Customer Reviews

It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower

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Wrong's book is cast as a biography of John Githongo, the former Kenyan anticorruption czar who blew the whistle on the Anglo Leasing scandal and fled for his life. Using Githongo's story, Wrong is able to weave in a substantial amount of important background information on Kenya, on ethnic politics, on corruption, and on aid delivery. It's a lovely and readable introduction to these issues, if a bit long, and I'm buying another copy as a gift for someone who has no knowledge of Africa, aid or corruption issues. Although at the beginning Wrong's writing style dips into a maddening form of purple prose, she soon rights herself. She's at her best when explaining issues rather than engaging in cinematic story telling; and she has an excellent grasp of the issues, and of the human costs of the issues that comes through clearly.

The book suffers where Wrong makes herself a subject, with self-conscious self importance of her own role in what she sees as a Le Carre novel. What is unusual about the Githongo story is both that Githongo went public and that somebody (namely the donor community) cared. But the financing of politics (as well as personal consumption) through procurement fraud in the security and military sector is absolutely everyday stuff in low income countries (and even some countries that are not low income). People trip over it, talk about it, write about it, sometimes audit it and very occasionally are killed over it -- usually without feeling the need to consult Le Carre for advice. Fortunately there is not too much of this.

An argument of her book is that John Githongo, who is reportedly intelligent, and who was the head of Transparency International in Nairobi before working for Kibaki and whose father did bookkeeping and presumably money laundering for the Moi regime, entered the Kibaki government with an incredible amount of wide-eyed naivete. Without knowing any of the principals personally, however, I always found it difficult to believe that Githongo had managed to reach maturity with absolutely no idea of how politics is financed in his country -- or indeed in any low-income country -- and what that implies for the commitment to the fight against corruption for the head of an incumbent political party and his Minister of Finance. It should be noted that Wrong is a personal friend of Githongo, who apparently gave her substantial material for this book. I wonder if Wrong is a little too close to her story to ask the hard questions.

Both in this book and in her last, Wrong finds fault with any compromise with existing African political machines. Such compromise, she argues, implies that Africans are not worthy of good government or are incapable of it. But patronage politics are not simply the result of bad people in government -- there are social forces that drive it -- which is why it is relatively impervious to a change of administration. More, it is obviously not exclusively African, so it is hard to read an insult to Africans in a recognition of the resilient nature of patronage politics.

The naive "bad people" theory of government too often informs the actions of Western donors, who like Diogenes spend their time looking for honest champions with whom they can entrust their money. It also drives American foreign policy, as Americans spend time lopping off the heads of foreign governments. But political machines are Hydra-headed. As one wag said in Panama about Noriega, "They took Ali Baba and they left us the forty thieves." We would all be better off if we understood that political machines take time to change, and asked instead how reformers can address the social drivers that create them, and how the West can best deal with political machines where we find them. Neither the old Cold War shrug, nor indignant and self-righteous total repudiation are likely to be useful strategies.

The two Amazon reviews for her new book are complimentary but weighty for someone who is merely interested in whether to pick up her book or not. If you have read her previous two, then my answer is a resounding YES! In this book she explores the events that caused current Kenyan President Kibaki's aide John Githongo to expose the corruption in their government. She also explores the aftermath of his whistle-blowing, including the riots occurring late 2007 after Kibaki was sworn in for a second term.
It is the combination of Wrong's veteran journalist chops and her desire to tell stories of the scary truth beyond any fictional thriller that takes what has happened recently in Kenya from a lurid, sensational story to a nuanced, thoughtful and ultimately heartbreaking story with no easy answers.
I read Michela Wrong's books because they encourage me to think about a world outside of the one I live in.

It's not clear to me why other reviewers persistently recharacterize one of this book's strongest points as a negative. The author has brought to bear her considerable experience with the country, region, culture, and political landscape to tell a story that has long needed telling about Africa's failure to come to grips with the tyranny of corruption. As long as donor nations continue to fund the kleptocracies that exist only to serve and perpetuate themselves, we in the west will continue to be played for fools.

I found this to be a strong and engaging account of one of the more intractable problems I've run into. I wish it had left me feeling hopeful, but it was far too consistent with my own experience to permit such self-delusion. Instead, it left me filled with admiration for a hero who, thanks to the author's incorporation of her personal experience, can be seen as a human and not as the caricature that time will eventually make of him. I also appreciate the historical and political canvass she offered to illuminate just how audacious his actions were.

Yes, the book does have the occasional hyphen, but the prose is never dull and the account moves very briskly. I found the style refreshing and enjoyed reading a treatment that mixed the personal with the historical with the social with the legal with a touch of suspense in a package that showed some respect for the reader who is hoping for something more considered than what might be offered from the Live Aid stage.

