It's Our Turn to Eat (34 page)

As he alienated potential allies, his anti-corruption strategy took a hammering, with Britain's DfID, champion of higher aid allocations, leading the way, and non-governmental organisations, which had always viewed Wolfowitz as a White House plant assigned to politicise a supposedly neutral international institution, piling in enthusiastically. Wolfowitz, argued the government ministers whose contributions kept the World Bank in business, was making the poor pay for the sins of the elite. The fact that Colin Bruce toured Western capitals, lobbying the same men and women to unfreeze pending loans to Kenya and approve fresh ones, was a measure of the mutinous mood. It was an initiative, said bank insiders, Bruce would never have dared to take without the blessing of influential colleagues and key ambassadors.

There was a strong element in the gathering revolt of score-settling for American high-handedness in its War on Terror–‘payback-by-proxy', as the
Washington Post
termed it, for the Iraq war. That was understandable, but in the process of taking their revenge,
Wolfowitz's critics risked throwing the baby–an overdue examination of the World Bank's complicity in corruption–out with the bathwater. John had no doubts on which side his sympathies fell. ‘There's a struggle for the soul of the World Bank taking place, and sadly that fight is being engaged over the small bit of paper called the anti-corruption strategy. The
nomenklatura
is pouring cold water over everything Wolfowitz suggests, deliberately misinterpreting his anti-corruption paper in order to kill it off.' By the time Wolfowitz's cherished Governance and Anti-Corruption (GAC) Framework was presented to the bank's Development Committee at its annual meeting in Singapore in September 2006, it had, in the view of its initial supporters, already been diluted by the institution's old guard to the point where it had become a collection of woolly aspirations rather than a pragmatic plan of action. Hilary Benn, DfID's international development secretary, took the opportunity to stick the stiletto in a little further, announcing that Britain would withhold £50 million in World Bank funding unless onerous conditions on lending to poor countries were removed.

The year's end saw two massive setbacks to John's fight against corruption. On 14 December 2006, Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, suddenly announced that the Serious Fraud Office had halted a long-running probe into allegations that BAE Systems, the British defence contractor, had paid out millions of pounds in bribes to Saudi dignitaries in exchange for military contracts. The suspension, which came just as investigators were on the brink of accessing Swiss bank accounts, was justified on the unconvincing grounds of ‘national security': continuing, prime minister Tony Blair said, would have damaged Britain's relationship with a key ally in the War on Terror. But there was no disguising the ugly fact that a country which had signed the OECD anti-bribery convention had agreed to investigate no further when a high-profile company came under pressure from an important foreign customer. In one fell swoop, Britain's outspoken stance on corruption was made to look like so much hypocritical posturing, its ability to criticise sleazy foreign states drastically undermined. As the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Lamb
put it: ‘How on earth can we lecture the developing world on good governance when we interfere with and block a criminal investigation in this way?' Contemptuous laughter resounded across the African continent. ‘What the BAE case shows,' said John, ‘is that Edward Clay didn't represent a change in British policy. He was an anomaly.'

The other blow was geostrategic. Taking advantage of the world's inattention during the holiday period, on Christmas Eve Ethiopia sent its army rolling into neighbouring Somalia to deal with the burgeoning Islamic Courts movement there. The United States, Ethiopia's closest ally, seized the opportunity to launch air strikes on suspected Al Qaeda operatives among the scattered Somalian forces fleeing south. Kenya played a helpful supportive role in the operation by closing its border, moving its army up to the frontier, and later flying suspected members of the Islamic Courts who fled onto its territory back to Somalia and Ethiopia for interrogation. When put to the test on an issue close to the Bush administration's heart, Kibaki's government had more than delivered. It was not hard to guess which, in future, was going to matter more to Washington–the fight against corruption, or the loyalty of a strategically situated ally in the War on Terror. However exasperated its ambassador on the ground might feel, Washington was unlikely to crack the whip in its future dealings with Kenya, and Kibaki's team knew it.

By early 2007, the World Bank was in a state of near open mutiny, with staff who wanted Wolfowitz gone openly sporting blue ‘good governance' ribbons to work. Then, in April, the boss's enemies were suddenly handed the excuse they needed. Wolfowitz, it emerged, had personally approved an overly generous severance package for his girlfriend, previously also employed at the World Bank. Shaha Ali Riza's transfer, ironically enough, had been motivated by the laudable desire to avoid any conflict of interest, and what Wolfowitz had done paled into insignificance when compared to what government ministers in the World Bank's recipient countries regularly got up to. But a man leading a global war on corruption had to be whiter than white. In May 2007, Wolfowitz accepted the inevitable and resigned.

