Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  Now with two estranged sons, my father was forced to rethink his priorities. On one level he had achieved a great deal. He had risen to become national President of the NAS and President of York’s Guild of Building. On his retirement these achievements were properly honoured in the local press. He sang in the Minster choir with his fine baritone voice, and had achieved some recognition among the local Conservatives. But he faced a lonely old age, locked into a relationship of loveless mutual dependence with my mother. She had survived a series of operations for bowel cancer, but whatever spark had once fired her had long since gone.

  They came to see us in Glasgow on their way to a holiday in Scotland and all the earlier rancour had disappeared. They invited our children to stay with them and my father became devoted to them. Slowly, a friendship developed between my father and Olympia. It gradually dawned on him that, colour apart, he had far more in common with his Asian daughter-in-law than with his sons or his wife. They shared the same passion for beautiful music, the same withering contempt for the decline in discipline and academic standards in education, the same uncompromising commitment to hard work, thrift and demanding professional standards. He came to see Olympia as his closest friend and shared confidences about his early life and private anxieties that he had never shared with anyone else, including my mother. There was a certain irony in a man, one of whose central beliefs was the need for women to know their subordinate, domestic place in society, finding consolation in his advanced years in two strong women: Olympia and Mrs Thatcher.

  I doubt whether Olympia would ever have blinked first in the confrontation with our two fathers. But when they did, it gave her great satisfaction to return to a central place in the network of interlocking families. Family life mattered to her more than anything else: primarily her own children and husband, but also more widely. She frequently quarrelled with one or other of her brothers and sisters, as she did with me, but it was quarrelling underpinned by caring and love. More than anyone I have ever met, she strove to achieve integrity and understanding, not just in the public domain, but in private relationships too.

  Chapter 5

  Facing Mount Kenya

  Two years before marrying Olympia and the family dramas that ensued, I had stepped on to an aeroplane for the first time, little appreciating what lay in store for me in Kenya. I remember Nairobi, four years after independence, as a tropical Woking or Basingstoke: neat, new, well manicured, unpretentious, suburban and provincial, differing from its English equivalents mainly in the jacaranda and bougainvillea blossoms, the red laterite soil, and the brown and black faces of passers-by. When I returned four decades later to see Olympia’s eldest brother and his family, the Rebelos’ remaining link with Kenya, Nairobi was a mega-city with twice the population of Paris.

  The country now had a population of forty million, four times bigger than when I left, and most of the increment had gone to the cities, especially the capital. The segregated tidiness inherited from colonialism had become a messy melting-pot. Kenya had also become a laboratory for some of the pathologies of development: the slums bigger and more squalid, the inequalities more extreme, the corruption grosser than elsewhere. But the country has survived and grown in a way that my more pessimistic contemporaries never believed possible. The different races, tribes and religions have more or less coexisted. The army has stayed in the barracks. A robust, if flawed, universal democracy has survived – though the events following the stolen Kibaki election of January 2008, including some brutal ethnic cleansing in parts of the country, cast some doubt on that optimistic assessment. For all its anarchic and corrupt excesses, Kenya’s model of capitalist development, underpinned by the entrepreneurialism of small-scale peasant farming, has served the country better than a lot of African alternatives and the enclave economy, settler-based, that preceded it.

  I arrived in 1966 with a mixture of high expectations and preconceived prejudices. I had travelled quite widely, but had never set foot in Africa. Olympia was the only Kenyan I had ever met and hers was the only direct account of Kenya’s colonial history that I had heard, featuring the semi-apartheid of society, the theft of land by the white settlers, and the British atrocities at Hola Camp. I had rejected my father’s alternative view of history and his expressions of dismay and outrage when he discovered I was leaving Britain to work for the evil genius who had fomented the Mau Mau. I had read my way voraciously through a pile of African histories and political tracts and had been most impressed, and perplexed, by Kenyatta’s tribal anthropology, Facing Mount Kenya, which he had written in the early 1930s as a postgraduate at the LSE. I was also fiercely determined to be bored by animals, as a reaction to the popular understanding of Kenya as a game park whose people were a rather dull backcloth to the lions and elephants.

  The job I was recruited to do was, at least initially, somewhat less glamorous than I had supposed: a finance officer in the Treasury was there to fill a gap in the post-colonial civil service until African graduates had completed their training. I was one of six British economics graduates recruited to work for sub-Saharan African governments by the Overseas Development Institute and its founder and director William Clark. William had been one of the leading foreign affairs journalists of his generation and made his name by resigning as Foreign Office press officer over Suez. He was larger than life, and somewhat camp, with an unparalleled talent for name-dropping which rarely descended below the level of heads of state or the royal family. The ODI fellows were his chosen people: the brightest and the best, who would populate the upper reaches of development decision-making in years to come. This particular dimension of his vision has been realized. But what William saw as a temporary, self-liquidating scheme to ease the transition from colonialism has proved to be a permanent arrangement to meet growing manpower gaps in numerous failing governments in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

