KENYAGATE: THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE CORPORATION THAT WASN’T

Okay: first a small confession. Part of the reason that I haven’t been able to write anything for a while on the blog is that I had a teensy weensy bit of advance knowledge of the Nation’s scoop and related revelations, but I had given my word to say nothing, although I assure you that honouring that promise of restraint almost caused me to pee on myself. Since it would have been frankly ridiculous for me to write about anything else whilst this was about to break, I was just, well, silent.

However, as intriguing, if unsurprising, as I find the various revelations, really, the question comes down to the “so what” factor. The government has been caught with its hand in the till (I’m sorry, but what I found funniest in the whole thing was that they tried to RETURN some of their spoils: oh yeah, that makes everything fine, thanks!) to our non-astonishment. Anglo-Leasing, the company that wasn’t, has, uh, liberated us of several billions more of our excess cash—we really didn’t need all that money anyway; it would have been wasted on stupidities like health care or infrastructural improvement, which as everyone knows, is quite absurd. So really, it was a sort of public service Anglo Leasing was performing, by removing billions of our tax shillings from the reach of simple-minded people who might have been brainwashed into thinking that the public’s money should be used for the public’s benefit. No, it’s true: there are some amongst us right now who are insane enough to still believe this. That, and that the earth is flat. Honestly! Or rather, not. But still, so what? Are the oops-is-that-me-on-candid-camera-with-my-pants-down Ministers in question indeed, going to resign, be sacked, be suspended and will the president have to fire himself?And what are we going to do or not about what they do or do not.?

I’ve actually had the privilege of reading the much-touted 31 page document, because fortune is a woman, and she smiles at me quite often. What I am wondering quite urgently is this: will His Excellency the Hon. President of the Republic of Kenya look up long enough from his P.G. Wodehouse to consider the seriousness of what has just fallen on his government’s head, and also the seriousness of the damage to his silent-but-steady paternal/patriarch image? Clearly, his posse was not about to come up with the ingenious schemes that they did (as another digression; can you imagine if all this ingenuity was just ONCE to be used to the people’s benefit? We’d have been a superpower twenty years ago) without his knowledge and consent, if not his explicit instructions. Much as I too, am riveted by the frolics of Jeeves and Wooster, it must be said, in the idiom appropriate to this pair, that one can see at a g. that the merry cabinet family has reason to be rather pensive just now.

Oh, and the Nation Rocks!!!!!!!
Mostly, I love the sentences that read something to the effect of “the Nation can now reveal…..” Has an accusation of attempted coercion and threat and government obstruction ever been more succinctly or elegantly made? Gotta love those writers and editors!

But my absolute FAVOU-RITEST thing is the hoistingness on own petards going about. Really, it is obvious to the meanest intelligence, as the saying goes, that it is somewhat..let us say.. “ill-considered” to appoint an honest anti-corruption czar and then go about being corrupt oneself. That’s sort of the equivalent of that scene in “Fight Club” where Edward Norton beats himself up and down the stairs in a quite marvelously self-contemplative and deliciously self-involved way. It is like gazing at your navel and actually falling into it as a result--down, down the rabbit hole. It isn’t even a cyclical concept—it looms in my mind like a DNA double helix or something. So, can we say: IT’S THE CORRUPTION, STUPID!!!!

The world is agog and agape, as am I, to see how our chums in high places are going to attempt to Vaseline themselves out of this one. I’ve thought of one defence already: they can all claim to have been abducted by aliens, who then inhabited their bodies and carried out these nefarious acts in their—technical—absence. Outside of that, I don’t really see what else they can possibly come up with, but I am sure they will entertaingly try. I’m just getting my popcorn and getting comfortable. Who needs comedians when we have Kenyan politicians?

One final, but morally vital point. Will those who were so quick to condemn and villify John Githongo without really knowing much about his business be as Olympic-rapid now to a) apologise and b) applaud? Do these, the arm-chair critics, realise that this man has AGAIN put his life on the line for us? Can you imagine any other person's existence that the Kenyan Government would so dearly like to see terminated with extreme prejudice? John Githongo has his friends and his supporters, no doubt: what he has done is not the work of one person. But, he is the face of that effort, it is his body and his life in the most immediate peril, it is HE, personally who will have to receive the villification and counter measures that extremely powerful and ruthless people, in the persons of our discredited and disgusting leaders and their henchpeople, are even now dreaming up for him.
John Githongo, I salute you, for the man you are, the hope you give and for the gift of your courage.