When allies turned against Githongo

John Githongo. Photo/FILE

The months that followed the unsuccessful attempt to have John Githongo transferred from State House to the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs were not proving happy.

Even as he received ever more detailed information about the Anglo Leasing contracts – facts he dutifully passed on to the head of state – Kibaki delivered a series of speeches protesting that he could not take action against alleged government graft ‘without evidence’. The remarks made John wince. What further proof could Kibaki possibly need?

With the passage of time, the Mount Kenya Mafia grew ever more careless, taking John’s acquiescence as read. Its members moved with disconcerting ease from pretending to know nothing about Anglo Leasing to coolly presenting it as part of a ‘resource mobilisation’ effort being pulled together for Kibaki’s DP party ahead of elections due in 2007.

John knew enough about his colleagues’ appetites not to give their explanation any credence. NARC’s 2002 election win, after all, had been built on authentic popular support, not bought votes and war chests.

And what appalled him were the terms in which the argument was couched. ‘What staggered me was that the justification was put in ethnic terms’.

By late October, 2004, he had calculated that the suspect contracts could amount to over $1 billion, for behind the eighteen Anglo Leasing cases lay other, even more secret and even murkier projects. The scandal just kept growing.

‘I’m worried that we will have another Goldenberg scandal before the elections,’ confided a clearly uneasy Kiraitu Murungi. Part of John watched himself, horror-struck, marvelling, as he joked with the Justice minister – that macho joshing again – about the ‘Goldenberg scandal of 2006’, speculating about whether they would appear as suspects or witnesses in the inquiry.

There was to be one last betrayal. Following a November 4 meeting to discuss Narc’s governance strategy, Justice Aaron Ringera, head of the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, stayed behind for a private chat.

Fraught, craving support, John ruefully confessed to the colleague whose career he had done so much to further that he had realised State House only wanted him to go through the motions of his job: ‘Mine is the shock of a personal realisation.’ Ringera nodded in agreement. ‘So you stay there, you are a little wiser and you know that you are there!’

And then this refined man of the law, John’s trusted friend, made crudely explicit the sheer horror of his predicament. ‘You can’t, in fact, afford to make any move. That’s when you will really be killed.’

So, joked a dismayed John – attempting, as ever, to clothe the abnormal in palatable language – the message from his superiors was: ‘That’s far enough.’

Ringera nodded, and added a diabolical twist: ‘If you wanted to resign and go today, that’s when they would kill you.’ It was the classic predicament of those who climb onto the merry-go-round of power, only to find themselves whizzing around so fast they cannot jump off.

The conversation was one of the bleakest moments of John’s life. ‘I felt lonely, very lonely. I realised at that moment that I had no more allies within government. In just one and a half years, it had come to this.’

On December 12, Kenya marked the anniversary of its independence. Jamhuri Day was when the presidency handed out its yearly honours, and to John’s surprise he was made Chief of the Burning Spear, First Class. The message was none too subtle: ‘Keep quiet and you will be amply rewarded,’ his bosses were telling him.

His last briefing with the President was on January 10, 2005. Shortly before the meeting, Kiraitu had been quoted in the national press stating that because the money involved in the first two contracts had been repaid, Anglo Leasing could be defined as ‘the scandal that never was’.

No money was lost, nothing had actually happened. Not so, John told Kibaki. Running through the eighteen contracts, he doggedly drew the outlines of the scandal in as much detail as he could.

The usually torpid President suddenly grew animated. For a brief moment, John’s heart lifted: had Kibaki finally become outraged at the scam’s depth and breadth? No, he hesitated.

Maybe he was incensed by the uppity young whippersnapper who insisted on making his life so difficult, harping on relentlessly on this discomforting topic. ‘We were both very angry. He was furious, we couldn’t look each other in the eye. Our relationship had collapsed.’

If the series of paybacks from phantom companies had briefly suggested John was cramping the fraudsters’ activities, even that victory was slipping away. Joseph Kinyua, permanent secretary at the Finance Ministry, informed John he was coming under tremendous pressure from David Mwiraria to pay out on some of the Anglo Leasing contracts.

Kinyua said he hoped to use auditor general Evan Mwai’s report as a delaying tactic, but Mwai informed John that Francis Muthaura, head of the civil service, had been telephoning to insist pending bills were paid, even if the audit was incomplete. John tried to stiffen each man’s backbone, encouraging them to hold firm. But the money-making machine brooked no delay.

Change of tone

As it gathered momentum, John’s colleagues seemed to lose all reserve. There was a palpable change in tone. ‘You are burning down the house,’ they told him, meaning the House of Mumbi. ‘You cannot burn down the house to kill a rabbit.’ No attempts, now, to hide what was going on.

After a Cabinet meeting at State House on January 14, Kiraitu walked into John’s office, pointed at him and accused him of undermining the party. According to the minister, the forthcoming party elections were expected to cost Sh200 million.

His family were kept in the dark: Too risky to tell them. But Mugo, his younger brother, twigged immediately when he drove round to see John and came upon him burning documents. ‘That’s when I knew he was off.’ Having long fretted over John’s government liaison, his younger brother was quietly delighted.

John’s trip would take him first to the Swiss resort of Davos, then to Oslo and London, where he and Justice Aaron Ringera were supposed to be tracking Kroll’s progress on Goldenberg. In the flurry, no one noticed that this experienced traveller, the kind of man one would normally expect to see pulling a single roll-on case – seemed to be carrying an unusually large amount of luggage.

In London John and Ringera, the man who had disappointed him above all others, held a last tete-a-tete, walking around Horse Guards Parade for two chilly hours. As they crunched across the gravel, John prepared Ringera for what was coming: his resignation and exile.

Leaving Kenya would ensure the spotlight of government scrutiny shifted off his family and followed him abroad, leaving those he loved unscathed.

Favourite uncle

And Ringera, a handsome, white-haired veteran who resembled everyone’s favourite uncle, revealed the steel beneath the velvet. Kenyan intelligence would ‘put something in your tea’ if John went public with what he knew, he said. ‘We made a sort of deal,’ says John. ‘I wouldn’t attack them and they wouldn’t attack me.

And Ringera said he would take that message back to the kiama – he meant himself, Muthaura, Murungaru, Mwiraria and Kiraitu – and a truce would be called.’

The judge’s choice of terminology gave John a jolt. In its own small way, it validated his decision to leave. ‘Kiama’ is not a Kiswahili word. It means ‘council of elders’ in Gikuyu and Meru, and refers to the gatherings which traditionally decided community matters in pre-colonial times.

(The author, in a different section of the book, on interviewing Mr Justice Ringera on his conversations with John about the possibility of the graft czar being poisoned, writes: “ He was baffled by John’s interpretation of these exchanges. ‘I was telling John that as a friend. I don’t know how he could have seen that as threatening. We were very close.’)

© Michela Wong, 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.