Kimunya: Oxford rendezvous

• In this first segment in the serialisation of It’s Our Turn to Eat: The story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, author MICHELA WRONG, relates how minister Amos Kimunya and Dr Dan Gikonyo went to UK to talk to Githongo

Kimunya and Gikonyo were there to make sure John did nothing to blow the referendum campaign off course. They kept saying, “SWEAR to us, SWEAR that you won’t spill the beans before the referendum. You must swear, John.”
Sensing resistance, Kimunya made the mistake of appealing to John’s supposed ethnic loyalties.

Stark reminder

Kimunya followed up the crude tribal rallying cry with a stark reminder of the reality of Kenyan politics. Break your silence, said the minister, and ‘Your grandchildren will regret.’

The encounter left a sour taste in John’s mouth. With the referendum less than a month away, it was too late now to spring into action.

But he hated the sense that, through his inaction, he had played into these men’s hands. ‘I felt very angry. I said to myself, “What have I done? I’ve quit the stage and left it to these buggers.”’

The delegation to Oxford might have got what it wanted, but it made no difference to the referendum result. Nor did the vast sums of stolen Anglo Leasing money spent attempting to secure the vote. Referendum day became a poll on the very principle of Kikuyu rule. John stayed up to monitor the various Kenyan newspaper websites updating their results throughout the night.
To his delighted amazement, Kenyans showed that while they were willing to be paid, they could not be bought. In the privacy of the polling booth, they cheerfully voted against those who had bribed them. Over 58 per cent rejected the new constitution consolidating the presidency’s supremacy.

Out of eight provinces, only one — Central Province, Gema’s heartland — voted ‘Yes’.

The country had delivered a stinging slap to an ethnic group whose leaders believed themselves born to rule. The text messages from excited friends back in Kenya came so thick and fast, John’s mobile gave up the ghost. ‘I think it just melted. It couldn’t take any more,’ he chuckled.

A devastating rebuke of ethnic conceit, it was an appalling result for the Mount Kenya Mafia, and one that caught them unprepared. Kibaki immediately dissolved his fractured Cabinet and suspended parliament.

John gave one of his barrel laughs when he began receiving text messages from desperate government officials begging him — him of all people — for advice. A siren call came from one adviser in Nairobi, a seasoned political observer. Punished by the electorate, surely Kibaki would recognise he had fallen into bad company, ditch the Mount Kenya Mafia and open his arms to true reformers?’

Desperate officials

The day after the referendum, John distilled his ninety-one-page dossier down to a thirty-six-page summary.
Tailor-made for a man with a packed diary and a short attention span, it was a document that could be digested in less than an hour and a half.

Having dispatched the dossier, John used his informers’ network to reach into the entrails of State House, monitoring each stage of its progress.

The whispers kept him abreast.

The dossier had been placed on the president’s desk. The president had spent an entire afternoon reading it. The dossier had been replaced on the desk without comment. Silence.