Githongo was given ‘no choice

• Advice to turn down State position was too late; decision was made in his absence

I had known John Githongo since moving to Nairobi in the mid-1990s, when he was an up-and-coming columnist and I was the Financial Times’s Africa correspondent.

John, who wrote a think piece for the EastAfrican, a business weekly owned by the Aga Khan’s Nation Media Group, had studied abroad, had travelled his own continent and had a sound grasp of geopolitics.

His vision was sophisticated, his instincts compassionate, and he had the good journalist’s ability, using colourful anecdote to make complex arguments accessible to the ordinary reader.

I began quoting John in my articles. Other Western journalists were also discovering him.

Soon the name ‘John Githongo’ was cropping up in more and more media stories as a pundit. Then he’d left journalism to revive the local branch of Transparency International, an organisation established by his own father and a group of likeminded businessmen disillusioned with Moi.

He had found the perfect platform from which to hold a morally bankrupt government to account.

While working at TI, John was also in discreet contact with the Kibaki team. He’d kept that side of things quiet, for the organisation was officially neutral, and had to be seen to remain above the political fray. But when Kibaki’s aides approached, asking for concrete suggestions on how to build the Opposition’s anti-corruption strategy, he could hardly refuse.

In the wake of the 2002 inauguration I tracked John down with a fellow journalist, keen to hear his thoughts. 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.
‘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 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.

More than a pawn

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. 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 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 anticorruption, 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.’ The appointment was announced in the following days, to much media fanfare.

Man in a hurry

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, veteran Africa writers all. His arrival was a welcome surprise, for John – always prone to the last-minute cancellation – had become outrageously unreliable since joining government, as notorious for his noshows as a Hollywood diva.
‘So, John, when are you going to resign?’ asked one of my colleagues, and John chuckled ruefully, shaking his head in defeat.

No longer in control

As we prepared to leave, I turned to him on sudden impulse. He had not said as much, but under the ebullient cheerfulness that was his customary public face, I thought I glimpsed a certain dismay. He seemed buffeted, a man no longer in control of his destiny.

‘I’ve just moved into a larger flat in London, John, with a separate guest room. If you ever need a base’ – the phrase ‘bolt hole’ was on the tip of my tongue – ‘somewhere to rest up, just give me a call.’

The response came a few months later. A call from Davos, where John was attending the World Economic Forum. ‘I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer of a room?’ He gave no hint of how long he planned to stay or why he needed a place for the night when presumably, as a government VIP, he enjoyed the pick of London hotels.

When he called again, this time from Oslo, where he was attending a conference, I asked whether his visit was something I could mention to journalist friends in London, always keen to see him. ‘Er . . . Probably best not. If you don’t mind, just keep it to yourself for now.’

Something, clearly, was up. And on the morning of 6 February 2005, when the capital was wrapped in a cold white cocoon, he arrived on the doorstep of my London flat, let in by a genteel elderly lady from down the hall who seemed, to John’s quiet amusement, to find nothing remotely suspicious about a huge black man in a KGB-style black leather jacket, herding a pile of luggage so large it was clear that this would be no weekend stay.

As he deposited the various bags in my guest room, which suddenly looked very small and cramped, John’s mobile phones trilled and vibrated, like a chorus of caged starlings.

How many did he actually have: three? four? more? He asked for a glass of fruit juice, took a deep breath, and gathered his thoughts. ‘One of the first things I need to do,’ he said, ‘is resign.’

He was on the run, he told me. In best espionage style, he had summoned two taxis to the London hotel where he had been staying with Justice Aaron Ringera, head of Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Commission, paid one to drive off in any direction and taken the second.

Whatever I might have fondly liked to think, his appearance on my doorstep at this moment of crisis was scarcely a tribute to the intimacy of our friendship. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was there precisely because so few people in Kenya knew we had ever been friends.

‘They told me it was them,’ he said, pacing the floor. ‘These ministers, my closest colleagues, sat there and told me to my face that they, they were the ones doing the stealing. Once they said that, I knew I had to go.’

He came bearing toxic material. A nervous tremor scurried along my spine as he explained that he had done the unthinkable, wiring himself for sound in classic police informer style, taping the self-incriminating conversations of the ministers who were supposed to be his trusted workmates.

The explosive contents of those recordings had been systematically downloaded onto his computer, which now sat quietly in my spare bedroom.

Sitting at my computer, John wasted no time in typing out his resignation letter.

He drafted it slowly and carefully. While he did not want to give anything away that might constrain his actions later on, he was also determined to make it clear to the careful reader – and he knew State House, the intelligence services and the media would be analysing every word – that he was not leaving happy in the knowledge of a job well done. There would be no ‘spending more time with my family’ cliches. The circumstances of his resignation alone, announced on a one-way trip into exile, must at this stage do the rest for him, sending a damning message about the true nature of the NARC regime.