The Volcker panel on which John sat delivered its findings four months later, recommending, as part of a proposed overhaul, the elevation of the internal investigation unit's head to the rank of vice president. But the wind had been knocked out of the World Bank's anti-graft campaign. By December 2007, the bank's representative Colin Bruce could proudly point to a Kenyan portfolio of sixteen active projects, worth $1 billion, with another $260 million due to Kenya from its share in three regional projects. Truly, this country director–now living in a compound whose perimeter wall and entrance gates had enjoyed a presidential upgrade at taxpayers' expense–had pushed the money out of the door.

In September 2007, huge billboards went up across Nairobi, looming over its busy roundabouts and honking junctions. ‘Hummer is here,' ran the ominous message. ‘Maybe you felt the tremors.'

And so we had. General Motors' Kenyan launch of the Hummer H3, one of the most macho 4x4s on the market, was one of those small events which combine with a host of other details to send out a signal about where a country is heading. It came as no surprise that Raila Odinga, always a flamboyant performer, beat everyone else to it by importing one of the gas-guzzling behemoths, dubbed ‘The King of Bling' by motoring fans, months ahead of the launch. But what took the breath away was the announcement by General Motors' local director that he expected to take a hundred orders for the car, priced at a sobering six million shillings (£47,000), in the first year. Did one hundred people really have that kind of cash in a land where the average citizen earned just $460 a year? Had J.M. Kariuki, the left-leaning populist who warned Kenyatta of the dangers of creating a Kenya of ‘ten millionaires and ten million beggars' shortly before his assassination, only got his figures slightly wrong?

Certainly, as the presidential elections beckoned, the nation seemed in the grip of an urban spending spree whose brash ostentation was a world away from the dourness of the belt-tightening Moi years. The stock market was booming, the shilling strong, agriculture enjoying a recovery, tourist numbers hitting new records, tax revenue–boosted by the newly efficient Kenya Revenue Authority–higher than it had ever been. Was it possible the old boast of Central Province–that only the Kikuyu could be trusted to run the country's economy–had something to it after all?

Once Nairobi had been known as the Garden City, where your breakfast could be stolen by light-fingered vervet monkeys sneaking in through an open kitchen window. Now it seemed a City in Permanent Construction, its birdsong drowned out by the sound of constant drilling, greenery thinning amid the high-pitched whine of electric saws. The self-confidence and technological nous of the Kenyan diaspora, which had brought its savings back and was investing at home, were reshaping the city. Cynics pointed out that construction had always been the easiest way of laundering illicitly acquired funds, but the sense of gathering momentum was beguiling. Across the capital, empty plots of land evaporated with the speed of puddles in the African sun. No street corner was now complete without a new apartment block in the local blue-grey Nairobi stone, and at the end of many of those streets the traditional two-storey shopping centre, with rows of small metal-grilled Asian shops, was dwarfed by a giant plaza offering seven-day shopping, twenty-four-hour service, beauty parlour, cinema, ATM banking, internet access and a branch of the Java café chain,
the
venue of choice for the city's latte-drinking, BlackBerry-wielding, laptop-addicted young professionals. You could measure prosperity levels in a new phenomenon: the Nairobi traffic jam. Once an exclusively rush-hour feature, it now seemed to last all day. Why, these days Nairobi even boasted an ice-rink–one of only three in Africa–where squealing Kenyan boys and girls tottered across the ice and thumped against the wooden barriers.

If Kibaki's government wasn't much good at delivering roads or affordable housing, it showed an impressive enthusiasm for the kind
of purely cosmetic makeover calculated to warm the heart of the most pursed-lipped of bourgeois housewives. Nairobi had become one of the few capitals in the world to outlaw smoking outdoors, a rule enforced with a six-month jail term. Another ban was briefly slapped on plastic bags–
so
unsightly–and another on livestock inside the city centre: those herds of cattle and goats being driven along main roads by Maasai herdsmen were nothing more than an embarrassment, a reminder of Kenyan society's humble roots. Thousands of the kiosks clustered on road verges–the cardboard-and-corrugated-iron shacks in which the
wananchi
ate their lunches, drank their sodas, gossiped and slept–were ruthlessly bulldozed and replaced with neat flowerbeds and tended lawns. Determined to broadcast the slickest of images to the world, the administration found such evidence of blatant poverty mortifying.

