downloaded contents of his taped conversations. From what had seemed at the time a messy chaos, new outlines now emerged, like a submarine rising from impenetrable depths. Why, here, back in June 2004, was a diary entry recording a conversation in which Kibaki told him to stop his investigations, to back off. ‘That was nine days before I was sacked. I came back, I wrote it down in my diary, but rereading it, I'm amazed. The words didn't really go in. I didn't digest it. There was so much else going on I put it to one side and carried on.' Players who had seemed
peripheral emerged with fresh prominence: he could trace the series of red herrings he had repeatedly been served up by Francis Muthaura, head of the civil service, track the sinister manipulations of Kenyan intelligence. Like a carpet-maker crouched over a loom, John had allowed his eyes to become distracted by the criss-cross of colours, haring along after individual threads. It was only now, stepping back to survey the fabric in its entirety, that he could make out the overall design.

In July, very abruptly, he stopped. ‘I suddenly hit a brick wall. I just couldn't bear to go on.' There were still hours of conversations to get through, but he had heard as much as he needed. Listless days followed one after another, but John was incapable of work, engulfed by lethargy. He had always been someone who embraced the night, working on long after others had retired to bed. Friends knew there was nothing strange about receiving a text message from him at 4.30 in the morning. Now the darkness was something he dreaded. He couldn't work, but couldn't sleep either, not for more than an hour or two. He felt exhausted, mentally and physically, but lay in bed with his mind racing, consumed by anxiety, listening to the traffic dying away on the Woodstock Road, the silence descending, and finally, after what felt like an eternity, the first liquid bird calls followed by a full-throttle dawn chorus as Oxford awoke. He went to see the college doctor, and asked for sleeping pills. He stopped going to the gym. A grey tide of depression had welled up and dragged him under, and there was no one on God's earth he could share his anguish with.

The crisis, a dark night of the soul that lasted two grim weeks, was a form of delayed reaction. However many times John might have noted in his diary that corruption in Kenya went to the top, his heart had never accepted what his brain told him. The
Mzee
could not be, must not be, the grand spider at the centre of State House's web of corruption. And now, having examined all the evidence, John knew that scenario made no sense. Kibaki was not out of the loop, deceived by manipulative aides, scattily ignorant of the system of sleaze operating all around him. He
was
the system. Kibaki and his cronies had
played him for a fool, and he–star pupil, plucky former hack and experienced NGO wallah that he was–had kindly obliged. The bitterness choked him.

And with that came another terrifying realisation: ‘This thing will never go away.' In his mind, up until then, John had managed to balance two parallel, if mutually exclusive, scenarios. Allow Anglo Leasing quietly to fade away, or clear his conscience and become one of the most famous–or infamous–Kenyans in history. What suddenly struck home was the understanding that it had to be one or the other, he could not have both. And it had to be the latter, with all it would involve in terms of public vilification and media hysteria, because of who he was. Character is destiny. ‘John has the kind of honesty that stems from not being able to live with yourself if you don't do the right thing,' Ali Zaidi, his former editor, once told me. As a moral actor and a devout Christian, his route was virtually preordained. ‘Initially, I never saw myself as a whistleblower. I had not thought it through to that point. Maybe part of me hoped all my work, my interactions with government people, would lead to internal changes that would be positive. But in the end I had to do the hard thing, the painful thing.' Travelling on the Oxford double-deckers, he gazed at other passengers and experienced a fierce pang of envy for their ordinary lives, their mortgages, their prosaic worries about which school to choose and whether they could afford a new car.

One dreary feature of this new life was clearly going to be an intimate acquaintance with various legal chambers. John already had a lawyer in Kenya, and as the months passed he would acquire additional lawyers in the United States and Britain. Thankfully, much of the work they did for him would be pro bono: he was the kind of high-profile client whose business added lustre to a chambers' reputation. Hanging over him was Kenya's Official Secrets Act. This catch-all legislation had long served as a curtain behind which government could conduct its affairs away from prying eyes. By chance, John had never been asked to sign it, although all his staff had done so. But that omission, in his own eyes, offered no real let-out–the keeping of state secrets had been implicit in his role. ‘I can't in good conscience
walk into a court and ask my lawyer to defend me on the basis that I didn't sign it.'

Before leaving Kenya, John had read up intensively on the Act, even asking a lawyer friend to draft a legal opinion. The question of whether it could be justifiable to divulge information acquired in the course of his professional duties–information clearly never intended for public ears–had haunted him since arriving in Britain. For John, this was not simply a legal issue, it was moral and spiritual. It bothered him so intensely that in the first months of exile he paid for an old friend, a devout fellow Catholic he had often prayed alongside, to fly from Nairobi to Oxford to serve as spiritual adviser. ‘He was in a quandary,' remembers the friend. ‘He wanted to know whether information of corrupt dealings that had only come his way because of his appointment could be used for purposes for which it was not intended. I went away, thought about it and told him that this information, which involved the stealing of public money, did not belong to the president or the government. It belonged to the
wananchi
. He was very scrupulous, he needed to be morally sure.'

Behind the Official Secrets Act lurked something even more alarming: a possible High Treason charge. High Treason carries the death penalty in Kenya, although such sentences are routinely commuted to life imprisonment. Crucially, it is a non-bailable offence, which meant that if John returned to Kenya he could be charged, immediately thrown into prison and–in a country notorious for the creeping pace of its judicial system and the squalid state of its jails–left there to rot virtually indefinitely.

