"It's Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower"
By Michela Wrong
Since its publication three weeks ago, “It’s Our Turn to Eat” has caused something of a stir. Nairobi’s booksellers have decided the book is “too hot to handle”, and are either selling it under the counter or not at all. I keep getting begging messages from frustrated readers’ groups in Kenya, and have taken to asking friends and acquaintances flying in to Nairobi to carry a few copies in their luggage for local distribution.
I’d like to think this surge of interest is a tribute to my writing style. The truth, I suspect, is that the book is playing the role of lightening rod. Kenya is a very troubled and unhappy country at the moment and for many Kenyans, debating the contents of this book is a way of mulling over the question of how their nation got into its present dire state.
The book is the result of a friendship dating back to the early 1990s. I’d known John Githongo when he was a newspaper columnist, then tracked his move into the anti-corruption movement and appointment to President Mwai Kibaki’s government as anti-corruption czar. When he turned up at short notice at my place in London in fear for his life in 2005, having uncovered a scandal that went to the heart of government, I realised a fascinating story was there for the telling.
But I always knew that if this book was going to be read, it had to be about more than a four-year-old procurement scandal. Everyone in Kenya today knows the details of Anglo Leasing and where blame lies. What interested me was what the light John’s itinerary – his attempt to investigate Anglo Leasing, his flight into exile, the leaking of his dossier and eventual establishment backlash -- shed on modern Kenya’s predicament. In particular, on Kenya’s ethnic hyper-sensitivity and a culture of corruption stretching from the uppermost echelons into every arena of daily life. The two issues were intrinsically linked, it seemed to me, and captured in that telling phrase: “It’s Our Turn to Eat”.
One of the book’s fundamental motifs is a clash of generations. I think two visions of the future are colliding head on in Africa today. There’s the older generation’s vision -- parochial, defensive, rooted in rural experience and the local community -- and a younger vision which is international, universal, urban. In the Kenya I lived in during the 1990s, the younger vision was definitely coming to the fore. The slums served as its melting pot, Sheng as its language of expression. The one area in which it had yet to triumph was politics, where the geriatrics held sway. The election debacle of 2007/8, tragically, saw the triumph of the geriatrics’ vision. I sincerely hope that is a temporary set back, not a permanent one.
Another key theme of the book is the way Kenya’s donors, through their aid policies, can inadvertently end up bolstering the “It’s Our Turn to Eat” approach to rule, with all that eventually implies in national division and instability. Most Kenyan voters, remembering the speeches of former High Commissioner Sir Edward Clay, do not realise that Western foreign policy is not uniform, such frankness a rarity. Development ministries like DfID, who want to keep lending programmes rolling, often find themselves at loggerheads with their own countries’ Foreign Ministries. In Kenya the donors – especially the World Bank – allowed themselves to become bewitched by the NARC government’s impressive growth figures and turned a blind eye to the poisonous political reality below those figures. The election debacle, and the current crisis in Kenya, exposes the foolishness of that approach.
The recent assassinations of two NGO activists, after a day in which the Mungiki ethnic militia movement blocked main thoroughfares in to Nairobi and brought a dozen towns to a standstill, highlights a deeply worrying phenomenon. Once regarded as the stable linchpin of East Africa, Kenya has become a country whose future will be decided by the policeman’s rifle and militiaman’s machete, not the ballot box and the rule of law. If this trend continues – and there’s no reason to think it won’t - the outcome of the 2012 elections will depend on the different factions’ varying readiness to use violence, and little else. This is the final and ugliest expression of the “It’s Our Turn to Eat” system of rule, and its implications are terrifying.
Michela Wrong’s “It’s Our Turn to Eat. The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower” is published by Fourth Estate.
You can purchase a copy of this book from RAS aStore by clicking here.
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