Michela Wrong - It’s Our Turn to Eat

My father's world view was typically northern European. My mother's characteristically Mediterranean approach would have made perfect sense to any Kenyan. In an ‘us-against-the-rest’ universe, the put-upon pine to belong to a form of Masonic lodge whose advantages are labelled ‘Members Only’. In the industrialised world, that ‘us’ is usually defined by class, religion, or profession. In Kenya, it was inevitably defined by tribe.

Western analysts have remarked on Africans' ‘astonishing ambivalence’ towards corruption, 10 but it is not so surprising. Under the colonial occupiers and the breed of ‘black wazungus ’ who replaced them, the citizen had learnt to expect little from his government but harassment and extortion. ‘Anyone who followed the straight path died a poor man,’ a community worker in Kisumu once told me. ‘So Kenyans had no option but to glorify corruption.’ In a 2001 survey, Transparency International found that the average urbanite Kenyan paid sixteen bribes a month, 11 mostly to the police or the ministry of public works, to secure services they should have received for free. Added together, kitu kidogo – supposedly ‘petty’ corruption – accounted for a crippling 31.4 per cent of a household's income. Those paying out no doubt saw themselves as innocent victims of oppressive officialdom. But while chafing at the need to grease palms, ordinary Kenyans were also playing the system with verve. Which of them could put their hand on their heart and swear that they had never relied on a ‘brother’ for a bargain, a professional recommendation or a job? Who had never helped a distant ‘cousin’ from upcountry jump a queue or win special access? Aware of their own complicity, they hesitated to point an accusing finger.

Moral values can become strangely inverted in a harsh environment. ‘In Nairobi, around 50 per cent of the population is either unemployed or underemployed – they're selling shoelaces or picking up rubbish, not earning enough to survive. But this country doesn't have soup kitchens, and you don't see hordes sleeping rough,’ says Professor Terry Ryan, a veteran Kenyan economist. ‘That's because a senior civil servant or CEO typically picks up the school fees and hospital bills of roughly fifty of his kinsmen, while a headmaster or low-ranking civil servant will be supporting twenty-nine members of the extended family in one way or another.’ Propping up such vast networks made bending the rules virtually obligatory. The man who abided by the rules and took home no more than his salary seemed to his relatives a creep; the employee who fiddled the books and paid for his aunt's funeral, his niece's education and his father's hernia operation a hero. In a poor country, ethnic marginalisation does more than blight life chances. It can actually kill. A 1998 survey found that Kalenjin children were 50 per cent less likely to die before the age of five than those of other tribes, despite the fact that most lived in rural areas, where life is generally tougher. 12 The statistic makes perfect sense. Under Moi, Kalenjin areas benefited from better investment in clinics, schools and roads. A worried Kalenjin mother would head for a well-stocked nearby clinic, child in her arms, along a smoothly tarmacked road. Her non-Kalenjin equivalent was likely to be tossed for hours in the back of a matatu struggling along a rutted track, only to eventually reach a clinic with nothing but aspirin on its shelves and watch her child die.

Researching this book, I repeatedly asked Kenyans for examples of how ethnic favouritism had personally affected them. ‘Oh, every Kenyan has a story like that,’ I was always told. Yet few volunteered details. It was easy to guess why. If they had lost out because of tribal patronage, they risked looking like whiners; if they had benefited, they'd be admitting to collaborating in a system that fostered incompetence.

I'd seen one example myself, at a Kenyan newspaper where I briefly worked as a subeditor. The East African Standard was being revamped after many years in the doldrums. The details of its ownership had always been kept deliberately murky, but the fact that the Moi family quietly pulled the levers was widely known, and had alienated readers, while management's habit of giving jobs to barely literate Kalenjins was blamed for a general collapse in standards. Now a new chief executive was poaching talent from rivals, with promises of an imminent takeover by a South African company. After my first few weeks at the paper, I went for lunch with one of the senior writers.

‘So, what do you think of the staff?’ he asked.

I ran through my various colleagues. Some had better training than others, some were more enterprising, but the goodwill was undoubtedly there. With one exception. The man in question, I said, turned up late or not at all, lounged at his desk playing music while the others hammered at their keyboards, and was often rude to his fellow workers. Robert – let us call him – was one of those rare, dangerous subeditors who could take a perfectly decent story and insert fresh mistakes. When I'd pointed one of these out, he'd given me a look of such astonished contempt that I'd realised criticism was something he rarely heard. In a surprisingly short space of time I'd come to detest him, and it was clear to me that many staff felt the same, although they were strangely mute in his presence. The man should obviously be fired.

The journalist gave me a long look, enjoying his moment.

‘You'll be interested to hear that I expect that individual to either take my job very shortly, or be made editor.’

Robert, he explained, was a close relative of one of the newspaper's top executives. Both men were Kalenjins. No matter how incompetent or unpleasant, Robert knew his career was assured – hence his arrogance and his co-workers' resentful silence.

‘Good Lord,’ I said. It was so crude I could barely believe it. ‘You know, where I come from, the boss's son often works twice as hard to make sure people don't accuse him of exactly this form of nepotism.’

He shrugged. ‘Not here.’

‘How about sending him on a training course so that, at the very least, he learns his trade?’

‘Oh, that's been done. Few people at the newspaper have received more training. He's even gone on one of those journalism courses in the UK. He never gets any better. It's a question of attitude.’

Having written about ethnic patronage for years, this was the first time I'd seen up close its insidious impact on a workplace. Since that lunch, many of the people we discussed that day – including my lunch companion and the chief executive who had dangled the hope of a South African takeover – have left the newspaper, which remains in Moi's control. They had been mis-sold the notion of a meritocratic, non-tribal, politically independent company, and with that promise went much of the incentive for staying. Robert, in contrast, has been promoted, just as predicted.

That was my story. But I wanted to hear someone else's.

Eventually I found him. His name was Hussein Were. He was forty-two when we met, and his boyishly unlined face jarred with the methodical manner of a much older man. Deliberate and self-contained, he spoke at perfect dictation speed – no rushing or interruptions permitted – and his sentences, peppered with ‘albeit’s and ‘pertaining to’s, were redolent of the legalistic world of depositions and affidavits, in which people pause before speaking and are careful to say what they mean.

His first job, he told me, had been with a firm of quantity surveyors, where he spent more than ten years. The boss was a Kamba and a Christian, Were a Muslim and a Luhya, but that didn't stop them working well together. So well, in fact, that when Were tendered his resignation, explaining that he had won a scholarship for a Masters at the University of Nairobi, his boss persuaded him to stay on, juggling his day job with his studies. But when Were returned to full-time professional life, he noticed that things were changing. The company was expanding, and every new arrival, he registered with quiet dismay, was a Kamba. ‘The assistant was Kamba, the secretary was Kamba, the receptionist was Kamba. It was becoming a single-ethnic organisation.’ His relations with these staff were cordial. They shared lunches, knew each other's families. But Were began feeling excluded in subtle ways. ‘In those situations, people begin to segregate into groups. They regard you as different and don't want to share certain things. They set up informal networks, channels inside the office.’ He did not understand the language in which the others communicated, and as a Muslim he would not be included in any Friday-evening trip to a local bar.