It’s Our Turn to Eat
A gripping account of both an individual caught on the horns of an excruciating moral dilemma and a continent at a turning point.When Michela Wrong's Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small mountain of luggage and four trilling mobile phones he seemed determined to ignore, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country regarded until then as one of Africa's few budding success stories.Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the election defeat of long-serving President Daniel arap Moi, John had been appointed Kenya's new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this giant of a man with a booming laugh, respected as a longstanding anti-corruption crusader, the new government was signalling to both its own public and the world at large that it was set on ending the practices that had made Kenya an international by-word for sleaze.Now John was on the run, having realised that the new administration, far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to pilfer public funds. John's tale, which has all the elements of the political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a lonely decision with huge ramifications. But his story transcends the personal, touching as it does on the cultural, historical and social themes that lie at the heart of the continent's continuing crisis.Tracking this story of an African whistleblower who started out as a pillar of the establishment, Michela Wrong seeks answers to the questions that have puzzled outsiders for decades. What is it about African society that makes corruption so hard to eradicate, so sweeping in its scope, so destructive in its impact? Why have so many African presidents found it so easy to reduce all political discussion to the self-serving calculation of which tribe gets to "eat"? And at what stage will Africans start placing the wider interests of their nation ahead of the narrow interests of their tribe?
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MICHELA WRONG
It's Our Turn to Eat
The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 2009
Copyright © Michela Wrong 2009
Michela Wrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007241965
Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007325115 Version: 2017-08-22
‘We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.’
T.E. LAWRENCE, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Contents
Chapter 2 - An Unexpected Guest
Chapter 4 - Mucking out the Augean Stables
Chapter 5 - Dazzled by the Light
Chapter 6 - Pulling the Serpent's Tail
Chapter 7 - The Call of the Tribe
Chapter 8 - Breaking the Mould
Chapter 9 - The Making of the Sheng Generation
Chapter 10 - Everything Depends on the Boss
Chapter 11 - Gorging Their Fill
Chapter 12 - A Form of Mourning
Chapter 14 - Spilling the Beans
It was early evening, that time when the traffic jams that clog the Kenyan capital of Nairobi's arteries for most of the working day reach their apogee.
Down below, thousands of honking matatu minibuses, drivers hyped on adrenalin and pent-up frustration, were doing their best to get their passengers home. Fighting for space against the lumbering public buses, sagging like old mattresses under the weight of their clientele, the customised Toyotas and Nissans jerked in fits and starts across the crumbling roundabouts, their touts leaning out of half-open doors to wheedle and abuse, pounding on the bonnets of encroaching cars in a manner more bullying than friendly. Choking on the black fumes pumped from hundreds of over-revved, under-serviced engines, blue-uniformed policemen struggled to keep the flow moving.
On the fifteenth floor of the Ministry of Finance, however, the beeps and angry shouts were barely audible. Most of the messengers, clerks and secretaries, keepers of the ubiquitous departmental Thermos of tea, had abandoned their perches behind the varnished wooden partitions, silence was creeping in to take their place. From this elevation, the world below seemed calm and peaceful, lent tranquillity by the approaching chill of evening. Wheeling in cooling eddies of warm air, kites traced monotonous circles high above, like black smuts whirling over a dying fire. Even higher above them gracefully looped Nairobi's sinister valkyries, the marabou storks, hardworking scavengers of the nearby slums.
From up here, the historic landmarks of the city centre, so grubby at street level, looked almost pristine. One side of the ministry gazed south-east, across the rusting, dilapidated entrails of the giant railway depot that was both the city and the country's original raison d'être: for Nairobi was the spot where British railroad engineers paused to gather their material, manpower and energies before flinging their ironware up and over the escarpment and dizzily down into the Rift Valley, aiming at the giant lake lying at the continent's alluring heart.
Beyond stretched the hangars and godowns of the Industrial Area, the capital's main airport and the savannah expanse of Nairobi's game park, hemmed in by the dry Ukambani hills, where the odd feather of grey smoke – some peasant clearing land – plumed skyward. The other side of the ministry looked across Harambee Avenue, past the colonnaded Law Courts, towards the clock tower of Parliament Buildings, City Hall and the conference complex named after Jomo Kenyatta, once dubbed a ‘leader unto darkness and death’ by a British official, now honoured as the nation's founding father. The small dots moving about on the esplanade below were Kenyan sightseers, come to have their pictures taken in front of the late president's seated statue, which showed him in chieftain's cap, flywhisk in hand. Beyond the square one could glimpse the lawns of Uhuru Park, where Mwai Kibaki, Kenyatta's former finance minister, had been inaugurated president eighteen months earlier. From up here, the park seemed the green and pleasant public garden its planners had originally envisaged, rather than what it had become in the intervening years: open-air toilet, haunt of roaming muggers, resting spot for the homeless and exhausted.
