In Kenya, Corruption Expose Is Too Hot to Sell
'It's Our Turn to Eat' Not Officially Sold, But it's Read Aloud in Churches.
Citizens Waking up to Graft's Effects
Corruption, of course, exists in every country. Defense-contract scandals haunt politicians from the United States to South Africa; British tabloids publish the taxpayer-funded expenses of parliamentarians. But in the cash-strapped developing countries of Africa – where graft costs the continent an estimated $150 billion annually – corruption can kill. Treating government revenues as a personal piggy bank is stealing money from millions of the world's poorest citizens, many of whom have been displaced by war, famine, or – as in Kenya's case – politically motivated violence. Unassisted, many of these Africans go hungry and even die.
"Kenya is not a natural-resource-rich country, so there is a limit to how much taxpayer money one can steal," says Mwalimu Mati, an anticorruption crusader with Mars Group Kenya, a think tank that documents corruption. "In the past, if a minister took 10 million Kenyan shillings [$128,000], a person would think: 'What does that have to do with me?' It was normal. But in the current economic environment, and particularly after the postelection violence, people are thinking, 'Goodness, corruption is rampant. This is affecting me personally.' "
The inspiration for Wrong's book is anticorruption crusader John Githongo. A member of Kenya's intellectual and ethnic elites, Mr. Githongo felt an almost religious revulsion to corrupt government officials' depleting Kenya's meager resources.
During the dictatorship of former President Daniel arap Moi, he worked for Transparency International Kenya to publicize the way politicians were misusing public funds. Like many idealists then, Githongo thought Kenya's problem was that it was a one-party state, and that with competition the system would cleanse itself. Rivals would expose one another's misdeeds, courts would prosecute the guilty, and a free media would ensure that no politician could misbehave with impunity. When Mr. Moi's government was thrown out in the 2002 elections, Githongo accepted new president Mwai Kibaki's offer to be his personal adviser on corruption in government.
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