It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

He focused on the departments which held the most power, where the most egregious offences seemed likely to occur: the Office of the President, the finance ministry, the ministry of internal security. Having sowed the seed, he waited to reap his slow harvest. ‘The trick, I found, was never to be in a hurry, never get excited.’

      What makes a law-abiding functionary, hardly the devil-may-care type, lift his or her nose above the daily grind and turn sneak, risking exposure, prosecution and dismissal? It was never for the money, something which was only mentioned late in the process, and usually at John's insistence. For many of those who would become his de facto informers, a profound and justified sense of betrayal explained the readiness to help. They were Kenyan voters too, after all, and like the mass of the populace, had believed NARC when it had promised a new dawn. Kibaki's campaign rhetoric had been almost too effective – they had taken the anti-graft message to heart. Now they knew, with a certainty not available to the ordinary Kenyan, that the old games were starting up again. Nothing smarts quite like the dashing of raised hopes. It forces the deluded to regret the best part of their nature: their readiness to believe in a better world. They felt they had been made fools of, and they wanted other Kenyans to know what was going on. ‘Some were very angry,’ remembers John. ‘They'd say to me: “This used to happen under Moi. If you let this get out of hand, we've seen what happens. We're glad you're here.”’ And it was easy to rationalise the move from dutifully cooperating with the ‘Anti-Corruption Czar’ as he was now known, just as they had initially been explicitly instructed to do by the president himself, to slipping that same individual – such a likeable young man – information they knew in their hearts their superiors wanted kept secret. Only a tiny step.