It’s Our Turn to Eat. Michela Wrong

the wake of the 2002 inauguration I tracked John down with a fellow journalist, keen to hear his thoughts. We found him in frenetic mode, simultaneously hyped, exhilarated and exhausted. He had been part of the election-monitoring effort pulled together by the human rights bodies and advocacy groups that constituted Kenyan civil society, and was fielding a series of calls from reporters in search of quotes, repeating the same phrases again and again. Halfway through the conversation, he revealed another reason why he was so distracted. The Kenyan businessmen who sat on TI-Kenya's board, old friends of both his father and Kibaki, had been in touch. ‘The wazee [old men] have put my name forward as someone to lead the fight against corruption.’ His laugh was half-embarrassed, half-excited. ‘It looks as though the new team is going to offer me a post in government.’

      My heart sank. I could see exactly why any new government would want John. No Kenyan could rival his reputation for muscular integrity, or enjoyed as much respect amongst the foreign donors everyone hoped would soon resume lending. In co-opting him, the incoming administration would be neatly appropriating a highprofile symbol of credibility, proof personified that it deserved the trust of both the wananchi and its Western partners. But I remembered all the other shining African talents I'd seen warily join the establishment they had once attacked, persuaded that finally the time was ripe for change, only to emerge discredited, beaten by the system they had set out to cure.

      ‘Don't take it,’ I said. ‘You'll lose your neutrality forever. Once you've crossed the line and become a player, you'll never be able to go back.’

      He listened, but my advice, it was clear, was being given too late. Effectively, he explained, he wasn't being given a choice. The old guys – Joe Wanjui, former head of Unilever in Kenya; George Muhoho, head of the Kenya airports authority; and Harris Mule, former permanent secretary at the finance ministry – had done the deal in his absence, taking his acquiescence as read. He'd gone round to Wanjui's house and found the wazee drinking champagne, celebrating the forthcoming appointment. They had ribbed the young man over the fact that he probably didn't even own a suit for his meeting with Kibaki, offering to lend him one. ‘They'd all cooked it up together. I drove away stunned. It was a great honour.’ In later years, he would think back over that day and detect an unappetisingly sacrificial element to the whole episode. These men he had grown up with, who had known him when he was nothing but a small boy running around in shorts, had trussed him up and delivered him to his fate.

      But it was obvious that John was more than a pawn in a deal done by his father's friends. He was the kind of man who believed it was up to every Kenyan – especially to someone blessed with his education and social advantages – to pull the country out of the mire. He had dedicated his brief career to fighting corruption. Now along came an administration that had won an election promising to do just that. It was asking for his expertise, inviting him into the inner sanctum, and he knew in his heart that there probably wasn't a single Kenyan better placed to wage that campaign. How could it be legitimate to criticise if, when you were explicitly asked to quit the sidelines and join the fray, you refused? ‘We discussed whether he should take it and concluded he didn't have a choice, morally speaking,’ remembers economist David Ndii, who had worked alongside John at TI. ‘If he didn't, he would always wonder if he could have made a difference.’ There comes a time in a man's life when fate offers him a chance to do something significant. It is rarely extended twice. Accepting the job was not just an exciting career opportunity, it was a patriotic duty.

      Leaving John that day, I felt a deep tinge of melancholy. Working in Africa, I'd grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on wilful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends'. When visiting a former Congolese prime minister, sitting in a villa whose bougainvillea-fringed gardens stretched across acres of prime real estate, I knew better than to ask if his government salary had paid for all this lush beauty. Staying with a friend in Nigeria, whose garage alone dwarfed the family homes of many Londoners, I took it for granted that his business dealings wouldn't stand up to a taxman's scrutiny. And when I shared a beer with a Great Lakes intelligence chief befriended in a presidential waiting room, I knew that one day I'd probably come across his name in a human rights report, fingered as the man behind some ruthless political assassination. Life was complicated. The moral choices needed to rise to the top were bleaker and more unforgiving in Africa than those faced by Westerners. It was easy for me, born in a society which coddled the unlucky and compensated its failures, to wax self-righteous. I had never been asked to choose between the lesser of two evils, never had relatives beg me to compromise my principles for their sakes, never woken to the bitter realisation that I was the only person stupid enough to play by the rules. If I was to continue to like these men and women – and I did like these men and women – it was sometimes necessary to focus on the foreground and wilfully ignore the bigger picture.

      But not with John, never with John. Through the years of knowing him, I had never caught a glimpse of any sinister hinterland, territory best left unexplored, and God knows I had asked around. What you saw seemed to be strictly what you got, and he was the only one of my African friends of whom that felt true. I looked at him that day and thought: ‘Well, that's over. In the years to come, I will pick up a Kenyan newspaper and spot an item in a gossip column about his partnership with a shady Asian businessman, the large house he is having built in a plush Nairobi suburb. Then there'll be a full-length article, a court case in which the judge finds against him but which goes to appeal, so I'll never know the truth. And one day, I'll be chatting to someone at a diplomatic party who will say: “John Githongo – isn't he completely rotten?” and I'll find myself nodding in agreement …’ Oh, I would still like him – who could not? But what had once been clear-cut and simple would have become qualified and murky. And already I mourned our mutual loss of innocence.

      There was one last hoop to jump through before his appointment was confirmed – an interview with the man who had just become Kenya's third president. At that first encounter on 7 January 2003, watched over benevolently by the wazee, his three mentors, John listened, humbled, overawed, as Kibaki outlined his ambitions and expectations. But he plucked up just enough courage to make a remark that went to the heart of the matter. If his time at TI had taught him one thing, he said, it was that since corruption started at the top, it could only effectively be fought from the top. ‘Sir,’ he told the president, ‘we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anti-corruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is “eating”, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.’

      Among the many calls John received in those hectic days, as excited friends rang to congratulate him, one was more sobering than the rest. It was from Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who, after years in opposition, was taken on by Moi in the late 1990s to reform Kenya's civil service. Leakey was no stranger to adversity – he had been hounded by the security forces, bore the scars on his back from a vicious police whipping, had lost his legs in a plane crash some suspected of being a botched act of sabotage. An experienced scrapper, his efforts to clean up the public sector had nevertheless eventually been rendered futile by Moi's Machiavellian strategies. ‘If you can pull it off, wonderful,’ Leakey told John. ‘But be careful. This is a tough one.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.

      After that, we rarely met. I was busy writing a book in London, John was a man in a hurry. After a lull, I started getting the occasional, worrying bulletin: he had made some powerful enemies, and travelled around Nairobi with two bodyguards; new scandals were surfacing; John had been moved sideways, then reinstated. That didn't sound good. It got worse: a journalist friend returning from Nairobi said John had told him that ‘if anything happened’ he had left instructions for both of us to be sent certain packages, an ominous sign if ever there was one. And his hitherto unblemished reputation was taking its first hits. Nairobi's chattering classes were complaining that the anti-corruption chief wasn't delivering. Whether through ignorance or impotence, they said, he was complicit in the new government's misdemeanours. He was going down the route the cynics had always traced for him, from superhero to flawed mortal.

      Then, on a visit to Kenya in late 2004, John joined a meal I was having in a French restaurant with four Western correspondents,