Kenya's favourite reading matter offered a telling insight into this strand of the national psyche. In Nairobi bookshops, three times as much space was dedicated to Western self-help books as to African politics or history.
Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway
,
How You Can Get Richer Quicker
,
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families
,
The Magic of Thinking Big
,
Why We Want You to be Rich
. Nothing, explained a salesman at Text Book in the Sarit Centre shopping plaza, sold faster than these motivational books, which enjoyed a display all to themselves. ‘This shelf makes my day,' he enthused. ‘People are looking for ways to create a positive environment. If I think negative things, I portray negative things.' He was, he admitted, a keen consumer of his own wares. ‘These books give me confidence and a purpose. It's part of a different attitude in Kenya. Essentially,' he explained, ‘it's all about getting rich.'

‘My favourite word is “Aspirational”,' declared Aly Khan Satchu, a Kenyan Asian who returned from the City of London to launch a stock market analysis website in one of those very plazas. His website was baptised www.rich.co.ke and promised: ‘Strike it rich.' The adjective he'd picked was virtually a national theme tune. ‘How do you see your average reader?' I'd ask the young editors who launched a spray of new metropolitan newspapers, business weeklies and lifestyle
magazines that year. ‘Very aspirational,' came the uniform answer. ‘Graduates with job prospects and disposable income.' The same word cropped up in the excuses proffered by Kenyan companies refusing to endorse NGO community projects in the slums that everyone tried so hard to forget: ‘Sorry, not an aspirational enough audience.'

Were there really enough ‘aspirational' people in Kenya, I wondered, to keep all these malls busy? Or, to put it slightly differently, weren't all these thrusting entrepreneurs in danger of forgetting that the most genuinely ‘aspirational' segment of Kenyan society was not in fact its small middle class, but the millions of exasperated inhabitants of Korogocho, Dandora, Mathare Valley and Kibera? And what would happen when those Kenyans finally registered that while a tiny elite was ‘eating' as never before, their own, more modest aspirations were doomed to go forever ignored?

Perhaps the most worrying element exposed by economic surveys was the extent to which, once you set aside the cosmopolitan cities, the growing divide between rich and poor took geographical–in other words, ethnic–form. A Kikuyu inhabitant of Nyeri, just north of Kibaki's constituency, could expect to live 23.4 years longer, on average, than his Luo counterpart in Raila's home town of Kisumu. If 46 per cent of the population in Central Province had only limited access to a qualified doctor, the problem was nearly twice as bad–88 per cent–in remote North-Eastern Province. Adult illiteracy, just 16.7 per cent in largely Kikuyu Thika, was 78.1 per cent in Bomet, a heavily Kalenjin Rift Valley town.
³⁸
And so it went on.

The regime's critics noted that many of the superficial features of the former era had crept back, so quietly they almost went unnoticed. Kibaki had promised to keep his name and image off Kenya's currency, institutions and roads. Now his official portrait hung on the wall of almost every office, just as those of Moi and Kenyatta had, and his features were stamped on the new forty-shilling coin. The man who, while in opposition, had promised not to waste Nairobi residents' time by blocking the city centre with official motorcades, now regularly paralysed traffic for hours at a time, prompting one outraged letter-writer to the
Daily Nation
to suggest he try using a
helicopter instead. Trivial disappointments, perhaps, but behind them lurked massive betrayals: the failure to reform the constitution, the failure to devolve power, the failure to appoint a prime minister. However noble the Kibaki government's intentions had been at the outset, yesterday's radicals had by 2007 turned into the steeliest of reactionaries, propping up a system they once abhorred. And
kitu kidogo
had made a comeback, with ordinary Kenyans–a Transparency International survey revealed–encountering corruption in more than half their dealings with officialdom.

One of the lessons of the previous five years seemed to be that when the spirit wasn't willing, it really didn't matter how many worthy new institutions, appointments or laws a government unveiled: the status quo remained unchanged. Witness the fate of the Public Officer Ethics Act, part of the raft of anti-corruption laws proudly announced on the lawn of State House in the wake of Kibaki's inauguration. Hailed as landmark legislation, it required government employees to declare their wealth, in the hope that this would prevent them using their positions to line their pockets. Yet the Act was rendered ridiculous from the outset. While countries like Tanzania and Uganda only required employees in key positions to fill in the declarations, Kenya made it compulsory for all 660,000 civil servants, whether drivers, messenger boys or volunteers, and extended the requirement to their spouses and children. The information provided was confidential, was not computerised, and since the declarations were to be kept for thirty years, storage space soon became a problem.

