Just check that I’m free and come right in, Kibaki told PS

One of the peculiarities of Nairobi’s State House is that it is invisible from the road, the only hint of its existence a formidable checkpoint and a challengingly high metal fence.

It was here, in an old bedroom converted into a study, that John set up base in early 2003. On his desk he placed a framed picture, a present from Bob Munro, a Canadian friend who ran a slum-based soccer-club scheme.

John had initially established an office outside the main building, within the State House compound. The president was having none of it. ‘No, no, no, I want you inside this building,’ Kibaki had said, insisting that the newly appointed anti-corruption czar should be virtually within shouting distance of his own office – just two doors and a foyer separated them.

‘Don’t brief anyone but me, don’t bother making appointments, just check that I’m free and come straight in.’ It seemed the president had taken John’s message on board.

That physical proximity alone ensured John extraordinary influence. Whatever John’s nominal grade, being granted free licence to update the president whenever he wished effectively placed him above many cabinet ministers in the pecking order.

And Kibaki was true to his word. By the time he left, John calculated that he had given his boss sixty-six briefings, some of them stretching over two or three separate meetings.

The first thing John did was to eliminate the traces of Kibaki’s predecessor. Moi’s official photo came down, replaced by a large one of Kibaki – ‘I was very proud of the president’ – and a calendar from the Japanese embassy.

The civil servants assigned to the department his office replaced – run by a former Moi speechwriter – were sent packing. John had an inkling of how institutions and structures can end up insidiously moulding behaviour, rather than the other way round.

When the administration assigned him one of Moi’s official cars, a dark-blue BMW, he tried driving it around for a day and then returned it, too ill-at-ease to continue.

In came the new team: seven specialists in human rights, governance and the law, picked to roughly reflect Kenya’s ethnic diversity.

‘Our office was very young. John was the oldest, and he was barely forty,’ remembers Lisa Karanja, a barrister and women’s rights expert recruited from Human Rights Watch’s New York office.

With youth, recalls Karanja, came irreverence, absence of hierarchy, and a deliberate adoption of the informal working practices of the non-governmental world from whence so many of the staff hailed.

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But there were risks inherent in John’s approach, which he would only later learn to appreciate. By surrounding himself with outsiders and failing to cultivate the old guard, he separated himself from the system.

When State House colleagues slapped him on the back and joked about ‘you and your crazy NGO wallahs’ they were underlining a difference that would come to bother them. The policy might insulate John from the sleaze of the previous era, but it also left him dangerously exposed.