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‘Africans are the most subservient people on earth when faced with force, intimidation, power. Africa, all said and done, is a place where we grovel before leaders.’

JOHN GITHONGO, Executive magazine, 1994

Working alongside the director of public prosecutions and a brand-new ministry of justice – an institution phased out under Moi – John Githongo had the job of digging down through this purulent history, sorting through the layers of sleaze.

The judiciary, which had become stuffed over the years with bribable magistrates ready to do Moi's bidding, must be purged: scores would eventually be publicly denounced, dismissed or encouraged to retire. Ministry departments needed to be cleansed of a generation of bent senior procurement officers who had for decades used public procurement as a source of illicit wealth, stealing, one study estimated, $6.4 billion between 1991 and 1997.¹⁶ An inquiry, the Bosire Commission, was launched to probe the Goldenberg scandal. Another, the Ndung'u Commission, probed the land-grabbing phenomenon. Yet another was established to investigate the scandal of pending bills. In a grand gesture of good faith, Kenya also became the first country in the world to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption.

Then there were the two pieces of legislation Kibaki had announced on the lawns of State House soon after his inauguration: the Public Officer Ethics Act, which spelt out a code of conduct for public officers and obliged them to declare their wealth; and the Anti-Corruption and Economic Crimes Act, which created the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), a doughty successor to the anti-corruption authority set up but rapidly neutered under Moi.

John helped ensure that the directorship of the new institution, which he eventually hoped to see given prosecutorial powers, went to Justice Aaron Ringera, whom he had befriended during his time at TI-Kenya on a long-haul flight to a World Bank meeting. Convinced that this former solicitor general was the perfect candidate for the job, he went in person to lobby the various political party leaders – not all of whom shared his enthusiasm for Ringera – to support the appointment. ‘I put my reputation on the line, without hesitation or equivocation. I had complete faith in Ringera.’ John was also partly responsible for the KACC director being granted one of Kenya's most generous civil service pay awards. The bigger the salary, the easier it would be for the holder of this key institution to resist temptation, he told the sceptics.

In NARC's flurry of law-making, one thing, however, was made clear. These inquiries would not go to the very top of the chain. Moi's lieutenants might be vulnerable to prosecution, but the former president himself would remain beyond pursuit. The new administration justified this stance on the grounds that ordinary Kenyans, grateful for Moi's tactful withdrawal from the political scene, would be revolted by the sight of a venerable elder being hounded through the courts. It was an argument John endorsed. He should have been more alert to the gesture's underlying message. Even in the new-look, squeaky-clean, corruption-phobic Kenya, the really big players could expect to get off scot free, while the smaller fry would be held to account.

As he put in his endless working days, friends from the old days noticed with concern that John, originally taken on as a consultant, now spoke in terms of ‘we’ when referring to State House. It was ‘our government’, ‘our administration’, and when cynics expressed scepticism, he grew annoyed, for it meant doubting John himself. Having decided that NARC represented Kenya's best chance to tackle a deep-rooted blight, he had deliberately failed to install a safety net. Some saw this as a step further than was wise, or was warranted by his job description. ‘He was using the language of government, when he should have seen himself as someone who had been seconded to government,’ says anti-corruption campaigner Mwalimu Mati. ‘He should have retained an intellectual distance, seen himself as an adviser, a specialist.’

Others viewed it as typical of a man who had to believe passionately in his allotted task to function at all. ‘He went into it with a lot more idealism than I thought warranted. But John is a conviction person, it's a personality type,’ says David Ndii. ‘With him, it's all about the heart. When John trusted someone, he did it completely. And when he was disappointed, he flipped completely. He has this pendulum thing.’ Beguiled by the sheer physical solidity of the man, his elders missed this emotional volatility. It made John a far more unpredictable player than those who had appointed him realised. ‘He probably didn't have the right character for the job,’ says Ndii. ‘Government is all about perseverance. John was disposed to the melodramatic.’ The balked romantic can prove surprisingly vindictive, turning avenging angel where others might simply withdraw into a sulk.

As a journalist, John had railed against two weaknesses he saw as intrinsic to his continent's predicament: the extraordinary deference African societies traditionally show their elders, and their meek passivity when confronted by rulers ready to use violence to remain at the helm. Moi, famously, had instructed his ministers to ‘sing like parrots’. ‘You ought to sing the song I sing,’ the president had told his cabinet. ‘If I put a full stop, you should also put a full stop. That way the country will move forward.’ The crudeness of the order, the exhortation to abandon all critical thought, argued John, exposed a humiliating respect for power for its own sake. Yet now that he was within the citadel, both insights momentarily eluded him. ‘There was a reverential tone in John's voice when he talked about Kibaki,’ remembers Rasna Warah, a columnist for the Nation and an old acquaintance. ‘It would be “the president thinks this”, “the president wants that”, never just “Kibaki”. It was a tone of total awe, as though the man had become a living saint.’

