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NAIROBI - It is hard to imagine John Githongo in hiding.
A great bull of a man with a booming voice, he doesn't look the sort to be easily intimidated. Nonetheless the former anti-corruption czar has spent years in exile from Kenya chased by death threats all the way to London for daring to expose the rapacious fraud of his government colleagues.
While he insists that he's no longer in hiding, Africa's most famous whistleblower has tried not to trumpet his return by stages to Kenya and works from an office in a non-descript apartment block in Nairobi.
This gradual, low-key homecoming has been exploded this week as a new book about his life and work has taken Kenyans back to the corruption scandals of the past just in time to remind people that they are at the root of the country's present parlous state.
His animated face was stretched across most of the front page of the Daily Nation this week under a headline taken from the book, It's Our Turn to Eat.
For people seeing the title across the country, it seems an excruciatingly precise diagnosis of what is wrong now - not just in 2005 when Githongo revealed how Kenya's leaders plundered the public purse to enrich themselves using a fraudulent security contract.
It was written by Michela Wrong after Githongo fled to her doorstep in London, carrying the evidence of grand corruption and in fear of his life. Her book has touched such a raw nerve that advanced copies are being sold under the counter in Nairobi. Selling it openly is considered too high a risk, and violence is too fresh in most memories.
A year on from the bloodshed set off by a crudely stolen election, Kenya's grand power-sharing coalition has achieved one thing, Githongo asserts, and that is to stay in power.
"Its most important achievement, in fact its only achievement, is to survive," he says.
The outlook in East Africa's biggest economy is grim. Famine has taken such a hold that it has been declared a national emergency, fuel shortages are becoming a plague, tourism is in decline, and each one of these crises has arrived with the depressing echo of another corruption scandal.
Perhaps the greatest outrage has been the news that food shortages from a chronic drought have been made worse by the theft of emergency maize reserves, sold by corrupt officials for a profit in southern Sudan.
"This coalition is held together by corruption," says Githongo. "What we are seeing now is a feeding frenzy."
It's Our Turn to Eat is the author's indictment of a political system based on the idea that each tribe will get its turn at the trough. The analysis, backed by Githongo, explains how an ethnic clique hoarded wealth, exacerbating tribal tensions in Kenya while international donors stood idly by, often complicit in the worst of it, only to declare themselves shocked when violence exploded last year.
This "poisonous politics" created by one group that "dominates access to wealth" is then compounded when "that group flaunts it, indulging in conspicuous consumption while people are starving".
Githongo watched this happen from a ringside government seat as his own tribe, the Kikuyu, talked about "trickle-down economics" while concentrating power, privilege and the proceeds of record growth as narrowly as they could.
The 43-year-old former investigator says the story began much earlier, though. It didn't start with the Kikuyu clique of the current President Mwai Kibaki, the bitter divisions and repression of Daniel arap Moi before him, or even the failures of the independence leader Jomo Kenyatta.
They simply inherited a state that was set up to enrich a small minority - originally the white settlers - regardless of the needs of the rest. "At independence the colour of the minority changed, but the structure of the state remained the same."
At Kenya's end-of-year elections in 2007 few apart from its most cynical politicians were prepared for the fallout that would follow what appeared at first to be a clear Opposition victory.
"Some ethnic groups had not been at the table for generations, and at the same time a demographic tsunami was coming" in the shape of a swollen younger generation, pumped "with expectations from television and new media".
Into this incendiary mix came campaigning politicians who, to borrow the analysis of Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, realised that the easiest way to establish superiority in voters' eyes was to trumpet ethnic identity.
More than 1000 Kenyans paid for that cynicism with their lives when widespread anger at vote-rigging exploded into violence that took Kenya to "the brink of civil war", according to Githongo.
He says the current Administration is no more than a "ceasefire" and in practical terms is paralysed.
The first major test of Kibaki and the Prime Minister Raila Odinga's forced marriage came this month as Parliament was meant to meet a deadline to set up a special tribunal to try those suspected of orchestrating the post-election violence.
The amendment was defeated, as the suspects included MPs who have been able to use income from corruption to buy the support of colleagues. Under the terms of the deal brokered by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, evidence will now be forwarded to the International Criminal Court, and justice has been deferred at the cost of immense uncertainty. Amid the wreckage and palpable tension, the former anti-corruption czar finds some positives.
"There has been a change in the last six months. In the past, ordinary Kenyans were unable to connect their impoverishment to these scandals because the figures involved were mind-boggling. To connect their two dollars a day to the millions or billions was impossible. Now people are linking corruption to their own lack of food. They are saying 'these politicians are stealing directly from us'."
He also angrily rejects the whispered Western analysis that democracy isn't for Africans. "Kenyans have not lost faith in democracy - the high turnouts demonstrate that," he points out. "However, they respond poorly to having an election rigged."
Splitting his time between consulting work in Kenya and his role as an associate at St Antony's College, Oxford, he compares the Government to a juggler with an increasing number of balls. "A crisis is coming. One of the balls is going to drop."
The hope remains that when the strained coalition comes apart it will be harder for its rabble-rousers to dragoon the slum dwellers and the rural poor - or "those who seek troops for their immediate political cause", as Githongo calls them.
But his outlook is sobering: "There is something dangerously wrong. We could lose it completely, and we saw a little of how that could look last year."
Even before the front-page reminder, he is a recognisable face on the crowded streets of Nairobi. Githongo says that ordinary people respond well when they see him.
"It splits about 80 per cent to 20." He cracks a modest smile when made to admit that those who don't approve of the whistleblower rarely have the courage to say so.
"The threats have dried up. That doesn't mean that security is 100 per cent, but the ground has shifted."
Most of his friends tease him that he's fled the English weather, a charge he denies with a laugh.
"I'm back because I'm Kenyan, this is my home."
JOHN GITHONGO
* John Githongo, 43, was born in Britain and graduated from the University of Wales, where he studied politics and philosophy. He is now a senior associate member of St Anthony's College, Oxford.
* He helped to uncover corruption at the NGO Series for Alternative Research in East Africa in 1998.
* He became an effective chronicler of corruption with the East African newspaper before setting up a chapter of Transparency International in Kenya.
* In 2002, when Mwai Kibaki took over as President of Kenya, he needed a "Mr Clean" to convince observers that he was serious about combating graft. Githongo was appointed permanent secretary for ethics and government.
* During Githongo's investigations, a businessman linked to the Government offered to write off debts said to belong to his father.
* In 2005, he fled Kenya with a suitcase full of evidence that alleged corruption at the highest level.
- INDEPENDENT
