BOOK: It's Our Turn to Eat

AUTHOR: Michela Wrong

PUBLISHER: Fourth Estate Books, 2009

VOLUME: 354 pages

PRICE: Shs 39,900

Available at Aristoc

"Eating" is how Kenyans dub the gorging on state resources by the well-connected. After the 2002 elections, writes Michela Wrong in "It's our turn to eat", many eyes were on Kenya - as they were exactly five years later. If only the new regime could get it right on corruption, if only Kenya could find its way, there was hope for the rest of Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa, post-military Nigeria and a revived Kenya could form the three points of a triangular success establishing Africa on firm, unshakeable foundations. Thus the thinking in Western embassies and corridors of power.

Things looked promising. John Githongo was appointed the new anti-corruption czar, the new government thereby showing its determination to end sleaze. In his youth, John had written a short story about a man who wakes up one morning to discover a giant pile of manure dumped outside his house.

Puzzled, he tries to discover where it came from and how to shift it. This, somewhat modified, was to be John's future task. But events took a surrealistic turn.

Frustrated at the performance of the new regime, after some time, and sensing his life was in danger, John "jumped the boat" on an official trip abroad and landed at the doorstep of the author's London flat where, in good spy thriller tradition, he lay low, juggling with several mobile phones to hide his whereabouts from unwelcome callers. He was offered a lecturing post at St Antony's College, Oxford, together with two hefty guards. His tracks were being followed.

He decided to spill the beans to the media. The initial effect was beyond all reckoning, especially in Kenya, yet eventually did not meet his expectations, least of all among official circles in donor countries. In February this year John left Oxford for Nairobi, where he plans to do community work in Mathare Valley slums and build grassroots support for a parliamentary seat.

His critics have branded him a traitor, at worst, and politically naïve at best.

"I accept that," he says. "Only a naïve person would take an anti-corruption job after twenty-four years of systemic corruption. But that's what you need. I went in naïve and I want to stay that way." Few public figures would have the honesty and humility to say the same.

Sub-titled "The story of a Kenyan whistle-blower", the book is also the story of a continent, our continent, in transition; and in crisis, a crisis of trust.

The Italians say it is good to trust, but better to trust no-one, especially outside one's immediate "family". This Machiavellian cynicism is deeply-rooted, not only in Africa. People like John Githongo set out to show that the mould has to broken. Michela Wrong's "In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz" exposed Mobutu's Congo. In "It's our turn to eat" she does a photo-scan of present-day Kenya. Based on interviews and conversations with John Githongo and many other players, and her background knowledge of Kenyan society, it is a compelling read.