If he had fallen prey to Strong Man syndrome, John was not the only smitten one. Bubbling with hope, the entire country needed, for a moment in history, to forget what it knew about Kibaki and his chums. Nations must indulge in periods of selective amnesia if they are ever to progress. History suggests that sclerotic systems are not transformed by untainted outsiders, but by those within, and usually by those who have been within the system so long they are associated with its worst abuses, rising thereby to the positions of power that make it possible to bring about change. Mikhail Gorbachev was such a figure in the Soviet Union – a seemingly loyal party stalwart who turned radical once he had the means to see his novel vision through.

On the surface, there was little reason to view Kibaki, who had played the Kenyan system to the hilt as both vice president and finance minister, as a likely champion of reform. The first African to graduate from the London School of Economics, a former lecturer at what became Uganda's respected Makerere University, one of the drafters of independent Kenya's constitution, Kibaki was routinely described as ‘brilliant’. But his glory days lay firmly behind him. Having swallowed one political humiliation after another under Moi, his preference for the unconfrontational role of Mr Nice Guy had won him the scornful sobriquet of ‘General Coward’ from political rivals, who quipped that Kibaki had never seen a fence he couldn't sit on. Well-heeled, well-oiled, Kibaki's image as a prosperous has-been was so entrenched by the mid-1990s that it never occurred to Western journalists like myself to request an interview. Why bother? The nominal head of the opposition was reported to be a sozzled regular at the Muthaiga Golf Club, interested in little more than the size of his handicap. While he regularly drove to parliament, he rarely performed inside the chamber, preferring, it was said, a long snooze at his desk. Yet suddenly this deeply disappointing politician was recast in the role of national saviour by a coterie that, believing it held the moral high ground, thought nothing was now impossible. ‘Go home, tend to your goats and watch us govern this country,’ justice minister Kiraitu Murungi told Moi, courting hubris with every patronising word.

‘They got lost in their own rhetoric,’ says Ndii, with a shrug. ‘Because they had the instruments of state, they thought they could change the world. It wasn't just John, all of them thought they were going to fix everything. Me, I was not a believer.’ Mwalimu Mati also shakes his head over what looks, in retrospect, like the most bizarre of collective delusions. ‘It was a type of mass hallucination. People went a bit crazy. No one stopped to consider how Kibaki had made his own fortune. We should be suspicious of finance ministers, especially from the past.’

It may have been a case of the ultimate idealist meeting the ultimate pragmatist, but John did not recognise the gulf in perspectives. Bonding with Kibaki came disconcertingly easily. A politician with none of Moi's instinctive understanding for the ordinary wananchi, Kibaki was an unrepentant intellectual snob. Whereas Moi, the former headmaster, was regarded as a leader who ‘knew how to talk to Kenyans with mud between their toes’, Kibaki was more likely to hail them as ‘pumbavu’ – fools. He recognised and respected the rigorous quality of thought in the young man, who had strayed into State House at more or less the same age Kibaki himself had ventured into politics. There was also a certain inbuilt familiarity to the relationship. John's accountant father had campaigned on behalf of Kibaki's Democratic Party, and while the Kibaki and Githongo families were not exactly intimate, their children had gone to the same schools, they shared the same faith, they belonged to the same patrician milieu.

In any case, affability came naturally to Kibaki, who possessed none of Moi's gruff abrasiveness. While other men commanded loyalty through the commanding magnetism of their personalities, Kibaki's style was one of diffuse, woolly bonhomie. He had always shrunk from making enemies, the head-on collision. ‘He's a very unstuffy guy, very laid back and easy to shoot the breeze with,’ John remembers. The two regularly breakfasted together, and there were also many dinners, just the two of them tête-à-tête. Kibaki felt relaxed enough in John's company to sit with him in the presidential bedroom, discussing politics, the price of oil, world affairs – never anything personal. In John's slightly star-struck eyes – who, after all, could spend quite so much time near the nation's most important man without feeling a little giddy? – the president came to assume the role of alternative father figure, favourite uncle. If John used the respectful ‘Mzee’ (Elder) when addressing the president, Kibaki addressed his anti-corruption chief as ‘Kijana’ – ‘young man’, a term that almost always comes tinged with paternal affection. ‘I used to think that relationship was very special. I had a huge amount of affection for Kibaki. Then I realised Kibaki was like that with everyone.’ Looking back, John would come to realise that he had allowed himself – as the overly cerebral often do – to be beguiled as much by a symbol as an individual. ‘At that time, everyone was dancing. Everyone was right to dance.’ Encapsulating the hope of a jubilant post-Moi nation, what Kibaki represented was more important than who he actually was.

