Wrong has got it right

• Book by British author is an ironclad, tell-all story about corruption in Kenya
• There is much in the book to suggest that Githongo was perhaps more idealist than realist

One winter morning in February 2005, a large man in a leather trench coat came in from the cold through Michela Wrong’s door in London, carrying an inordinate amount of personal luggage, four mobile phones and secrets that could have killed him.

She was not surprised to see him and the overtones of espionage that hung about him would become all too real (leaving a London hotel minutes earlier, he had hired two taxis, sent the decoy in a wrong direction and boarded the second).

But it was her lack of surprise that was most ominous; two years earlier, she had warned this same man against taking a hazardous job back in Nairobi.

The appearance of John Githongo – on the run from what he felt was a threat to his life, from a job that people like Richard Leakey had warned him against taking – on Ms Wrong’s doorstep, started a chain reaction of rumours and counter-rumours that would headline in the international media and feed speculation in Kenya.

His high profile “escape” from Kenya and the break with the NARC government has become part of the sediment Kenyan politics is precariously balanced over – a latter-day prelapsarian tale to burden the national narrative of how right went wrong.

In a way, the drama of Githongo’s life presaged the killings and burnings that convulsed Kenya last year - if not for the colour it added to the buildup to the clashes, then for the ominous shadow it cast into the future.

His “escape”

The dimensions of his “escape”, and what it foreshadowed was enough to drive Michela Wrong, already a veteran journalist/writer with a landmark novel of Mobutu’s Zaire, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz under her belt, into writing what already has the makings of a major book.

Mr Githongo was, and in a way remains, a man on the run. The optimism occasioned by the end of President Moi’s 24-year rule had come crashing down earlier for him than for any other Kenyan.

As “anti-corruption czar” he had booked a front row, middle seat in the murky drama that is African governance. But more than that, he was a protagonist in that Beckettian play as well, one in which nothing goes right and all our worst expectations come to pass. He was never going to slay the dragon for the simple reason that this dragon was actually a hydra.

In a suspenseful paragraph in It’s Our Turn to Eat, a man in high office (speaking of the Anglo-Leasing scandal), tells a very disillusioned Githongo, “Anglo Leasing is us.”

From that point, there was nothing much to do. The penny had dropped – in fact, a lot of pennies – some $751 million’s worth of them, a sum larger than the total aid money given to Kenya in the 2003/04 financial year.

Within these pages, we stand eyeball to eyeball with corruption. The book is an ironclad tell-all that mercilessly bares all to the light. It feels dangerous to just read, let alone write. We can only imagine what is like to live it, as Githongo does.

We are close enough to smell the nervous sweat staining the armpits of the people involved in this story. Among Nairobi’s literati, there is talk already that this is the most far-reaching book written on Kenya to date. As one Nairobi wit puts it, Michela Wrong has got it Right.

A suspenseful read, a nail-biting narrative, a driving analysis into not only the yet-unconcluded dire straits a young, naive man got himself into, but also an update on the character of a dramatic nation, It’s Our Turn to Eat is a transferable tale whose larger thrusts afford insights into a Nigeria, a South Africa, a Uganda as much as a Zimbabwe.