It's Our Turn to Eat (31 page)

Having claimed his first scalps, John barely paused for breath. Even before Kiraitu had accepted the inevitable, John had travelled down to London to testify before the Public Accounts Committee, whose members had flown to Britain to hear his evidence. Entering the Kenyan High Commission on Portland Place, John effectively had his longed-for moment in court, testifying for two solid days.

So far, much had gone his way, but emerging from the High Commission on the final day of his evidence, John was reminded of the perilousness of his course. He had always known the revelation he had taped his colleagues would revolt as many Kenyans as it impressed. Some of the Kenyan journalists who gathered there that day were drunk, and they hurled the familiar accusations in his face.
‘Did you tape the fucking president?' shouted one. ‘Did you have a gay relationship with Edward Clay?' called another. ‘Who's paying your fees?' Dickson Migiro, a young Kenyan television producer there that day, cringed at the spectacle. ‘I thought, “My God, is this Kenyan journalism?”, because they were chasing the guy down the street.'

In mid-March John was back at the High Commission, this time to testify before Ringera's KACC. Just as a government delighted to see the back of him had been forced to invite John home, circumstances now required the judge who had told him to stop pursuing Anglo Leasing to go through the motions of quizzing him.

That exchange marked the slow pulling out of the tide. It would take John a while to realise it, but his testimony before the Public Accounts Committee marked the high-water-mark of his campaign for accountability. Plotting his course, he had divided his operation into seven separate stages. Stage One was the exposure of the system of looting. Stage Two weathering the public reaction. Stage Three his testimony before the PAC and KACC. Stage Four would be the bringing about of political change, however small. The next stages involved the return of stolen monies and prosecution–the last of which, while a theme harped on by opposition and human rights groups, seemed to John a virtually hopeless cause in a litigation-prone nation. ‘These guys own the judiciary, they've stolen the money and can pay the lawyers to fight for them for years. The crucial thing isn't prosecution, it's restitution, payback.'

In the event, Stages Five, Six and Seven would slip forever from his grasp, retreating into the nebulous realms of What Might Have Been. The coming year would see a gradual, systematic clawing back of lost ground by the scandal's perpetrators and their defenders. So formidable would that campaign prove that even holding on to the rewards of Stages One to Three would come to seem something of an achievement.

Soon after midnight on 2 March 2006, staff working the night shift in the Kenya Television Network headquarters in Nairobi's I&M Bank Tower, a gleaming skyscraper that pierces the skyline like a splinter of blue ice, got a nasty shock. Viewers of KTN, part of the Standard Media Group, would later be able to see exactly what happened, thanks to CCTV footage replayed on national television. Commandos in balaclavas and hoods, wielding AK47s, broke into the transmission room where two technicians were watching a row of screens. Driving up to the I&M Tower in unmarked cars, the raiders had roughed up nightwatchmen and smashed their way through a series of locked doors to get that far. Ordering KTN staff to close down the station, they kicked them to the ground and then proceeded to ransack the offices, removing vital broadcasting equipment, scores of
hard drives and computer monitors. Only solid doors saved the
Standard
's editorial floor from similar damage. Frustrated, the hooded men roared off to the
Standard
's printing plant in Nairobi's industrial area, where they smashed machinery and made a bonfire out of thousands of copies of the next day's edition.

Smarting from weeks of merciless media attack, the Mount Kenya Mafia had struck back. If the
Standard
, Kenya's second-biggest newspaper, had not led domestic coverage of the Anglo Leasing affair, it had joined in with relish. While a certain amount could be forgiven the
Nation
, in light of past friendships, Moi's ownership of the
Standard
meant any criticism from that quarter was viewed as politically charged. ‘Your newspaper is dangling by a thread,' Alfred Mutua, the government spokesman, warned Pamela Makotsi, the
Standard
's editor, the day before the raid. ‘The government is looking for the smallest excuse to slam down on the
Standard
. They can raid you, you know, just like they did in the past.' She had been incredulous. ‘What, this new government, raid us? Come on, that's what happened in the old days.'

It took a while for the government to admit responsibility for an operation whose brute thuggery seemed more typical of Mugabe's Zimbabwe than of Kenya. But when it finally did, there was no apology. The
Standard
had been planning a story that posed a threat to national security, the government claimed. ‘If you rattle a snake, you must be prepared to be bitten,' said John Michuki, minister for internal security.

The raid, which came as John was preparing to give testimony to the KACC, had several curious characteristics. One was that it had been staged without the prior knowledge of police commissioner Major General Hussein Ali. The other was that the technicians ordered to the floor had noticed, despite the balaclavas and hoods, that several of the commandos were white. It was the first, but not the last, controversial appearance of the ‘Artur brothers'–two guntoting, rule-flouting, medallion-sporting, party-throwing, bling braggarts whose sojourn in Nairobi would deliver a sharp kick in the groin to what little remained of NARC credibility.

