What are Business Folk Reading? Greg Durst tells us what he’s reading right now.

by Yolandi on 10/11/09 at 1:00 pm
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I’ve been wondering what books interest South Africa’s business folk, so I asked Greg Durst what book he’s busy reading right now. Greg is a member of the investment team at Horizon Equity since late 2008. Before that, Greg spent three years as Managing Director of Endeavor South Africa, which we mentioned last week in relation to the Global Entrepreneurship Week, sponsored by FNB. So, Greg replied It’s Our Turn To Eat – A Kenyan Whistleblower’s Story by Michela Wrong. He describes the book as “the sad truth about corruption in a beautiful country run by a continuing series of kleptocrats”.

Writer Michela Wrong is a well-known international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. Based on her experiences in Africa, ‘In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz’, her first book, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction. Greg describes In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz as a story “about the collapse, rise, collapse and rise and collapse of Congo”. Here is a quick overview of the book from Exclusive Books:

It’s Our Turn To Eat – A Kenyan Whistleblower’s Story

“When Michela Wrong’s Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small mountain of luggage, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country regarded until then as one of Africa’s few budding success stories. Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the election defeat of long-serving President Daniel arap Moi, John had been appointed Kenya’s new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this giant of a man with a booming laugh, respected as a longstanding anti-corruption crusader, the new government was signalling to both its own public and the world at large that it was set on ending the practices that had made Kenya an international by-word for sleaze. Now John was on the run, having realised that the new administration, far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to pilfer public funds. John’s tale, which has all the elements of a political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a lonely decision with huge ramifications. But his story transcends the personal, touching as it does on the cultural, historical and social themes that lie at the heart of the continent’s continuing crisis. Tracking this story of an African whistleblower who started out as a pillar of the establishment, Michela Wrong seeks answers to the questions that have puzzled outsiders for decades. What is it about African society that makes corruption so hard to eradicate, so sweeping in its scope, so destructive in its impact? Why have so many African presidents found it so easy to reduce all political discussion to the self-serving calculation of which tribe gets to ‘eat’? And at what stage will Africans start placing the wider interests of their nation ahead of the narrow interests of their tribe?”

For Greg, It’s Our Turn To Eat – A Kenyan Whistleblower’s Story is an excellent gripping story.

For a book review check out the following links:

Maureen Isaacson Reviews It’s Our Turn to Eat: The story of a Kenyan whistleblower by Michela Wrong

Sunday Independaent – Kenya swallowed by moral turpitude

Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels. Besides moonlighting as the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative, Yolandi runs Autofemme, a blog about cars, as a business on the side. View more articles by Yolandi.

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