Entertainment

Kenya swallowed by moral turpitude

October 25, 2009 Edition 1

Maureen Isaacson

It's our turn to eat: The story of Kenyan whistleblower

By: Michaela Wrong (Fourt Estate)

Review: Maureen Isaacson

'Eating" is the Kenyan term denoting the gorging on state resources and Michela Wrong's new book is about gorging, about ethnic entitlement, about corruption and the man who blew the whistle on the sleaze in the Kenyan government.

John Githongo, a journalist turned anti-corruption czar, uncovered the scam about the Anglo Leasing and Finance Company, which had 18 contracts with the Kenyan government and turned out to be no more than a facade for a company which was no more than an address

in London Like Kibaki, Githongo belonged to the same ethnic group as Kenya's first post-independence Kenyan

president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu man.

When Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin, came to power in 1978

things changed, but with Mwai Kibaki at the helm from 2002 Kikuyu snouts were back in the trough. They no doubt expected loyalty from one of their own, says

Wrong. They felt betrayed by Githongo. She had known him since the 1990s when she was reporting on Kenya, and thought him "a highly moral, ethnically denatured young man. He would probably have thought of himself as a spiritual being first, a Kenyan second, a Kikuyu third."

Wrong, who made her name as Africa correspondent for Reuters, the BBC and Financial Times, wants us to know she is not painting Africa black. Yes, she understands

that it takes a corruptor to create the corrupt and that Kenya is not alone in the creation of its muck. She reports an amusing outburst by Lucy, Kibaki's wife, aimed at her tenant and neighbour, the World Bank representative Makhtar Diop, a former Senegalese finance minister, because of the disturbance created

by his noisy farewell party. The man "responsible for telling World Bank headquarters whether Kenya deserved millions of dollars in aid, saw nothing amiss in paying rent to the president of a client nation", writes Wrong.

His successor did the same. Also, she writes, the World Bank was unruffled by the leaking of Githongo's dossier about a $750 million procurement deal and three days

after this announced $145m in new loans to Kenya. It emerges that the Netherlands was the only bilateral donor to freeze aid over corruption concerns.

"This book does not seek to argue that donors should cut all aid to Africa, on the grounds that it will only be stolen as cynics claim," but Wrong does want to alert Western readers "to the damage well-meaning thoughtlessness routinely causes". She believes that Kenya's foreign partners just did not "get it" -

the "Our Turn to Eat" principle would bring no progress.

"The better the economy fared, the more unstable the country became, because public awareness of inequality deepened."

Her argument against African leaders who spirit money away cannot be countered, but her smug approach is difficult to countenance. When Githongo fled the baying

hounds of government after his story blew up, and he landed on her doorstep in London, she asked him if she could write his story. He agreed. His dossier gave her a

springboard to the wider story of Kenya's slide into chaos - she has, after all, reported on the country for a dozen years.

Many African scholars feel she should have left his story to him to tell; others feel he may not have got round to doing it. And she can write. Nonetheless it is difficult to swallow the tone of this cautionary tale - which ostensibly holds a message for other African countries, including South Africa.

Here is Wrong, telling us that she herself is liberated from making moral judgments: "The moral choices needed to

rise to the top were bleaker and more unforgiving than those faced by any Westerners. 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 willfully ignore the bigger picture.

This was never the case with Githongo - in all the years of knowing him she had never glimpsed "a hint of darkness. What you saw seemed" strictly what you got, and he was the only one of my African friends of whom that felt true. Friends? Come on Michela. It seems that she likes the man, cannot understand him, wants to show he is no saint, but loves his story because it is "hot" and is in fact virtually an African Watergate. She is

confused and uses this book as a confessional to work out how she really feels about her complex subject and source.

And she is writing for a Western readership all right.

Wrong made an impression on the literary scene with In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz; Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (1991), about the excesses of Mobuto

Sese Seko. Gbadolite, his home town, which he sought to transform into a "Versailles in the jungle", providing

a lush background for a bizarrely out-of-control African

president in search of a caricaturist.

Wrong says Mobutu was aided in his folly by the US and European powers who thought they knew what was best for this African state. In I Didn't Do It for You; How the

World Used and Abused a Small African Nation (2005) she reminds us of Eritrea, a country still nursing unhealed wounds, its memory lost to the world "in the milky haze of amnesia following the ill-treatment by its former masters and intervening powers".

The book was well received by the US and British mainstream publications saddened for the nation

abused by Italy, Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Israel and Ethiopia, "the most formidable occupier of

them all." But Huriy Ghirmai, writing on Eritrea.com, says: "There is a scary level of dramatisation as she

recounts how Eritrea's "fall from grace" caused her and her fellow true believers a lasting trauma.

Gifted with a peerless power of invention, she manages to put together an Eritrea complete with people who

bear no resemblance to real Eritreans. Western reviews praised her writing, her narration of the tale of a tragic country in the end bowed under authoritarianism amid

poverty and famine. No Afro-pessimist, Wrong is

seeking good news. She is often called an "honest" writer but is sometimes plain patronising. She had "the uncanny feeling that I was speaking to the many mouths of one single, Hydra-headed creature: the Eritrean soul".

Even if she was a believer in their progress, Eritreans are not treated as her equals. They are among the many creatures who inhabit the vast savannah that is the

Africa she has taken captive in her peerless prose. Wrong should take care how she handles those she meets along the way.