They called themselves Artur Margaryan and Artur Sargasyan, boasted that they were descended from Armenia's former royal family and related to the Armenian prime minister. It later emerged that their passports were stolen, their real names a mystery, the Armenian premier had never heard of them, and their nationality was just as likely to be Russian or Czech. With their black shirts, heavy gold chains and close-cropped heads–which only served to accentuate the contrast between their pallid East European skins and dark hair–they certainly looked what opposition leader Raila Odinga claimed them to be: the least discreet of international mercenaries.

Raila claimed government operatives had hired the two not only to lead the raid on the
Standard
, but to assassinate opposition politicians. Not true, replied the two Arturs, they were harmless international investors who would bring prosperity to Kenya via–now, where had Kenyans heard this before?–their role in Africa's gold and diamond trade. But everything about the two Arturs was off-kilter. Strangely talkative, they staged the first of their press conferences in Jomo Kenyatta airport's VIP lounge, an area usually inaccessible to ordinary mortals. Reports circulated that they were part of a Russian mafia network and had been sent to Kenya to ‘liberate' a massive cocaine shipment seized at the coast in 2004, the biggest haul in African history. When they were at last deported in June 2006, having finally crossed the line by waving a gun at customs officials who tried to open their luggage at the airport, their villa was found to contain a collection of assault rifles, bulletproof jackets, a small fleet of cars, and official documents assigning them the rank of deputy police commissioners and giving them unrestricted access to all Kenya's airports. Decidedly, these were unusually well-connected soldiers of fortune.

Through his various security contacts, John heard that the Artur brothers had been spotted in Britain. The freelance security experts' assignment, he was told, was twofold. Their first task was to install listening devices at the Kenyan High Commission in London in order to record his closed-door testimony before the PAC. The second was to rid the Kibaki presidency, in the style of Henry II, of this turbulent
whistleblower. The Thames Valley Police had heard similar reports, for after a six-month silence they suddenly got in touch. ‘It was very discreet, very gentle. They just said: “We've heard about the Russians. You might want to move.”' John swapped his exposed lodgings on the Woodstock Road for a room in the womb of the college campus, and was issued with a set of alarms.

The devices were never put to the test. Did John's enemies lose their nerve at the prospect of carrying out an assassination on British soil, an act that would have plunged Kenya into the same kind of diplomatic and political hot water as the Soviet Union in the wake of Alexander Litvinenko's fatal poisoning later that year? Did the Artur brothers, so clod-hoppingly indiscreet in all their operations, simply fail to deliver? John could only guess. The brothers were tracked as far as Oxford. ‘It was incredibly incompetent. These guys were spotted drinking downtown within days.' And then they disappeared from the radar, returning to Kenya mission unaccomplished.

The episode had provided John with a timely reminder of how far his enemies, facing a forthcoming election, were ready to go to stay in power. But the entire Artur saga carried wider lessons for anyone concerned about Kenya's trajectory. One was that the president's entourage was careering out of control. The other was even more worrying. The brothers' swaggering contempt for the regulations suggested they thought they had landed in a banana republic, where those with friends in high places need fear neither the journalist's microphone nor the policeman's knock. It was a view they increasingly shared with Kenya's foreign donors, in whose eyes the government was beginning to look about as respectable as those of Colombia or Albania.
³⁶

For the United States in particular, whose embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had been bombed by Al Qaeda in 1998, the Arturs affair highlighted the vulnerability of a society eaten away from within. Corruption can reach a point–and it seemed, with the Artur saga, that point had been reached–where an entire nation is there for the taking, where sleaze has security implications not just for the nation concerned, but for its neighbours and allies. ‘The reason Al
Qaeda came here in the 1990s wasn't for the scenery,' Ambassador Bellamy told me. ‘If you can lie your way through immigration, if you can get your goods through customs, if you can induce law enforcement to turn the other way, if you can sort out your legal problems with a few attorneys and judges, if you can launder your money and invest in legitimate businesses, well, why
wouldn't
you come to Kenya?' And if Al Qaeda found Kenya a congenial environment, thanks to the ease with which officialdom could be bought, then so did global criminal syndicates, drug traffickers and warlords wanted by international war crimes tribunals.

In the final stretch of his own posting, Bellamy had reached the same stage of hair-tearing exasperation as Edward Clay before him. ‘The raid on the
Standard
was the nadir. It's like watching a Greek tragedy, in which the protagonists are doomed from the start to take the wrong stand at every turn.' The country had become a land of opportunity for the international underworld. Later that year, British Foreign Office minister Kim Howells revealed that Kenya had become a major transit point for drugs traded on British streets, with nearly a dozen domestic drugs seizures proving to have Kenyan links.

