Michela Wrong's latest book It's Our Turn to Eat: the Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower has stirred controversy in Kenya. Through the struggles of anti-corruption whistleblower John Githongo, Wrong examines how corruption has plagued the country. Transparency Watch spoke with Wrong about the themes behind her book: identity, history, cynicism and integrity.

Transparency Watch (TW): The story of John Githongo, who fled Kenya and showed up at your doorstep, is the basis of your latest book, through which you tell a larger story about corruption in Kenya. How did you feel about the risk of providing refuge to this man who was a friend, turn threatened anti-corruption whistleblower?

Michela Wrong (MW): I had offered him a room in my flat when we met briefly in Nairobi, as it was clear that things weren't going well and he might need somewhere to escape to. I didn't know until he turned up quite what was involved, that he was about to resign and go underground, and I didn't know that he thought his life was in danger in quite such an acute way. It was slightly a case of biting off more than one had expected. But you know, I have spent a lot of time working in Africa and I was aware that these kinds of challenges come up in the lives of many journalists. Reporting in Africa is never trouble free and many of the people you meet as a journalist will be in danger because of the opinions they hold and actions they take. As a journalist you tend to get involved in their stories in a way that may be regarded in other countries as very unusual.

TW: What do you think about your book being sold under the counter and not being carried by many bookstores in Kenya?

MW: It's very exasperating. The situation is actually worse than you describe - I don't know of a single bookshop in Nairobi that is openly selling it. I think the reaction is quite exaggerated because the government has not banned the book. So far, in spite of various reports, none of the key characters mentioned in its pages have taken legal action. So it's very frustrating to then find the book being effectively censored by the very people who should be selling it. I keep getting Facebook messages and emails from people in Nairobi asking how they can get hold of a copy. I know that there is an electronic pirated version of my book doing the rounds and it's infuriating, because clearly there is a vast appetite for the book yet the booksellers, through their nervousness, are not allowing it to reach the public.

TW: Why is that nervousness there?

MW: Under former Kenyan president, Daniel arap Moi, there were instances where his cronies sued booksellers for selling books in which they deemed themselves to have been libeled [CPJ]. There has been this history, but I don't believe that this would happen nowadays. I think there may have been a campaign conducted to persuade these booksellers not to stock the book as this refusal seems to be strangely uniform, which I think is essentially censorship in another form.

TW: John Githongo has been accused of being a puppet of the West. What do you make of such comments?

MW: I get irritated when some people ask ‘why did he have to go abroad to tell this story, why didn't he stay here and tell the Kenyan people about it and made sure it was investigated here?' If you read the dossier he wrote and if you read my book it's quite clear that he spent years trying to get the Kenyan authorities to do something about the Anglo Leasing scandal [BBC], to absolutely no avail. Githongo briefed the president 66 times! He was in touch with the Kenyan anti-corruption commission all the time.

He was trying to put pressure on the justice minister, the finance minister, the minister of international security. I therefore don't think it's valid to claim he didn't try and deal with the problem domestically and simply ran abroad to spill the beans. That's just unacceptable. He did try and he only went abroad because a) he was afraid for his life and b) because it had become clear in his view that there was no desire at all in Kenya to find and prosecute the perpetrators of Anglo Leasing. In any case, John could never be anyone's stooge.

He has always had his own very independent view on the role the West has played in Kenya. He has become very vocal in his criticisms of the World Bank and the aid industry and organisations like the British Department for International Development, so it's pretty unconvincing to present a man like that as being at the beck and call of Western powers. The great thing about John is that he has proved that he is not at the beck and call of anybody, including the very president who originally appointed him.

TW: Your previous books were on Mobutu Sese Seko and the Congo and Eritrea. Were there any recurrent issues that you now see resurfacing in this book?

MW: Definitely. Every time you write a book you find yourself reviving themes that you have already explored in previous ones. I have become increasingly critical of the West's record in Africa - from the role the World Bank played in propping up Mobutu to the extremely cynical role both the West and the Communist bloc played in Eritrea. And now in Kenya. One of the themes of my work is always to try and remind Western readers of a history that we tend to forget because our colonial past is not studied at school. There are generations that grow up in western countries with no idea about their own imperialist history and how it shaped Africa. I always try, through my books, to remind Western publics how important the colonial experience was and what a deep imprint it left behind.

