It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

shortly, or be made editor.’

      Robert, he explained, was a close relative of one of the newspaper's top executives. Both men were Kalenjins. No matter how incompetent or unpleasant, Robert knew his career was assured – hence his arrogance and his co-workers' resentful silence.

      ‘Good Lord,’ I said. It was so crude I could barely believe it. ‘You know, where I come from, the boss's son often works twice as hard to make sure people don't accuse him of exactly this form of nepotism.’

      He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

      ‘How about sending him on a training course so that, at the very least, he learns his trade?’

      ‘Oh, that's been done. Few people at the newspaper have received more training. He's even gone on one of those journalism courses in the UK. He never gets any better. It's a question of attitude.’

      Having written about ethnic patronage for years, this was the first time I'd seen up close its insidious impact on a workplace. Since that lunch, many of the people we discussed that day – including my lunch companion and the chief executive who had dangled the hope of a South African takeover – have left the newspaper, which remains in Moi's control. They had been mis-sold the notion of a meritocratic, non-tribal, politically independent company, and with that promise went much of the incentive for staying. Robert, in contrast, has been promoted, just as predicted.

      That was my story. But I wanted to hear someone else's.

      Eventually I found him. His name was Hussein Were. He was forty-two when we met, and his boyishly unlined face jarred with the methodical manner of a much older man. Deliberate and self-contained, he spoke at perfect dictation speed – no rushing or interruptions permitted – and his sentences, peppered with ‘albeit’s and ‘pertaining to’s, were redolent of the legalistic world of depositions and affidavits, in which people pause before speaking and are careful to say what they mean.

      His first job, he told me, had been with a firm of quantity surveyors, where he spent more than ten years. The boss was a Kamba and a Christian, Were a Muslim and a Luhya, but that didn't stop them working well together. So well, in fact, that when Were tendered his resignation, explaining that he had won a scholarship for a Masters at the University of Nairobi, his boss persuaded him to stay on, juggling his day job with his studies. But when Were returned to full-time professional life, he noticed that things were changing. The company was expanding, and every new arrival, he registered with quiet dismay, was a Kamba. ‘The assistant was Kamba, the secretary was Kamba, the receptionist was Kamba. It was becoming a single-ethnic organisation.’ His relations with these staff were cordial. They shared lunches, knew each other's families. But Were began feeling excluded in subtle ways. ‘In those situations, people begin to segregate into groups. They regard you as different and don't want to share certain things. They set up informal networks, channels inside the office.’ He did not understand the language in which the others communicated, and as a Muslim he would not be included in any Friday-evening trip to a local bar.

      Were gritted his teeth. He had hoped for better – ‘Maybe I'm naïve’ – but he felt no real surprise. ‘I had come of age learning about the working environment in this country. I knew Kenya was full of one-ethnic companies. I thought, “I'll live with it.”’ His ambitions remained high. After ten years in the job he had every reason to expect to be made partner. Then professional rivalry began to undermine his reputation for efficiency. ‘If I was registering certain successes, my colleagues wouldn't want them to reach the boss. But negative things would immediately be brought to his attention.’ Were, who had once been his boss's second-in-command, noticed that key information was now passing him by. He was being written out of the script. ‘Colleagues would mention things that concerned me directly that they had been discussing separately with my boss, chats which were probably taking place during visits to construction sites.’ At that stage, Were resigned. ‘I saw the whole thing was untenable.’

      He didn't bother to explain why he was going. ‘I never raised it directly with my boss, because I realised he was encouraging it. I just said I needed to progress my career.’ Like many Kenyans caught in such circumstances, he expresses not anger, but resignation at what he knows to be a commonplace experience. ‘There are lots of people in this country who have never sat a job interview or even know what one is. They have been whisked by their tribespeople from school to job. I believe in fighting my own way.’ Friends tell him his problem was not being ‘anchored’ by a network of friendships and family relationships that would have made it impossible to ‘detach’ him from his place of work. But he has no intention of developing these limpet-like muscles. At the consultancy he has now set up, he's proud of the fact that not a single one of his current projects comes from a fellow Luhya. ‘There are people who feel like me, who do not subscribe to that kind of thinking,’ he insists. ‘I wouldn't pack a company with my people.’

      Were's experience, and that of my colleagues at the Standard, was the most benign manifestation of the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ culture. Its other forms were much uglier, and their impact far more damaging. So few Kenyans identified with any overarching national project, their leaders felt free to loot state coffers, camouflaging crude personal enrichment in the prettifying colours of tribal solidarity.

      Decade by decade, practices that had flourished under the colonial administration – itself no stranger to high-profile corruption scandals – were fine-tuned and pushed to ever more outlandish lengths. What they all shared were a reliance on the political access and inside knowledge enjoyed by either a minister, an MP, a civil servant or a councillor, and their target: the public funds and national assets on which every Kenyan citizen depended for education, health and the other basic necessities for a decent life.

      The command economy of the post-independence years made self-enrichment for the well-connected a fairly simple matter. What could be easier for a minister than to slap an import quota on a key commodity, wait for the street price to soar, and then dump tonnes of the stuff, thoughtfully stockpiled ahead of time by one of his companies, on the market? A 1970–71 parliamentary commission helpfully authorised government employees to run their own businesses while holding down civil service jobs (‘straddling’, as it was called), a ruling its chairman later justified on the grounds that there was no point banning an activity that would persist whatever the law decreed.¹³ A post in a state-run utility or corporation, which could hike prices ever upwards thanks to its monopoly position, offered untold profit-taking opportunities. Similarly, who was better placed to benefit from foreign exchange controls which created a yawning gap between black market and official rates than an insider with excellent banking and Treasury contacts?

      The structural adjustment programmes pushed on Africa by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s, which loosened the Kenyan government's stranglehold by making aid conditional on privatising bloated parastatals, dropping currency controls and opening markets to international trade, complicated things, but the ‘eaters’ quickly vaulted that hurdle. The privatisation process itself, it turned out, provided all kinds of openings for the entrepreneurial fraudster, including ruthless asset-stripping. It was funny how often the politically-connected banks in which state corporations chose to deposit their proceeds collapsed, swallowing up public funds as they expired. And so many other routes remained open. Import goods duty-free as famine relief, or claim they are in transit, then sell them locally, undercutting the competition. Take out a state loan you never intend to repay. Bid for a government tender your contacts at the ministry tell you is about to come up, then get them to ensure that your ridiculously inflated offer is the one approved. It doesn't matter if your firm can't deliver: the invoice will join Kenya's huge stock of ‘pending bills’, carried over from one government to another, and eventually settled with the issue of trade-able treasury bonds, no questions asked.¹⁴

      By the early 1990s, Western executives flying in with plans to invest in Kenya quickly realised that their companies would never thrive in the country's supposedly free-market environment unless a slice of equity was discreetly handed over to a firm owned by a Moi relative, trusted henchman or favoured minister. Frank Vogl, who runs a communications firm in Washington,