Having created a tsunami of information, the Act failed to specify how it should be analysed or what action should be taken if wrongdoing emerged. By September 2007 there had not been a single case of a public servant being prosecuted or even fined under the legislation. Who was to blame for this exercise in futility? According to Erastus Rweria, head of the Efficiency Monitoring Unit in the Office of the President, a group of parliamentarians who had served in the Moi government had deliberately neutered the Act. ‘The MPs' aim was to make it unuseable. Most of them are in parliament to protect
what they grabbed.' No doubt. But it was difficult to imagine, in light of Anglo Leasing, that government ministers of Kiraitu, Mwiraria and Murungaru's ilk would be too distressed by this act of sabotage.

Nothing better illustrated Kenyan society's acceptance of its own glaring faults than the rehabilitation of Kamlesh Pattni, architect of the Goldenberg scandal. By 2006, the man who had nearly destroyed Kenya's economy had renounced his Hindu faith, embraced Christianity and been reborn as ‘Brother Paul', preaching from a hall inside a casino complex. When journalist Kwamchetsi Makokha was assigned to interview the sleek former jailbird on live television, he was taken aback by what followed. ‘All these young people who had been manning the lights and cameras suddenly rushed up and mobbed Pattni like groupies. They were all excited, asking for his autograph, one even held out his sleeve for Pattni to sign.' Salim Lone, spokesman for Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) opposition party, was attending a funeral for a group of MPs killed in a plane crash in north-eastern Kenya in April when he heard a storm of applause. ‘I assumed some celebrity had arrived. But no, it was Pattni. They were applauding him like some kind of hero.' Far from earning society's opprobrium, one of Kenya's most outrageous conmen had acquired the glamorous aura of a rock star. He had done what so many dreamed about but did not dare attempt.

Perhaps the ultimate act of cynicism came in August 2007 when, to the astonishment of his own Kalenjin kinsmen, former president Daniel arap Moi suddenly announced his support for Kibaki's reelection bid. The probable explanation for this baffling move came shortly after, when a 2004 version of the report Kroll had been compiling into Goldenberg's missing millions was leaked to the press. Kroll had abandoned the project when the Kibaki government stopped paying its fees, but the draft still shed devastating light on the systematic looting conducted by Moi's family and friends. The former president's sons Philip and Gideon were reported to be worth £384 million and £550 million respectively, with the assets held in an array of international real estate, bank accounts and shell companies. The implication of the leak was clear: Moi had given his political
endorsement in return for a promise that he would remain free to enjoy his stolen assets, whose location the government had known for years but done nothing to recapture. A few months later, a section of a bill was quietly approved granting amnesty to anyone who confessed to grand corruption and offered their illicitly-acquired assets in amends. Section 56B of the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act miraculously appeared on the statute books despite having earlier been deleted by parliament. ‘Help us remain at the trough, and we'll let you continue eating,' one administration had told its predecessor.

The ruling class seemed locked in a mood of amoral pragmatism. If the economy was thriving, what did the unsavoury realities denounced by anti-corruption campaigners really matter? To use a cliché beloved of economists, the rising tide of prosperity would surely end up floating every citizen's boat, and a little sleaze was no more than scum on the water–unsightly, but not doing any real harm. When challenged about graft in the media, government ministers always responded by pointing to growth rates, apparently unable to grasp that the issues–economic prosperity and individual theft–were, in fact, distinct. ‘We can afford to be corrupt, given the kind of growth we're delivering,' was the implicit boast.

The international community seemed of like mind. No one would have guessed from its behaviour that Kibaki's government deserved anything other than unqualified support. In May 2007, the United Nations actually awarded Kenya its annual Public Service Award. No April Fool's, this: a government whose key ministers and top civil servants had conspired to steal up to $750 million in public funds was commended for ‘improving transparency, accountability and responsiveness in the public sector', with Kenya beating states like Singapore, Austria, India and Australia. In September came another prize: the World Bank ranked Kenya as one of the world's top ten reformers when it came to ease of doing business. And that same month, a beaming Amos Kimunya, the man who had gone to Oxford to beg for John Githongo's silence, signed a joint aid strategy with seventeen foreign donors, including Britain, the United States, Japan, the World
Bank, the EU and the UN, giving the Kenyan Treasury a greater say in how aid funds were spent. Aimed, the signatories said, at ‘improving the effectiveness of development aid', the agreement also allowed the government to closely monitor aid being channelled to civil society. Anglo Leasing might never have existed. And the same went for John.