TW: What role do you think colonialism played in shaping the structure and perhaps planting seeds for social problems in today's Kenya?

MW: The colonial experience in Kenya was of the kind that tended to cement the differences that existed between the various historical ethnic groups. Those differences predated colonialism - Maasais knew that they were Maasai, Kikuyu knew they were Kikuyu, Kamba knew they were Kamba. But the way the colonial state dealt with those ethnic communities reinforced the differences and played its part in creating this climate of '2009-05-07It's our turn to eat' - which I used as the title of my book. Each ethnic group which came to occupy State House felt it had the right to gorge on state resources and do little to share the goodies with other ethnic communities. You could say that the whole 'It's our turn to eat' philosophy was rooted in white colonial rule, in which one ethnic community, which happened to be the white settler community, behaved as though it had a divine right to the riches of the country and that everyone else living in that country was essentially there to serve its plans for self-advancement. So the colonial experience served as a model for Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, and Kenyatta's approach served as a model for Moi [Times]. We see this sort of attitude being perpetrated through the decades. It's not the only reason, but the colonial experience definitely drummed that smash-and-grab vision of how you rule a country into the psychology of many Kenyan leaders.

TW: There are those who say that poverty is no excuse for corruption. How do you see this?

MW: If you are a lowly civil servant, schoolteacher, or shop assistant, and you regard yourself as being a small part of some epic struggle in which your ethnic community is massed against all the other ethnic communities in the country then you will think that it is your job, your duty even, to give that brother from upcountry a job in your office, to dole out better grades at school to his children, perhaps, or subvert the tendering process so a brother wins a contract. You then find corruption being perpetrated in tiny shops and small offices throughout the country.

If you feel, in contrast, that you are born into a meritocratic system where people have an equal chance and where you come from doesn't automatically determine what your life chances will be, you will behave in a completely different way. It's really about your relationship with the state and who you think you are. Corruption is all bound up with identity. Poverty is not the key issue, it's how you see yourself in relationship to your fellow citizens. Living in Kenya, it became clear to me that identity and corruption were intrinsically linked and that until people began to think of themselves in a different way, they would not be able to get corruption out of their lives, whether they were suffering from its effects or perpetrating it themselves in hundreds of tiny social transactions.

TW: During your research, what have you learned about the role of international donors?

MW: What I have learned, and it certainly was true in both Congo and Kenya, is that western regimes tend to get very fixated with individual players, the African presidents of the day. They become almost bewitched by these characters, obsessed with keeping their aid programmes or their partnerships with these leaders on the road. So many wrongs are tolerated and many corruption scams are spotted, but politely ignored, because the overall relationship is deemed to be so incredibly important.

TW: Why do you think that is?

MW: I think there is an inbuilt inertia in any bureaucracy - this applies to Western lending institutions, Western development ministries and Western NGOs. Once you start lending aid to a country you tend to regard it as a complete disaster to halt an aid programme or sever ties. The massive momentum of aid programmes and partnerships takes over. People lose sight of the big picture. They tend to assume that anything is better than change. So you stick with the president of the day, come hell or high water, because it would be better than change, which is seen as innately destabilising and dangerous.

If such a policy is continued, you eventually pay a much higher price, because the inequalities that develop at the grass roots-level are so profound they create an incredibly unstable situation. We saw the anarchy that unfolded after Mobutu fled the Congo and in Kenya after the elections. Turning a blind eye and not talking about embarrassing things like human rights abuses or massive corruption scandals perpetrated by governments of the day always backfires in the end. It's a very stupid and shortsighted way to run foreign policy

TW: TI Kenya recently released a survey which shows that citizens have lost confidence in the government's ability to tackle corruption. Where do you think this is all heading?

MW: I think we are in an incredibly dangerous period. The recent killing of two NGO activists in broad daylight was a sign of how the rule of law in Kenya has broken down on many fronts. Extra judicial killings by the police are completely blatant and very wide spread, with the security forces exercising total impunity [BBC]. When you have millions of angry, frustrated young men with no prospects, leaders with ethnic agendas and security forces who don't recognise the rule of law, it makes for a really dangerous combination. One of the problems at the moment in Kenya is that everyone is looking forward to the 2012 elections, without anyone thinking that now is a key opportunity to heal the wounds created during the last elections.