There are three main strands in this short and gripping book. One is the extent to which high-level corruption is embedded in the (formally) democratic structures of Kenya. The second reveals the willingness of donor countries and multilaterals to go on doing business as usual after corruption is revealed and a few eye-brows have been raised .... The engrossing chapters describing both aspects confirm the conviction of many development economists that fighting corruption is a battle lost even before the fight : there is a conspiracy of silence among the leaders, and donors and multilaterals are good at barking but hardly ever bite. The third strand is the exemplary story of a man of values, John Githongo, put at the helm of an anti-corruption authority by country leaders who expected Githongo to expose graft in the previous government -but keep clear of the misdeeds of the incumbents.

Michela Wrong's third and latest book is an outstanding read. Having been the FT correspondent in Kenya for several years, Wrong has an excellent grasp of Kenya's history and contemporary political scene and it shows in her writing and analysis. Corruption is often lamented by commentators the world over and it usually just leads to people shrugging as though there is nothing they can do about it. This story explains what happens to one man who decided to try to do something about it and paid heavily for his courage. Yet Wrong explains just how complicit the international donor agencies were in the Kenyan debacle, to the extent that the World Bank tried to downplay the violence that followed the last election. There is something that ordinary westerners can do about the corruption in African countries - put pressure on their own donor agencies to stop funneling more and more taxpayers money into the corrupt governments. These funds become the life blood of corrupt regimes and allows them to continue to repress their own people.

This book helps us understand Kenya, corruption, development or lack thereof. It is a gripping read and highly recommended. Not for nothing the Kenyan govt. has tried to suppress it and almost every Kenyan I have spoken to is desperate to get a copy.

It's Our Turn to Eat is a real-life political thriller that lifts the curtain on the inner workings of an African government.

And where else do you get that? Most books by outsiders about Africa - the ones you see on the bestseller lists - trade in cliches and stereotypes. They divide the continent into innocent victims and venal dictators. At one extreme you get books that could be titled: "My Adventures in ..." (fill in the war-torn country). At the other, you get dry textbooks by people who spent years researching their subject but don't know how to tell a story.

This book is far smarter. It doesn't aim for an everything-you-need-to-know-about-Africa view of the continent. Instead it says more by saying less, focusing on the story of how John Githongo became a whistle blower at the heart of Kenya's government, why he blew the whistle and what happened next.

Githongo comes across as a visionary but if he's a saint he's a 21st century kind of saint. He makes silly decisions as well as brave ones. He infuriates his friends by constantly skipping appointments. He might have a true moral compass but by the end of the book it's not clear how he's going to get there and even he doesn't seem to know. In other words, he's a rich, rounded character: not a cliche, not a stereotype.

One other thing to like about the book: it has cool enemies. Michela Wrong shares Githongo's view of corruption and she writes with controlled outrage.

Yet the villains of the story aren't so much the looters themselves. They're the army of donors and diplomats who have invested so much in the status quo they can't really imagine Kenya - and by extension Africa - being any different. And she nails them: certain senior diplomats and aid donors will not enjoy this book.

But you will.

Once again Michela Wrong's journalistic impressionism and meticulous reporting lights up a neglected corner of a neglected continent. Wrong is a writer with incredible sources and she knows how to weld their information into a compelling story.

The book centers on John Githongo, an idealist in a world where pragmatism ruled. He was appointed as the head of a new anti-corruption agency created by Mwai Kibaki, newly elected president of Kenya. Kibaki was only the third Chief Executive of the east African country, replacing Daniel arap Moi who ruled from 1978 to 2002 and who replaced the revered Jomo Kenyatta, founding father, freedom fighter, hero of African independence.

Kenya, according to Wrong, is structured more by tribe than anything else. Membership in the Kikuyu tribe is more important than citizenship of Kenya, for example. President Kibaki and John Githongo were Kikuyus and Githongo discovered his role in the government was to act as window dressing for donors and foreign governments, to show these very important westerners that the corrupt old days of Moi were over. They weren't, of course. The people pocketing the bribes and kickbacks changed but the method didn't and the more Githongo found out the less popular he became.