  It was an earlier ODI fellow who took me in hand in Nairobi and helped me to settle in his cottage in the heart of the Karura Forest, the last expanse of virgin jungle near the city. Terry Libby had boundless energy and enthusiasm and radiated positive thinking. He was the son of a general, more socially and politically conservative than me, but his good humour and organizational skills sustained our joint household. The organization took in a Kenyan servant, Mubia, later joined by a friend. Terry felt entirely at ease with servants and managed the relationship in a professional but caring way. I felt, however, deeply uncomfortable with the whole idea, which I associated with upper-class decadence, but lacked the courage or conviction to reject it. I could also see that making Mubia unemployed would be deeply inhumane to him and his family, whom he saw infrequently but who depended on his modest income. Mubia was also highly competent and hard-working and seemed to see nothing undignified about his labour for the two wazungu. My own relationship with the two men oscillated between overfamiliarity and cold detachment, and I felt especially uncomfortable when African friends came to stay. But when Terry left Kenya, the ‘houseboys’ moved with me and then worked for a succession of ODI fellows. I later discovered that, by saving a high proportion of his pay, Mubia had been able to become a modest landowner and successful farmer in his village near Nyeri and to put his growing band of children through school.

  The cottage in the forest also provided a vivid and somewhat alarming immersion into the physical realities of Africa. The nocturnal sounds of wild animals and the distant rhythm of music and dancing in the nearest villages were occasionally augmented by mysterious footfalls: curious villagers, perhaps, or, it was rumoured, a gang of outlaws. When the rains came the forest roads became impassable and on several occasions I had to abandon my VW and walk. Those night walks, alone, through the forest, in torrential rain, still inhabit my bad dreams.

  These exciting extramural activities sustained me through the initial months of life in the Treasury when I was learning how to be useful. I was wedged awkwardly between an earlier generation of colonial civil servants who saw me as an ins
trument for perpetuating British good administrative practice, and the young African inheritors of the system, most of whom, with varying degrees of impatience, regarded white faces as a symbol of the past from which they were seeking to escape. In my two years there, the administrative centre of gravity shifted decisively from white to black.

  The permanent secretary throughout this period was a Kikuyu, John Michuki. He never showed any hint of racial preferment, was impeccably professional, fair, competent and honest, and provided the leadership that was absent from our ministers: the finance minister, Mr Gichuru, who was permanently ill or drunk; and his deputy, Mr Okello-Odongo, who was sidelined by Kenyatta as a communist subversive before disappearing into preventive detention. Michuki resurfaced four decades later as a key minister in the present Kibaki government with a reputation for tribal partiality, thuggishness and corruption, qualities that were wholly absent from his younger persona.

  Under him was my immediate boss, a formidable woman called Joan Tyrrell with a fearsome reputation for rigorous standards, workaholism and not suffering fools gladly. She had learned her trade in the colonial administration of Nigeria and was now in overall charge of the government’s capital development budget and of negotiations with aid donors. Thanks to her as much as anyone, new roads, water supplies, agricultural credit, tourist lodges and small-scale industries multiplied rapidly in post-independence Kenya. After initially regarding me as a particularly hopeless case, useful only for feeding parking meters and carrying files, she discovered, during a long absence, that I could cope, and we developed some rapport. Unfortunately, her habit of bawling out dimmer colleagues, with a splendid indifference to colour or rank, caught up with her and she was encouraged to retire early. My next boss was another bright young Kikuyu civil servant, Joe Kibe, whose kindly, jocular manner disguised a tough and ruthless operator who, like Michuki, returned in later life to a position of power in the Kibaki administration. Although we got on well, he made it clear that the era of white expatriate civil servants in the Treasury was over and I was, before I left, required to train an African replacement. My designated successor was to be an unfortunate choice: a seemingly very stupid but cunning young man called Arap Ngeny, who was from a tribe of nomadic pastoralists, the Nandi, and was promoted in the interests of ethnic balance. His one claim to fame was kinship with the then vice president, and future president, Daniel arap Moi, who eventually made him governor of the central bank. There he oversaw large-scale looting of the government’s finances.

  The person who had most influence on me was neither British nor Kenyan but a Swedish economist called Kurt Savosnik, working, courtesy of the Ford Foundation, in the planning ministry. There was predictable tension between the Treasury, which controlled the sinews of financial power but whose officers had a narrow, bean-counting approach to economics, and the planning ministry, which occupied the political and intellectual high ground but had no direct control of how money was actually spent. Interdepartmental conflict was reinforced by a key tribal and personal fault-line in the government. The finance minister, Gichuru, though hopeless and an alcoholic, was a long-standing political ally and fellow tribesman of the president. The planning minister, Tom Mboya, was a Luo, the most glamorous figure in the Cabinet and a source of much envy on account of his brains, good looks and communication skills. How much planning he actually did is debatable, and my friends on his staff reported a large and steady procession of beautiful women of all colours and creeds to his office, who would emerge, dishevelled, some time later.

