Michaela Wrong’s gripping latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, is the antidote for anyone who knows the weariness of wading through the jargon of implementation plans and institutional treatises on governance and anticorruption. It’s the anti-boredom serum, the potion that brings you the real consequences of what happens when those plans are ignored.
On one level, the book is the story of one John Githongo, the eponymous whistleblower. A former journalist and pro-transparency activist, Githongo was handpicked in the euphoria following the 2002 Kenyan election to serve as the new president’s special anti-corruption advisor. “The era of ‘anything goes’ is gone forever,” declared Kibaki in his acceptance speech, “Corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya.”
But when life very quickly began imitating that old Who song (“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,”) Githongo fled the country, fearing for his life, with the tapes and documents that would blatantly incriminate government officials—up to the highest rungs—in a $500 million corruption scandal.
On a different level, Wrong’s book is also the story of an international movement. Githongo was up against the looters and thugs who threatened to silence him. But he also found himself on the wrong side of the fence from much of the donor community, which wanted Kenya’s new president to be part of a generation of democratic leaders paving the way for a new and prosperous Africa.
As Githongo gasped for air, Tony Blair was boosting DfID’s aid commitments to Africa and launching the Year of Africa:
Playing to the industrialized world’s guilt complex, the Make Poverty History Campaign, Africa Commission and Gleneagles summit all shared one characteristic: the emphasis was on Western, rather than African action. Top-down, statist, these initiatives were all about donor obligations, pledges, and behaviour. What they definitely weren’t about…was highlighting the shortcomings of African governments set to benefit from future Western largesse.
It’s Our Turn to Eat is an unblinking look at the roots and the consequences of sleaze (the violence during Kenya’s recent elections, a referendum on the corrupt leaders’ failure to spread the wealth, was the worst Kenya had seen since independence). It is also a condemnation of “the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’.”
Despite Nairobi booksellers’ reluctance to stock the book, Kenyans are buying the book off street corners, reading it aloud on the radio, and debating it in church groups. Still, some of the best advice Wrong has to offer is for her Western readers.
Worried Westerners, who so often seem to fall prey to a benign form of megalomania when it comes to Africa, would do well to accept that salvation is simply not theirs to bestow. They should be more modest, more knowing, and less naïve.
9 Comments
“Githongo was handpicked in the euphoria following the 2002 Kenyan election… As Githongo gasped for air, Tony Blair was creating DfID and launching the Year of Africa.”
DFID was created in 1997.
I think the West has to realize that there is a different ball in its court when it comes to development. This ball, I doubt that even Michela Wrong with her award winning book has properly addressed. This is the issue of harboring corrupt proceeds. America really needs to watch its backs and financial institutions because that is where all the proceeds from the sale of raw materials as well as aid money given to us by governments go. They return right back to the West. The west really cannot lecture our leaders about corruption in public while corporate leaders in the developed world entertain their corrupt deals with the active co-operation of the umbrella of the foreign missions of these countries. These are things the west must look into before it can lecture about corruption
I’ve read the book as soon as it became available in East Africa. I found the first 150 pages of background stories highly frustrating, but then the book became truly fascinating and ended in a quite pessimistic tone for the prospects of East Africa (Kenya being the economic power house in the region).
No doubt, it’s a must read.
But one should also put in perspective that government corruption in Kenya cannot be strongly related to “aid”, since bilateral aid forms only a tiny percentage of the budget (in contrast to budgets in Uganda & Rwanda for instance).
It is better to name it plain theft of taxpayers money.
And theft is a much bigger problem for the private sector in Africa than (government) corruption.
@Adam Jackson, You’re absolutely right. Tony Blair led a drive to increase the amount of aid to Africa during those years that Githongo was working for Kibaki(UK aid to Africa doubled from 2002-2005), but DFID was created as a separate ministry years before, in 1997. Thanks for the correction; the text has been updated to reflect it. Laura
Mrs Freschi
Thank you for this thoughtful review. Reading the book was in fact a delightful experience. For the reasons you mention above plus some other personal reflections.
First, the book is noteworthy because it provides the readers with the context in which John operates – the background stories, the expectations the Mzee had from him and the ethnic loyalty they expected of him. Second, because the book shows a historical progression from colonialism to the post-colonial era. In Kenya, the colonial legacy is more easily traceable than in other contexts. I know and have blogged extensively about colonialism seen as a scapegoat for current problems, but this book shows just how similar the colony and the postcolony are. Third, the book is insightful because it shows how politics, corruption and ethnicity are interrelated. The Mount Kenya Mafia, the structures of power, the president’s office might seem to be antagonistic forces in the eyes of international organizations but in practice they are clearly interrelated, thus comes the difficulty of judging the current situation in Kenya fairly.
As much as this book is about John Githongo, it is also about political adaptation. “New situations demand new magic” once said Evans Pritchard in a different context. But that statement also speaks about political power. Power, as various authors show, is ambivalent. It is embedded in the social structures, in the local forms of resistance and, naturally, in the work of those whose only goal is their personal enrichment. Any attempt to address the string of “crises” Kenya is facing requires treating the underlining causes. And that is in fact this book’s contribution to the literature on Kenya. Not that this is something new. In fact Bill Easterly has written about this extensively. The uniqueness of this book lies in the fact that the author and John Githongo are actually documenting these crises and their underlining causes first hand. By bridging the gap between corruption, political forces, and ethnic loyalty, this book provides people working in and on development with the necessary data to reinforce their arguments and rethink the measures that should be taken in the quest for real and sustainable development.
PS: I asked my research assistant to go to 10 different bookstores in Nairobi to look for the book. He didn’t find the book in any of them. So, yeah, the book cannot legally be found in the city. But I did discover something nice. Some of my friends had xeroxed copies of various chapters. Exciting, isn’t it???
Thanks Laura. I’ve not read the book yet but greatly look forward to doing so.
where can we buy the book
I was intrigued by your post so did an informal poll of booksellers in Nairobi and Kisumu. According to them, the problem is not that they are “reluctant” to sell the book. It is actually illegal at the moment to sell it here. Such is the unfree freedom of the Kenyan context.