TW: Do you think civil society can or has any real chance to change anything?

MW: Civil society was shaken and traumatised by the events that followed the last elections, but I get the sense that these groups are growing in confidence and becoming much more vocal and active once again. The problem in Kenya is that violence now has become the understood method of deciding who runs the country. The lesson of the 2007 elections is that the ballot box is no longer the decider. Who ends up running a country will be determined by brute force: on one side, the capacity to get mobs out on the street, on the other, the capacity to deploy security forces ready to shoot demonstrators on sight. It's very hard for civil society to deal with that level of violence.

TW: Do you have any hope?

MW: I am pessimistic at the moment and I think it is reasonable to be so. It seems to me that one of the problems with Kenya in the past is that people who interact with Kenya - NGO workers, diplomats, donor representatives, journalists - have all tended to look at it through rose tinted spectacles and ignored the reality at the grass-roots level of increasingly poisonous politics. So I think one has to be realistic and accept how serious the problem is before you can see any real improvement. At the moment it is only sensible to be very worried, but there are still three years to go before the next election and there is time to heal these wounds if people really have the will. Western donors want to see that change, too, but they just don't know how to push Kenya's political players in the right direction. And I don't see Kenya's extraordinarily cynical political elite showing the required leadership or setting any examples.

TW: You've spent many years reporting in Africa. How has your understanding of corruption developed over the years leading up to writing this book?

MW: When I was in Congo I felt that corruption was something that came from on high, from figures like Mobutu. I saw it as predatory looting by a sleazy elite. This was very obvious in Congo, because of the extraordinary spending patterns of that elite, the extravagance of Mobutu and his cronies, with their Concorde trips to Disneyland and their villas in Belgium [NY Times]. Living in Kenya, I realized that the same phenomenon was evident not just at the top but at every level and echelon of society.

People feeling that they had the right and duty to give a job to someone from their village back home, that they had the right and duty to rip off their employer, especially if he was from a different ethnic community or if he was a white man or Asian. Every business deal came with its own sleazy fiddle. I realised that corruption is not just an elite problem, but that it goes down and down and down through a society's various layers. The years have brought an appreciation of just how deep-rooted that attitude to state resources is.

TW: What role do you see the private sector playing?

MW: Here in the West, and particularly in Britain, we need to clean up our act when it comes to doing business in Africa. At the moment Britain can rightly be accused of total hypocrisy in its attitude to bribery abroad perpetrated by British companies. We are quite rightly being held to account and much criticised for our own shameful track record on things like the BAE investigations. Although it's not the main thread of my book, I would hope that people reading it will come away thinking that it is not only Kenyans and Africans who need to ponder why their societies suffer from ingrained corruption, but also for us in the West to think through what we mean when we say zero tolerance for corruption. Because, in fact, we currently turn a blind eye to it. We have shown almost no indication that we are ever going to get serious about prosecuting companies that apply these tactics here in Britain.

TW: Does it give you any hope that an organisation like TI has existed for only fifteen years and yet the issue of corruption is now much more at the forefront than it was fifteen years ago?

MW: Yes absolutely. When Mobutu had his exchanges with the World Bank it was considered unacceptable to discuss corruption in the Bank's corridors because it was seen as a tasteless infringement of African sovereignty. That attitude has completely altered now and I think TI is to be congratulated on helping to bring about that fundamental change. There has been a radical shift in attitudes. There's an awareness that rather than this being a merely cosmetic problem, it can actually destabilise states and lead to conflict.

My only criticism of the anti-corruption industry is that I think it's going through the same process as the aid industry It is tending to become institutionalised and bureaucratised itself, and so there are these conferences, which I too have attended, where people fly across the world and stay in expensive hotels to discuss corruption. There is a danger that the anti-corruption campaign becomes a sort of income generating industry where people who may have all sorts of economic crimes to their discredit go and spout platitudes about corruption in front of international conferences and rack in the per diems. It would be a terrible shame if that process went too far. The danger is that the anti-corruption industry becomes smoothly co opted by the very institutions and people it would like to bring down.