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

In mid-September, Kenya’s electoral commission named 21 November 2005 as the date for a long-promised referendum on a new constitution.

What President Mwai Kibaki had pledged to deliver in the first 100 days of his presidency had taken nearly three years, and the final version was a world away from what the Kenyan people had once envisaged.

It was true that on issues such as land ownership, women’s inheritance and the role of religious courts, the proposed constitution offered radical change. But in the eyes of its critics — who happened to include six members of the Narc Cabinet — it failed to deliver on the critical issue that had blighted politics in Kenya since independence.

Whereas the first Bomas draft had proposed dividing executive powers between a president and an executive prime minister, the final version included a non-executive prime minister, subservient to a still-supreme president.

For Raila Odinga, this was the ultimate betrayal. The Memorandum of Understanding signed on the eve of the 2002 election had been violated, the faultline at the heart of a hastily assembled coalition exposed. And if part of the country felt distinctly nervous about the idea of Raila as prime minister, they were far from happy at Narc’s sleight of hand.

A historic opportunity to place the country’s system of government on a more equitable footing had been missed.

Both the Cabinet and the country divided along ethnic lines, with the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu rallying behind a ‘Yes’ vote, symbolised by a banana, while every other community called for a ‘No’, represented by an orange.

These were violent times in Kenya, as the Orange and Banana camps clashed on the campaign trail. Bombarded with information from his sources, John Githongo felt pulled this way and that. This, he finally decided, would be the worst possible time to come out with a corruption dossier. If he went public before the referendum, it would be seen as a blatant political move, aimed at boosting the Orange campaign.

It was frustrating, but he did not want his dossier reduced to campaign fodder. He stowed it in a safe deposit box and prepared to wait the referendum out.

Unaware of this decision, the Mount Kenya Mafia extended an agitated feeler. Lands and settlement minister Amos Kimunya and Dr Dan Gikonyo, Kibaki’s personal physician, turned up in Oxford to negotiate a quiet understanding.

Smooth-talking, Kimunya was regarded by diplomats as a representative of a promising breed of young statesmen rising through the ranks in Kenya. A US-trained cardiologist, Gikonyo was a doctor with a political profile.

He had always been close to the Democratic Party, patching up opposition activists beaten by security forces during the Moi years, and had been constantly at Kibaki’s side since his near-fatal campaign car crash.

His practice had thrived, and he was about to open a 102-bed, four-storey private hospital in Karen, boasting state-of-the-art scanners and TVs in every room. Coincidentally, Gikonyo was also physician to Joe Githongo and, via that association, to John himself.

That no doubt explained why he had been sent with Kimunya to woo John — who but a priest can rival a doctor for leverage over a trusting patient?

They booked a table at Brown’s, one of Oxford’s most popular restaurants, a few minutes’ walk from St Antony’s. The evening started cordially, with broad smiles all round, but deteriorated when the emissaries began delivering their message. As voices rose, the waiters exchanged glances and lifted eyebrows, wondering whether the evening might end in blows.