Nervous moment as tape recorder starts 'talking' under his shirt

The structures to which Narc had pinned its anti-sleaze credentials were about to be put to the test. The president had little choice, for Parliament was now on the case, Kanu MPs licking their lips at the scent of Narc blood.

The head of the Parliamentary Security Committee, David Mwenje, arrived in John’s office and announced that he intended to summon various politicians and officials to give evidence. He was carrying a stash of documents, whose contents – relayed by John’s spy network – were already familiar to the anti-corruption chief. Someone had been leaking with abandon.

Having set the ball rolling, John left with Mwiraria and Kiraitu for London, where he had an appointment at the offices of Kroll, the risk-consultancy group investigating Goldenberg on the Kenyan government’s behalf.

While the three Kenyans were there, John took the opportunity to ask for British records to be checked for evidence of Anglo Leasing. The checks, conducted on the spot, confirmed what John’s sources had said: Anglo Leasing was not a legal entity.

Aside from an address in Liverpool, there was, in fact, a baffling absence of information about the mysterious company which had had so many dealings with the Kenyan Government.

The blatancy of the scam seemed to embolden justice minister Kiraitu, who was in take-no-prisoners mode on the plane returning to Nairobi. “The time has come for big heads to roll,” he declared. John was delighted. “If we act firmly on this, the rest of our term will be a free ride politically. We will occupy the moral high ground,” he told his colleague.

The return to Kenya was like a cold shower. Fired up, John couldn’t wait to clear airport immigration to get things moving. He rang the head of the KACC from the VIP lounge at Jomo Kenyatta. The news was grim: the head of the civil service, Francis Muthaura, was refusing to cooperate with investigators until Parliament had completed its own inquiry.

Buoyed by his defiant stance, the permanent secretaries at Finance and Home Affairs were also stonewalling, with the former refusing to give the KACC a copy of the original Anglo Leasing contract. Chris Murungaru, minister for Internal Security, was also cutting up rough.

But a May 2 exchange with the President reinvigorated John. Kibaki, in fighting spirit, said he knew who were all involved in Anglo Leasing. The money was probably already ‘eaten’, he acknowledged, but John must press ahead as fast as he could.

“Proceed without mercy,” Kibaki ordered. His anger at the gathering revelations certainly seemed to confirm the scenario of a high-minded leader betrayed by shifty aides, a scenario John was more than happy to embrace.

With Kibaki apparently backing him to the hilt, John redoubled his efforts. All further payments to Anglo Leasing, he wrote to Magari, must be stopped. John had not expected his zeal to endear him to his ministerial colleagues, given the extent of the network his informers had sketched. It was just as well.

On 4 May, Vice President Moody Awori invited him for a lunch of stew and chapatis at the Vice President’s villa in Lavington, where they were joined by Kiraitu and Murungaru.

Once the guests had arrived, “Uncle Moody’s” genial expression suddenly vanished and he turned on John. “Now, what’s all this about?” There was no need to investigate Anglo Leasing further, he insisted — he had already explained the matter in a statement to Parliament. When John disagreed, a tense discussion ensued.

Recording the encounter in his diary, John had a surreal sense of priorities being inverted. Anglo Leasing, for these men, was not the issue. He was the “problem” they had all gathered to resolve.

Perhaps the element of the lunch that pained him most was the new stance adopted by Kiraitu. John knew enough about the Harvard-educated minister’s background to hold him in considerable respect.

Kiraitu had been one of a group of pro-opposition lawyers who had braved the wrath of the Moi regime in the 1980s, fighting for multi-partyism, defending political detainees. A member of what the media had dubbed the Young Turks, he had been harassed, monitored and followed before finally going into exile in the United States.

His long friendship with Chris Murungaru was also a source of concern. But Kiraitu still stood for much that John believed. What had happened to the enthusiasm he had shown on the flight home from London?

It was about this time that John systematically stepped up a practice he had initiated the year before. This activity would later trigger his critics’ most vitriolic abuse and leave even otherwise sympathetic Kenyans shaking their heads: he began secretly taping conversations with his colleagues.

Why did he enter into what he would subsequently acknowledge was “morally disastrous territory, the worst form of betrayal, the most discomfiting thing I’ve done in my entire life”?

Initially — how ironic this would come to seem — it was simply in order to be able to prove his bona fides to the boss. In the first year of his tenure, the most contentious material he heard came from businessmen passing through his office.

Without any paperwork to prove his claims, he realised that if he relayed these gobbets of information to the President, only for those who had provided them to think better of their frankness, he could be made to look either a villain or a fool.

But as the Anglo Leasing scandal began to unfold, the motives behind John’s taping subtly changed. It was no longer merely a question of convincing his employer, but of justifying himself before history.

As the disconcerting admissions piled up and his suspicions about his closest colleagues mounted, the cold realisation of just how much he stood to lose — reputation, credibility, employability — dawned.

Listening to the Goldenberg hearings he had helped engineer, John had imbibed a pertinent lesson: throughout Kenyan history, civil servants had always served as scapegoats, fall guys, when high-profile financial scandals came to light.