Those at the top had bent the rules so often they could no longer tell the difference between the legal and the illicit. Already, worrying new scams were pushing the Anglo Leasing scandal into the shadows. The latest involved Charterhouse Bank Ltd–funny how Kenya's conmen, true to the country's imperial history, always favoured names redolent of public school and playing field–a Nairobi bank suspected of laundering $1.5 billion-worth of illicit proceeds. Like the Artur brothers, the institution seemed to enjoy top-level protection. When the Central Bank moved to investigate it, its governor was suspended by finance minister Kimunya, its investigators accused of nepotism, and two whistleblowers who had alerted the authorities promptly took up an offer of asylum in the United States. Shopping in Nairobi that spring, I ran into a senior diplomat who told me his posting would shortly be coming to an end. Was he sorry to go? I asked. He shrugged. Well, yes and no. His embassy was very concerned about this Charterhouse business, a scam which seemed
to dwarf even Anglo Leasing. ‘There's a sense that every time you lift another stone, you find more things squirming underneath,' he said. ‘It just never seems to end.'

In the light of the devastating revelations of top-level complicity, given the mounting evidence of State House's links with global gangsterism, what action would the country's donors decide to take following the leak of John's dossier? The answer was complicated. Kenya was about to find itself at the heart of a global ideological debate over corruption and development, a battleground between aid idealists and aid sceptics, the practitioners of
realpolitik
and those with dreams of saving the world.

 

Makhtar Diop had been replaced as World Bank country director for Kenya by one Colin Bruce, a Guyanese. Bruce must have known that his predecessor's tenancy had sparked controversy in Kenya, but he moved into the house inside president Kibaki's compound in Muthaiga notwithstanding. ‘I told him not to do it,' one of his Kenyan acquaintances told me, with a shake of the head. ‘But he wouldn't listen. These World Bank guys revel in that intimacy. They want to be part of that class, to hang around those people.' When asked about his living arrangements by journalists, Bruce refused to comment. He set about forging even closer ties with his landlord and key cabinet members than those enjoyed by Diop. ‘He rationalised it by saying the government was not a uniform entity, there were the old guys and the reformists, and it was crucial to align with the reformists,' recalls a former colleague. Those reformists, in Bruce's mind, included finance minister David Mwiraria, who, he assured colleagues in Washington when questions arose about the politician, was ‘totally clean'.

Demonstrating a truly remarkable sense of timing, the World Bank chose to announce $145 million in new loans to Kenya–the first credits approved by the executive board for fifteen months–just three days after the leaking of John's dossier, signalling that, as far as this institution was concerned, a $750-million procurement scandal was no grounds for querying the wisdom of re-engaging with the
Kenyan government. The same emollient message came from DfID, which had announced a £58-million grant a few days before John's leak, and saw no reason to reconsider. The IMF was more wary, refusing to release two scheduled tranches of a lending programme, and a consultative group meeting between the Kenyan government and its donors, originally planned for April, was put on hold. But the Netherlands was the only bilateral donor to announce it was actually freezing aid over corruption concerns.

How did these organisations manage to persuade themselves the Githongo dossier was of such limited relevance to their funding programmes? By taking the long view and fixating selectively on statistics. ‘The trajectory is positive, the direction of travel is correct,' aid officials chorused when I interviewed them in Nairobi, pointing to GDP growth averaging 6 per cent over four years, such a relief after the minus scores of the Moi administration. Of course Anglo Leasing had been very depressing, but–and here they began to sound worryingly like NARC politicians–it was important to remember that more than half the eighteen suspect contracts had been signed under the previous administration. Perfectionism was pointless. Kenya was a graft-blighted society, certainly, but it was improving, and by encouraging the establishment of institutions like the KACC, funding NGOs like TI-Kenya and cajoling the government into passing procurement bills and adopting ministerial codes of conduct, fully-engaged donors could keep nudging the leadership towards greater accountability. The very fact that ministers had resigned over a corruption scandal–an unprecedented event in Kenyan history–was seized upon as a sign of progress.

‘I use a long-term time horizon, which is frustrating for some,' one DfID official in Nairobi told me. ‘My attitude is that through a series of gradual changes we are putting in place a system of checks and balances that will almost force Kenya's leadership to improve, despite itself. Not in time for this generation, necessarily, but for the next. This is a bracing time, a very encouraging time, and the overall trend is upwards.' With aid contributing just 4 per cent of the national budget, there was only so much donors could hope to achieve.
Reforming Kenyan society was ultimately the responsibility of the country's citizens, not outsiders, and in the meantime, why should the poorest of the poor–for most aid went on education and health–be made to pay for their leaders' failings? And, by the way, was I so naïve as to think a return to a KANU government would be better for Kenya?