Those now in power had the same view of government as those they replaced: it was not to produce public
goods like roads, bridges, markets, irrigation, education, health care, public sanitation, clean drinking water or effective legal systems but to produce private goods for those who hold or have access to political power. Contracts don't go to the low bidder or to the company most able to perform but to whoever offers the largest bribe. The most outrageous example of this is the Anglo Leasing fiasco. Anglo was a company that existed only as an address in Liverpool--it had no plants, no equipment, produced nothing, had no contacts with those who did. It wasn't even a middleman but simply a facade so that when contracts let by the Kenyan government were paid to Kenyan officials the checks weren't made out to the individual politicians. When the government decided to update the printing and tracking of its passports Anglo was given the contact for a bid of 30 million Euros even though a French company with a long list of satisfied clients bid 6 million Euros. But it wasn't just the 500% increase in cost: Anglo Leasing had no capacity to produce passports and had no intention of doing so. They were also given contracts for a forensic lab, military vehicles even a frigate for the navy.

This is a tragic true story of one man's efforts--his obsessed and doomed striving--to vault Kenya from a well oiled kleptocracy that kept its citizens poor while the elites prospered into a functioning democracy.

I had the privilege of living and working in Nairobi between late 2004 and the end of 2005. It was only a few months after my arrival that John Githonga suddenly left Kenya and went into exile because of death threats from those government officials whose grotesque corruption he was about to expose. Until I read "It's Our Turn to Eat" one year ago, I had limited understanding of how deeply ingrained and tribal-oriented the corruption has been. It provided the clearest and most honest explanation I have ever encountered of how profound the role of tribalism has been in Kenya, both before and since the country's independence from British rule. I only wish that I'd had the benefit of reading it before I began my attempt to help bring reform to the Kenyan law enforcement system so that I might have better understood why such efforts were naive and destined to be thwarted by those benefitting most from the status quo.

During my time in Kenya, there were frequently reports in the then newly-free press of what were astoundingly brazen and arrogant acts of corruption by one government minister or another. When their crimes were exposed, each responded in a manner that said, in essence, "so what?" or, if the acts were exposed by the U.S. or U.K., accused the messenger of acting as a hypocritical colonial power with racist attitudes towards "the Kenyan people. We in the United States certainly have corruption among our government officials, particularly in Congress. But one difference between our corrupt and those in Kenya is the arrogance and sense of entitlement among Kenyan officials that results in their not caring at all about the public reaction to such acts. It was obvious that the way to move from poverty to untold riches in Kenya was to be elected to Parliament or, even better, get appointed by the president to a ministerial post. Ms. Wrong's book puts it all into historical context and provided the kind of insider knowledge that only someone of John Githonga's stature, integrity and lifelong experience could truly piece together.

This is an extraordinary book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to really understand why Kenya is so poor today, despite its natural riches, hundreds of millions in foreign aid and citizens who are incredibly proud, hard-working, educated, enterprising and hospitable. Time will tell whether its newly-enacted Constitution will make meaningful changes in the extent to which elected officials can continue to plunder the country's riches and leave the masses so incredibly poor.

In Kenya, the word "eat" is often used to mean "consume money", and there is a vast amount of eating described in this book. The book is about John Githongo, a former journalist who was the head of the Kenyan branch of Transparency International, who was appointed Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics in January 2003 by the new Kenyan President Kibaki, who had campaigned on a strong anti-corruption platform.

President Moi had ruled Kenya for 24 years, and his government had been known for its corruption, which particularly favoured Moi's ethnic group, the Kalenjin. It took only a few months after the new government was elected for insiders to become aware that the extent of corruption was to be undiminished, but it was now to favour the Kikuyu, Kibaki's ethnic group. Githongo happened to be a Kikuyu himself, so it was naturally assumed that his conscience would be willing to bend in favour of tribal loyalty.

When Githongo refused to accede to the corruption he started receiving death threats, eventually resulting in his exile to England. He had taken the precaution of secretly recording incriminating conversations, and there was a great deal of interest when he published these recordings. A couple of Kenyan ministers were sacked before being reinstated 6 months or so later. Some foreign aid was stopped as a result of the scandal, but the Make Poverty History campaign and lobbying from celebrities has made donor governments more concerned about pushing aid out the door than whether it is being used productively, so much of the aid has been restored. The book is well written and very entertaining, but the culture of impunity in Kenya for corrupt politicians continues.

There are two ways of looking at this book: either as a Kenyan/African (like myself), constantly shocked by our leaders or as a curious observer, given a rare glimpse into raw Africa - extremely fickle and strangely intriguing. A good friend of mine says Africans can't resist a good conspiracy theory. This book proves that those theories no matter how crazy mostly have a sliver of truth.

The ostentatious corruption exposed within the pages of this book has been more or less been duplicated across the continent with a tempo that makes you wonder how this ravenousness can continue to be sustained. I gave the book one less star because there were moments when I was more interested in the unfolding deception than in the whistleblowers personal life which droned on in certain sections.