John had the goodwill of the head of state, the envy of many veteran political players, his own staff and budget. It seemed, on the face of it, a great set-up from which to take on the forces of darkness. But within weeks of Kibaki's inauguration, the evil genie Moi deposited in State House snickered and lashed out, delivering a blow so devastating, so sudden, that the presidency, it could be argued, never recovered. Kibaki's presidency was delivered premature, shrivelling before it had a decent chance to take its first real breaths. A crippled and maimed thing, it would be too worried about its own survival to care overmuch about anything else.

The first Kenyans heard of it was an announcement, in late January 2003, that the president had been admitted to Nairobi Hospital to have a blood clot – after-effect of his car accident – removed from his leg. Kibaki would continue to carry out his official functions from hospital, his personal doctor Dan Gikonyo assured the public, as long as he did not get overstressed. He suffered from high blood pressure and had been advised, amongst other things, not to wave his arms around. The statement failed to reassure. ‘I don't want to cause alarm but I am worried about our president's health,’ a perceptive Kenyan blogger wrote in February, noting that Kibaki had not addressed the nation for a month, remaining silent even when a minister was killed in an air crash. ‘I have this nagging feeling that State House is not telling all.’ The blogger quoted eyewitness accounts of an incoherent president checking out of hospital and embarking on a strange two-hour meet-the-people drive around Nairobi. ‘Something is wrong, something is terribly wrong,’ he fretted.

Kibaki had, in fact, been felled by a stroke. Any debate about how many terms he hoped to serve was suddenly rendered irrelevant – would he even see one through to the end? When John Githongo went to visit the Old Man in hospital, he was shocked. Whatever criticisms had been voiced of Kibaki in the past, everyone had agreed on his extraordinary intellectual acuity. Now John found him watching television cartoons. He never mentioned his new concern to friends, but the worrying vision of Kenya's top statesman happily transfixed by children's programming lingered in his mind: ‘You never completely recover from a stroke like that.’ Once Kibaki checked out of hospital, John started briefing him both orally and in writing, so concerned had he become over his boss's ability to retain information.

Journalists who covered NARC's 2002 election campaign say there have been two Kibakis: the pre-stroke Kibaki, engaged, focused, acute; and the post-stroke Kibaki, vague, distracted, struggling to maintain a coherent chain of thought. From a man in command he had become a man going through the motions, as if in a dream. The British high commissioner, Edward Clay, immediately noticed a change. Just as Britain, traditionally a major donor, was hoping to reengage with Kenya, it became impossible to win an audience with the president. Development minister Clare Short left the country without seeing the head of state. And Clay noticed that Kibaki struggled during his regular meetings with the diplomatic corps. ‘He had a genuine problem carrying on a train of thought from one meeting to another, particularly if there wasn't a witness. Some days were better than others. I didn't think he was himself again until early 2004.’

It was noticeable that when Kibaki was delivering a speech he no longer extemporised or made eye contact with his public, keeping his eyes glued to the autocue. He knew that if he lifted his gaze he might never find his place again. There were reports of him sleeping through cabinet meetings, of aides having to repeatedly brief him on the same subject. At an investors' meeting I attended in London two and a half years after his collapse, by which time many were remarking on the extent of his recovery, Kibaki still gave the impression – characteristic of stroke victims – of being a little tipsy. His delivery was slightly slurred, his enunciation ponderous, and when answering questions he meandered and contradicted himself. The entire audience seemed to be willing him on, praying he would make it through to the end without some monstrous faux pas. Like the latter-day Ronald Reagan in the grips of early Alzheimer's, he came across as an urbane, delightfully charming old duffer, but not a man anyone would want running a country.