He was in a hurry to cross that Rubicon; the letter needed to be faxed immediately to State House. But whose fax machine to use? If I used my own, his location would immediately be revealed. My parents’ fax would be no better – given my family’s unusual surname, it would immediately lead anyone with half a brain back to me.

In any case, a Camden Town telephone number would once again point Kenyan investigators in my general direction.

In the end, despairing of getting it right, I walked into an independent bookshop I regularly patronised and asked the owner to fax the letter, hoping he wouldn’t notice its recipient (‘President’s Office, State House, Nairobi’) as it passed through his hands.
The resignation was splashed across the front pages of Kenya’s newspapers in three-inch capitals the next day, the only topic of conversation on the FM radio stations, morning chat shows and Kenyan websites.

Even the international media ran hard with the story, realising this was an event likely to damage relations between the Kenyan government and its new-found foreign friends.

After only two years in his post, the living, breathing symbol of Kibaki’s good intentions had thrown in the towel, the shining white knight had fallen off his horse. In the days that followed, the Kenyan government mounted a quiet manhunt. As security officers descended on John’s house in Nairobi – ‘It was just like the old days,’ a friend who lives in the same district later told me, ‘with police cars drawing up in the night, neighbours woken, dogs barking’ – staff at the Kenyan High Commission in Portland Place scoured London. They checked the addresses of John’s friends, people he had grown up and gone to school with.

Nothing. They canvassed the roads around Victoria Station, an area of cheap lodgings patronised by Africans who can’t afford the top hotels. No luck. No one thought to check the home of Michela Wrong, former Africa correspondent of the Financial Times.)

In theory, I should have been pestering him for an interview. In fact, I held back. While I was clearly sitting on a fabulous story – Africa’s Watergate, by the sound of it – sitting John down with a notebook and tape recorder would have felt like a cheap trick, his host joining the manhunt rather than offering the safe haven he clearly desperately needed.

So I mentally stored the nuggets of information that came my way, while allowing the overall picture to escape me. He talked of ministers, he mentioned a naval vessel, the words ‘Anglo Leasing’ came up repeatedly. But he never joined up the dots.
I wondered, once or twice, what I would actually be able to say to the police if something sinister happened to him. I’d have no coherent tale to tell, and they would surely refuse to believe that an intelligent journalist, harbouring a political fugitive, had never bothered to fit the various pieces together.

Ignored phones

Out on the street, I scanned black faces with a paranoid new attentiveness, trying to spot the undercover Kenyan agent attempting to blend in. But Camden has an awful lot of Africans living in it. From my new and wary perspective, almost everyone looked suspicious. At night I lay in bed, pondering how far the Kenyans might go.
Were the stakes this time high enough to be worth killing a man?

Clearly, John believed so, otherwise he wouldn’t have fled. So the only question that remained, from a selfish point of view, was whether the Kenyans would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try something on British soil. Which meant my flat.
If I was finding John’s stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? Yet he seemed astonishingly cool. For the most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he’d pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili.

But usually he would just look at the display, check who was trying to make contact, then put the handset down.
The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House. ‘It’s very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven’t cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn’t even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’

‘It’s their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They’re saying, “It’s not too late, the lines are still open.” Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed.

He wasn’t sleeping well either – I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem – and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again.
As he quietly came and went, a silent question mark was forming. Fleeing the country, in a way, had been the easy part. What, precisely, was he going to do next?

A fortnight later, with the key questions unanswered, John moved out. He headed first to the home of Michael Holman, another British journalist whose friendship with him was as little known as my own, and then to a scruffy flat next to a north London fish-and-chips shop.

Followed by agents

A few weeks after finding his own place, waiting on a London Underground platform, John realised he was being followed by two middle-aged Kenyan men who looked exactly what they almost certainly were: undercover agents.
He sprinted down a passageway and hopped onto a train to lose them. Then one day, emerging at his local tube station, he was confronted by a Kenyan man, standing coolly watching him, making sure John registered his presence.

They had tracked their prey down to his lair, and were showing off the fact that they knew where to find him.
Yet they did nothing. There was no attempted break-in to verify what, if any, material he held in his new lodgings, no raid to confiscate the incriminating laptop – still in his possession and containing plenty of unbacked-up material – no overture, no whispered threat, no attempt to lure him back to Kenya. They were hanging back, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly? Presumably for the same thing as the rest of us: waiting for the Big Man to make up his mind.

He moved yet again, this time to Oxford’s St Antony’s, a college with a history of offering sanctuary to those in political hot water.

Professor Paul Collier, an expert on African economies, had come to the rescue with a not particularly demanding senior associate’s post on its East African Studies programme. It was exactly the kind of academic berth John needed at this juncture, offering him accommodation, a work space and – crucially – the time in which to gather his thoughts.

© Michela Wrong, 2009. ‘It’s Our Turn to Eat’ will be published in London on Monday, February 23, and goes on sale in Nairobi the same day.