One way to sidestep these problems would be to testify before parliament. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was a cross-party group led by opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta, the man beaten by Kibaki in the 2002 elections. Anything said before the PAC would be privileged, protecting John from legal pursuit. He could not go to the mountain, so the mountain must come to him. If he could persuade Uhuru Kenyatta to bring the PAC to London, he would unburden himself before its members, satisfying his nagging desire to render account to the Kenyan people. When, in August, planning minister
Peter Anyang' Nyong'o raised the possibility of John testifying before the PAC, John responded with alacrity. He was ready to talk, he declared in his first press statement. He was simply awaiting a government invitation.

The government reaction was a telling silence. It was the same story when John, hearing that Kibaki would be in London to meet East African investors, once again allowed himself, for a moment, to pin his hopes on his former boss. ‘I've been in touch with State House, suggesting that I present my evidence directly to the old man at the High Commission. I owe it to him,' he told me. ‘If you do that, make sure someone else–me, Michael, anyone–goes with you,' I emailed, suddenly convinced that if John entered the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place alone, he would never come out. I needn't have worried. The president had no desire to talk to his troublesome former
kijana
, and John's offer was not taken up.

 

One of the elements miring him in his Slough of Despond was the grim isolation of his position. ‘When you effectively blow the whistle at that level, there's no one you can speak to. There's no one who can tell you what it's going to be like, the opprobrium that is going to result, no one. There are no precedents.'

Back in Kenya, Joe and Mary Githongo had withdrawn into their Karen villa, aware that many old acquaintances hesitated to be associated with a family which had produced such a wayward son. Their phone line had become so crackly, conversations were virtually impossible. Mrs Githongo had gone to complain at the Telkom Kenya office, but thought she knew the reason for the interference: the line was being monitored. There had been an unnerving episode when a Kenyan MP turned up at the residence–which Joe Githongo had used as collateral for a bank loan–claiming he had heard it was for sale. Two flustered, vulnerable old people were being used to send John a message.

When I visited John's parents in Kenya that August, I had a sense of a couple disconcertingly ignorant of what was to come, but hunkering down in cautious preparation for any eventuality. With his sons'
help, Joe was trying to settle his debts and sort out his tangled business affairs. Mrs Githongo, for her part, had sold a stretch of the land at the back of the plot where the family had until recently run a small farm. She planned to do the same with several plots upcountry. Walking slowly, to allow an adored granddaughter to trot alongside, we inspected the empty chicken runs and livestock pens, which were being clucked over disconsolately by John's aged wet-nurse and one of his aunties. ‘You know, Kikuyus and land, you never let it go,' said Mrs Githongo, observing the women's distress. ‘But look at Kenyatta, look at Moi–so much land, for what? Let others enjoy what we have.'

The couple tried to keep their spirits up, tracing Christian parallels in their son's tribulations. ‘Jesus came from Heaven and had to die for us all,' said Mary Githongo. ‘Someone had to sacrifice his life for others.' But they had no real grasp of how great that sacrifice was likely to be. John, they told themselves, would return once the crisis had blown over. Let him do a Masters, maybe take a job with the African Union, or go to work in the States. It was just a question of waiting things out.

John's brothers, with whom he exchanged constant emails, were far more aware of what was in the offing, and nervous with it. His departure had altered the shape of their lives, too. Younger brother Mugo had also noticed problems with his phone. He tried to keep a step ahead of his shadows by regularly buying new SIM cards, switching email accounts and changing the locks to his apartment. But a low profile felt like the best precaution. This was no time, he said, to go drinking at night in Nairobi's bars. ‘My social life has stopped. I'm very wary. I don't go out.' It was too easy, in a city notorious for violent crime, for a political hit by someone wanting to get at John via his family to be camouflaged as a random mugging. Mugo never wore his seatbelt in the car these days, he let slip, because he wanted full freedom of movement in case of sudden incidents on the road ahead.

Gitau also seemed in sombre mood. We met for a beer next to the swimming pool of my one-star hotel. Evening was drawing in and the first bats were darting out from the palm trees as the light died, skim
ming the pool for midges. Although he was in fact the second Githongo son, Gitau was often mistaken for the oldest sibling. He had the same bull-neck, solid jaw and sheer heft as John. He was the one who had got lumbered with the family firm, and if Mugo was the T-shirt-wearing radical puppy of the family, Gitau, grave and balding, looked the accountant he had become, conservative and cautious. He had many friends in the business community, and they took a distinctly pragmatic view of Anglo Leasing, he told me. As long as they were making money, they could tolerate sleaze. ‘They're telling me: “In whose interest is it for the government to fall? Let these tenpercenters have their 10 per cent, what we care about is stability.” What you have to realise is that Kenyans don't really believe in democracy.'

If he fretted about the explosive impact of his brother's revelations, Gitau also worried, quixotically, about the precise opposite. ‘What if John spills all, everything he knows–and
nothing happens
?' The media in Kenya were increasingly complicit, the political class supine, and what did the donors' reaction–if there was any–matter when China stood ready to lend to African governments, no questions asked?

We walked together to his car, a classic old Mercedes the colour of dull gold. Before saying goodbye, Gitau halted and turned to pose a question that had clearly been preying on his mind.

‘Has anyone else ever done this?'

‘Watergate?' I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘I mean in Africa.'

I thought for a bit, but couldn't recall a single occasion in which a government official of John's stature had blown the whistle on an African administration. There were no examples pointing the way ahead. Gitau nodded gravely, a worry confirmed, and got in his car.