Last month, I wrote about Michela Wrong’s It’s Our Turn To Eat, a no-holds-barred indictment of corruption in Kenya. I have now read the book, and encourage you all to do the same.

Wrong's writing is journalistic, not academic. Its relative lack of formal citations is frustrating at times, but Wrong extracts thoughtful and coherent criticism from the riveting story she tells. In a sense, the story writes itself – John Githongo, the voluntarily exiled former corruption official in Kenya, handed Wrong a story most journalists would surely salivate over.

The book follows the progression of Githongo from an optimistic anti-corruption investigator, personally embraced by the new president Mwai Kibaki in 2002, to an outcast who came to know too much. As Permanent Secretary for Governance and Ethics, Githongo briefed the president daily on his corruption investigations – after all, Kibaki was elected on an anti-corruption platform. As the realities of corruption within Kibaki’s own administration came to light for Githongo, he built up a covert network of informants and even recorded private conversations with ministers. Briefing the president on his work, Githongo found himself in an unusual situation: “Ultimately, it became clear. I was investigating the president,” he said. 

I found this book interesting in part because of the details of corruption it reveals. We all know corruption exists, but how many of us know how it works? In a multilayered government bureaucracy, how exactly does $750 million in procurement funds disappear? Wrong, using Githongo’s courageous cum foolhardy research, shows us how.

More importantly, Wrong digests this information responsibly. In the end, the prime targets of her criticism are not the Kenyan officials guilty of corruption, but the Western aid establishment that, in her view, fosters corruption.

“Critics of international aid often claim it all ends up in Swiss bank accounts, a charge development officials easily swat away, pointing at the accountants and consultants who police spending. The argument should be a different one: not that the aid is itself stolen, but that donors make it possible, via that aid, for governments to dip their hands elsewhere in the budget while still delivering basic services thereby escaping the electorate’s wrath” (p. 210).

Leading up to the 2007 elections, Kibaki was widely praised for having delivered on his promise of free primary education – I can attest from my time in Nairobi that even opponents of Kibaki conceded this one success. Yet Wrong suggests that free primary education was only possible because of DfID funding, while the government at large squandered hundreds of millions elsewhere: “NARC [Kibaki’s party] would get the credit come elections and might win another term on the back of DfID’s input.”

Wrong describes the stubbornness of international aid organizations to continue giving at all costs. The rationale is always to reach out to the poorest of the poor; with time, accountability will grow. Wrong disagrees:

“Kenya’s foreign partners failed to grasp that a system of rule based on the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ principle was explicitly designed to prevent the trickle-down upon which they counted for progress. The better Kenya’s economy fared, the more unstable the country actually became, because public awareness of inequality… deepened a notch” (p. 325).

Although Wrong surely fits the category of disgruntled development cynic, her writing still manages to uplift. Githongo may not have overturned the establishment in one go, but many more are continuing in his wake. Despite the self-censorship of booksellers, the book is now available for online purchase. Wrong’s conclusion is a direct defense against the skeptics, of whom there are no doubt many:

“Their skepticism is shared by a school of Western analysts who see sleaze in Africa, intertwined as it is with cultural respect for the extended family and ethnic loyalty, as part of the continent’s very haemoglobin… They are wrong to be so dismissive, or so despairing. Cultural values are not immutable; they shift all the time, as the West’s own history… amply demonstrates. The dramatic changes Africa has experienced in the last hundred years, hurling its citizens from herding livestock on the shamba to lunchtime at the cyber café, shows the continent is no bizarre exception, impervious to the trends and processes that affect the rest of humanity” (p. 323).

I too share Wrong’s optimism – or, more accurately, Wrong’s rejection of ill-founded pessimism. African corruption will not disappear overnight. Furthermore, it is not the role of Westerners to impose such change. However, as Wrong makes abundantly clear, African corruption is not simply an African problem – it is a machine oiled as much by Western governments and donors as by African elite. It is our problem.

Wrong does not propose that we cut aid altogether (as Dambisa Moyo does), but she “[hopes] to alert Western readers to the damage well-meaning thoughtlessness routinely causes.” Aid should not exist only to provide the services that governments should be but are not providing. Aid should pursue its own redundancy. Aid should push governments to be accountable on their own merits, to boast functioning security and service sectors. I realize this opens a whole new can worms, but what can I say, Wrong got me thinking.