Confronted by a calamity no one had anticipated so early on, Kibaki's closest aides reeled and then rallied. If the Old Man was temporarily incapacitated, then they would have to run the country until he regained his faculties, just as the Kremlin's stalwarts had done whenever their geriatric Soviet leaders turned senile. The kernel of this group consisted of Chris Murungaru, the burly former pharmacist appointed minister for internal security; David Mwiraria, finance minister and Kibaki's longtime confidant; Kiraitu Murungi, justice minister; State House comptroller Matere Keriri; and personal assistant Alfred Getonga. The one factor all these players had in common was their ethnicity – they were all either Kikuyu, like Kibaki, or members of the closely related Embu and Meru tribes, who the Kikuyu regard as cousins. In naming his cabinet, Kibaki had presented himself as a leader of national unity, careful to distribute all but the key ministries across the ethnic spectrum. But in his hour of need, like any sick man, he reached for what was familiar and safe, and that meant sticking with the tribe. The popular press, noticing the trend, soon coined a phrase for this circle, the real power behind the throne. ‘The Mount Kenya Mafia’, it called them, a reference to the mountain that dominates Central Province. The phrase was to prove more apposite than anyone could have guessed at the time.

The group's influence was swiftly felt in a vital area. A new constitution had been one of the key promises NARC had made to an electorate exasperated at the way in which Kenya's colonial-era document had been repeatedly amended to place ever greater power in the president's hands. Kibaki had also, it emerged, secretly signed a memorandum of understanding with his NARC partners promising, amongst other things, that fiery Luo leader Raila Odinga would be given the post of executive prime minister under a future dispensation. Incapacitated by his car accident, Kibaki had depended on Raila to do his heavy lifting during the election campaign, and the younger man had done so indefatigably. The prime minister's post was to have been his reward. It was a promise that implied a radical trimming of powers in favour of a tribe that Kibaki's Kikuyu community had, since the days of Jomo Kenyatta and Raila's late father Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, regarded as its greatest rival. After decades of marginalisation, during which they had seen their leaders assassinated, jailed and exiled, the thwarted Luos were itching to come in from the cold.

But now, with Kibaki looking like the weak old man he was, all promises were off. The Mount Kenya Mafia felt too vulnerable for magnanimity. The very same men who had, as members of the opposition, tirelessly denounced a document that skewed the playing field in Moi's favour, suddenly found there was much to be said for this tilted arrangement. A national conference convened to hammer out the modern arrangement Kenya needed ground to a halt, as Kibaki's key ministers proposed changes that would, if anything, concentrate even more power in their man's hands. The Kibaki delegation would eventually storm out of the talks at the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village, and unveil a draft constitution which bore little relation to what had originally been proposed. The setting aside of ethnic rivalries, hailed as marking the Kenyan political class's coming of age, had outlived the elections only by a paltry couple of months. No sooner had the Mount Kenya Mafia climbed the ladder than they were kicking frantically away at it to ensure no one came up behind.

In State House, the process of ethnic polarisation was palpable. Since starting his new job, John had made a conscious effort during working hours to use Kiswahili – the national language – not Gikuyu, as would feel natural with tribal kinsmen. He knew how easily non-Kikuyu colleagues could be made to feel boxed out. The Mount Kenya Mafia showed no such restraint, finding his self-discipline quaintly amusing. ‘We know you have a problem with this, John,’ they would laugh, lapsing into a throaty barrage of Gikuyu. John would shake his head at the message conveyed. ‘I used to warn them: “This talk will fix us.”’ He noticed how mono-ethnic State House had become. ‘When meetings took place, they would all be people from the same area. All the key jobs were held by home boys.’ The old tribal rivalry had returned – or rather, John realised, it had never actually gone away. ‘With the collapse of Bomas I realised we had never been serious about power sharing. Kiraitu Murungi, the very man who had written about the problem of ethnicity, was the first to use the term “these Jaluos” in my presence.’

At a formal dinner in London several years later, I found myself discussing with John and a British peer of the realm, in light-hearted vein, what were the little signs that betrayed the fact that once-reformist African governments had lost their way. ‘My measure is the time a person who's agreed to an appointment keeps you waiting,’ said the Lord. ‘If it's half an hour or under, things are still on track; more than half an hour and the place is in trouble.’

I quoted a journalist friend who maintained that the give-away was the moment a president added an extra segment to his name – ‘Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’, ‘Daniel Torotich arap Moi’ – but added that I regarded the size of the presidential motorcade as the tell-tale indication that the rot had set in.

John had been silent till then. Now he suddenly spoke up. ‘How about the time it takes for the man in charge to get a gold Rolex?’

‘But surely Kibaki already had a gold Rolex?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Yes, but this was a brand-new one. Very slim, with a black face and diamonds round the edge. It was so new it hadn't yet been measured to size, and it dangled off his wrist. That's why I noticed it, because it didn't fit.’

‘So, then, how long did it take?’

‘Just three months,’ John said, with a grim shake of the head. ‘Just three months.’