It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

terms of reference.’ He would try repeatedly to pin down his exact role, going to see the president on three separate occasions with ever more explicit definitions, but the initial error could not easily be rectified. His job, as envisaged by Kibaki, was not to formally investigate suspected corruption, nor did he have any powers to prosecute. Those tasks remained with the police force and the attorney general. His role was purely to advise the president – an interesting insight into the extraordinarily centralised nature of power in Kenya – but that duty, in his own view, gave him both the right and the obligation to prod and to poke, to nudge and to pressurise, in any area that seemed to merit attention. ‘When people asked about my remit, I would say,“The president asks questions, and I answer them.” My job was to pick up the phone and call ten people who could put together a picture allowing me to tell the president what was going on. Essentially, my job was to act as a catalyst.’ Such vagueness would be an advantage when he enjoyed the boss's blessing. But it would leave him adrift when things were no longer moving in his direction.

      Abandoning lodgings on Lower Kabete Road, in Nairobi's Westlands, John rented a house in the woody suburb of Lavington, close enough to State House to be able to get to work at a moment's notice, however congested the Nairobi traffic. He probably could have claimed a government property – he now had a bodyguard and a small fleet of cars assigned to his office, after all – but he did not want to go down that route: ‘If you live in a government house, they own you.’ Instead, he found his own place, an elegant villa with a large garden perfect for a pack of bounding, scruffy mongrels he had acquired, specimens of the breed ironically dubbed ‘Kikuyu pointers’.

      But he never really spent enough time there for it to feel like home. Always a workaholic, John now paused only to sleep and eat. ‘We have an eighteen-month window of opportunity before the old, shadowy networks re-establish themselves,’ he told reporters, and he was constantly aware of the clock ticking. Here was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to put everything he had preached into effective practice, and if it failed, it would not be for want of effort on his part. ‘He worked all the time,’ says Lisa Karanja. ‘It wasn't just late nights, or part of the weekend. He worked all the time. So much so that I worried about his health, because he'd had some problems with high blood pressure, and the way he was living didn't seem likely to help.’ The dividing line between work and play blurred as John methodically extended an already enormous social circle to include any players with the insights and experience that might help him in the Herculean task of cleaning out Kenya's Augean stables.

      Since childhood, John had possessed a talent for bonding with people from different spheres. Thrusting Kenyan yuppies and world-weary Asian lawyers, doddery white leftovers from the days of colonial rule and impassioned activists from Kenya's civil society, lowly taxi drivers and puffed-up permanent secretaries: they might not be able to talk to one another, but they could all, somehow, talk to John. He might not have the hormonal magnetism that allows a man to electrify a crowd, but when it came to the one-on-one encounter, few were more beguiling. Researching this book, I would at first be taken aback and then quietly amused to discover just how many people I spoke to were convinced they enjoyed a special bond with John, sharing unique intimacies and confidences. ‘Take it from me, it's you and a thousand others,’ I was tempted to tell them. But in a way, they were not fooling themselves. The Big Man had a Big Reach and a Big Appetite. His interest, affection and trust in them were only rarely exaggerated or faked, as far as I could see. It was just that they weren't on exclusive offer. Like a woman of astounding beauty, John was always more loved and desired than he could ever love in return.

      It was an instinctive sociability that served his masters well, turning him into a form of national mascot, the acceptable face of the Kibaki regime. John's State House office became a magnet for foreign ambassadors, whose governments picked up its incidental running costs. ‘They made it very clear John and our unit were their darling. There wasn't a donor group that came through Kenya that didn't drop in on the office,’ remembers Lisa Karanja. For aid officials who had decided to throw their weight behind the Kibaki government's good governance programme and the Western investigators assigned to help it recover Moi's looted assets, a visit served as a refreshing pick-me-up. ‘When I came out of my first meeting with John, I felt like I was walking on air,’ said one, not normally the type to gush. ‘With someone like that in charge of anti-corruption, working for the government, what could possibly go wrong?’

      It was impossible to engage with the man and not be won over. Like all charmers, he held up a mirror to those with whom he interacted, and in it they saw a version of themselves. Meeting Kenyan friends his own age he showed his African side: boisterous, loud, irreverent. With the wazee, you would think him a son of the soil. When he met with foreign donors, he was more analytical, he knew how to talk the development language of empowerment, benchmarks and governance. ‘I never cease to be amazed by the love affair you wazungus all seem to have with John Githongo,’ Kenyan businessman and columnist Wycliffe Muga once sardonically remarked. But why should he be surprised? John was the perfect dragoman, the go-between who held a pass into two very different universes, Africa and the West. He had lived in both, and could explain Africa's ways to Westerners and the West to Africans. Of course the wazungus lapped it up. And State House, looking to donors for renewed funding, was happy to encourage the love affair.

      During this period John's family virtually lost sight of him. His parents' hearts might swell with pride every time they saw him on television, but they were worryingly aware that these glimpses afforded their only real insight into what he was doing. ‘You wouldn't see him from one month to another,’ remembers younger brother Mugo. And when he did turn up, he might as well not have bothered, so seriously did he take the need for professional discretion. ‘John is usually a great gossip and storyteller. But at family lunches he would sit and say nothing, just raising one eyebrow,’ remembers Ciru, his younger sister. ‘It was unbearable. We lost him then, we lost him to the state.’

      Old friends still invited John round, but now did so automatically, never expecting him to turn up. His acquaintances, in any case, had long ago coined the term ‘to do a Githongo’, or ‘to be Githongoed’, to encapsulate the frustrations that went with being one of John's friends. ‘Being Githongoed’ meant to be stood up by the Big Man. It meant to be given heartfelt assurances that he would be there, to realise with dawning horror that one had been played for a sucker (again), to sulk a bit, and finally to forgive all when the Big Man resurfaced, so contrite would be his apologies, so rewarding the conversation. ‘Githongoing’, an area in which all who knew him agreed the otherwise impeccably behaved John regularly performed disgracefully, puzzled me for a while. It wasn't possible, I thought, for a man as rigorous and disciplined as John to confuse his appointments as often as this. Then I realised that his unreliability was in fact the expression of a form of greed: the greed of the intellectual omnivore. When a refreshing new encounter loomed on the horizon, John could not bear to say no. He collected new acquaintances the way others collect stamps, and those joining the collection couldn't help but feel aggrieved on registering that, having once been objects of Githongo fascination, they had been relegated to the category of known quantities, whose exposure to the Big Man would henceforth be strictly rationed.

      But John was too busy to worry about such bruised feelings. While overall responsibility for coordinating the anti-graft war rested with the Ministry of Justice, his office would be involved in virtually all of NARC's early efforts to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya's corruption problem. It was a task only a team as young and absurdly optimistic as John's would embrace with enthusiasm, for it meant probing the roots of a dysfunctional African nation, from the haphazard creation of a British colony to the tortured foundation of an independent state.

       4 Mucking out the Augean Stables

      ‘The shocking rot of Nairobi's main market was exposed yesterday when it was revealed that 6,000 rats were killed in last week's cleanup exercise – and an equal number made good their escape. Wakulima Market, through which a majority of Nairobi's three million residents get their food, had not been cleaned for thirty years. So filthy was it that traders who have been at the market daily for decades were shocked