From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Feb 17 2009 - 10:05:13 EST
Michela Wrong: Whistleblower on a crusade for the truth
Analysis
Tuesday, 17 February 2009
Many Kenyans experience a spasm of irritation when they hear the glowing
terms Western outsiders use to describe John Githongo.
Their irritation is understandable, for we do tend to wax absurdly lyrical.
"Kenya's Gandhi," was the way the respected Oxford economist Paul Collier
described the burly former anti-corruption czar last week, going on to draw
analogies with President Barrack Obama.
Such responses are invariably genuine, however, and they represent more than
a knee-jerk reaction to John's undoubted charisma. While most people's
journeys through life are blurred and muddied by personal factors, John has
always possessed the almost frightening single-mindedness of a man on a
religious quest. We may not want to practice it ourselves, but we admire it
in others.
As he has moved from newspaper columnist to anti-corruption campaigner,
permanent secretary enjoying the presidential ear to bruised, angry
whistleblower, John Githongo has always been fired by a fundamental
conviction. He believes individual acts can transform society, and that it
is up to this generation of Africans to take control of a long-emasculated
continent's destiny.
He is by no means alone in that approach. In the time it took to research my
book, I came to know many other Kenyans who, equally exasperated by modern
Kenya's top-level corruption and poisonous ethnic factionalism, were
doggedly working for change. Some are civil rights campaigners, many are
journalists, some are bloggers, some are in the Church.
But none enjoyed John's symbolic prominence; and few were faced with as
stark a personal choice. When he realised, back in 2004, that his
ministerial colleagues were involved in the $750m Anglo Leasing scam, John
knew he could either remain loyal to his ethnic community - President Mwai
Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe - or obey his Catholic conscience and lose job,
friends, colleagues and home. There was no contest: he chose exile.
Africans often criticise foreigners for viewing their continent through the
prism of individual personality, seeking heroes and villains in every story.
But that approach possesses a certain coherence on a continent plagued by
Big Man rule, where the personal foibles and strengths of a Mobutu and a
Mandela impact on so many tens of millions.
John Githongo is not a saint. But by deciding to expose a scandal in the way
he did, by placing his fellow Kenyans' interests above his own tribesmen's
narrow appetites at a certain point in history, he broke the mould, setting
an example which will cheer those facing similar moral dilemmas across
Africa for years to come. Every society needs role models. John is one of
them.
Michela Wrong's "It's Our Turn to Eat. The story of a Kenyan whistleblower"
is published this week by Fourth Estate