  Nonetheless, he added status to the art of economic planning, which was then considered essential to the achievement of economic growth. Indeed, much time and consultancy money was spent compiling vast documents based on the supposed economic achievements of Nehru’s India, Harold Wilson’s Britain, and de Gaulle’s France (by then, the USSR and China were no longer considered suitable role models for Kenya). Earnest American, Indian and Scandinavian professors laboured to produce National Plans which were then studiously ignored by ministers, my Treasury colleagues, visiting aid donors and foreign investors, and, indeed, anyone who mattered. Savosnik had been recruited from Sweden at considerable cost to ‘plan’ industry, but instead of spending his years in Kenya playing charades, had decided to try to introduce discipline and genuine economic rigour into how decisions were actually made, for which he needed an accomplice in the Treasury: me.

  Savosnik had been one of the brightest economists of his generation: one of several Swedes who contributed generously to the construction of trade theory. He was fiercely honest to the point of bluntness, which meant that he lived dangerously in a world where tact and political correctness were strongly recommended for expatriates. But he lacked totally the air of effortless racial superiority that even well-intentioned Westerners would often exude, and African ministers appeared to like him. He was the son of Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust who had escaped to Sweden. Far from feeling a sense of gratitude, however, Savosnik detested the smug moral superiority of Swedes who, he had discovered at school, often harboured ideas about Aryan purity not greatly different from those of the Germans across the Baltic Sea. He endeared himself to his acolytes, like me, for a different reason. He was a widower whose late wife had been crippled and in Kenya, in his forties, had just discovered conjugal bliss with an attractive French lady. Our morning meetings would start with a review of the stock exchange and world commodity prices followed by a graphic and detailed account of his sexual exploits of the previous night.

  The particular project he embarked upon, and for which he enlisted my help, was to open up the opaque process by which the government granted licences, import quotas, hidden subsidies and tax reliefs to large numbers of mainly foreign businessmen who came to Kenya to help the government ‘promote industrialization’. Many of the projects, on closer inspection, turned out to be wealth-subtracting, though the glamorous vision of pulp and paper mills, steel factories, car-assembly units and textile plants was seductive to African decision-makers anxious to wean Kenya away from the imperialist past of, as they saw it, ‘hewing wood and drawing water’. It was also becoming clear that corruption was beginning to percolate into government in a serious way. One of the president’s closest associates, Paul Ngei, had recently been criticized in a public inquiry into a scandal involving the Maize Marketing Board. But the most egregious abuses centred on trade and industry, where the minister, Dr Ciano, was universally dubbed Mr Ten Per Cent. The problem did not stop at Ciano. The businessmen promoting the contaminated deals usually included in their visits courtesy calls on the president, and it was increasingly believed that the fish was rotting from the head down, rather than from the guts in the middle. Savosnik believed, and persuaded me, that it was irresponsible and immoral to look the other way and play games with economic models while foolish and ruinously expensive, and often corrupt, projects were being allowed through unquestioned.

  The problem was how to communicate dissent without appearing directly to challenge not only some very powerful figures in the government but the whole concept of modernity. To an economic liberal like Savosnik it was obvious that systems of licensing and government permits would generate ‘ rent-seeking activities’ (i.e. corruption), but in an intellectual climate in which it was still necessary to pay lip service to ‘planning’ and ‘socialism’, the defence of markets and competition was not likely to find a ready audience. We did, however, have allies. My permanent secretary, John Michuki, was, at least at that stage of his career, a puritanical stickler for due process. There were plenty of other African officials who subsisted on low salaries, had not yet been faced with overwhelming temptation, and could be relied upon to reinforce any serious questioning. Indeed, there were some fine, idealistic young civil servants who could see the danger signs only a few years after independence. Prominent among them was Robert Ouko, permanent secretary at the ministry of works, whose department presented considerable opportunity for graft, and who was killed in
mysterious circumstances some years later for opposing the excesses of President Moi.

  Where malpractice could be identified, Savosnik was smart enough to point the finger at the white or brown bribers rather than the black bribee. Adam Smith’s unsentimental warning from two centuries earlier that all businessmen were potentially engaged in a conspiracy against the public found an African echo.

  My modest role was to help him develop a simple methodology for evaluating projects at world, rather than local, prices: an idea that, in a more sophisticated form, later became a standard economic tool. Savosnik taught me in addition to analyse the balance sheets of companies that had solicited government protection and favours in order to identify suspicious ‘black holes’. We then had a sound basis for warning our superiors of questionable activities and, to a surprising and encouraging extent, our advice was acted upon. I also had access, as a Treasury official, to parts of the government that he could not reach. I sat on the boards of state corporations, notably those dispensing credit to the industrial and tourist sectors. Bizarrely, John Michuki also placed me on a sensitive committee determining the pace of commercial Africanization (in effect, the replacement of Asian licence-holders by Africans). Since the role of the Treasury representative was to urge caution in the interests of the economy, it was all too preditcable that there would be a backlash. Had I been a senior African official I would, I am sure, have taken umbrage at an Englishman in his mid-twenties seeking to block progress, however sensible the objections. One powerful permanent secretary, Kenneth Matiba, who later became a leading figure in the opposition to Moi’s rule, recommended that I be deported, but I was defended by Michuki and the head of the civil service and allowed to continue.