Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  These personal excitements were rare and, in retrospect, I have undoubtedly exaggerated their importance. But I did have a ringside seat, and occasionally a small acting role, in the big dramas being played out at the time: the debate on commercial Africanization, which led, in 1968, to the exodus of Kenyan Asians; the break-up of the East African Union; the 1967 UK devaluation, which was seen as a massive breach of trust by a sterling-holding government; and the pushing through of a land reform programme under which white settlers were bought out and replaced by African smallholders. The last of these was Kenyatta’s master stroke and it prevented Kenya going the way of Zimbabwe, an achievement somewhat diminished, later, by the greed for land of Kenya’s new black elite.

  The main role of a Treasury official was to say ‘no’. But it was occasionally possible, and wise, to be more positive. One major project, with long-lasting consequences, for which I could claim considerable credit – or blame – involved a new road to the far north where the Turkana nomadic pastoralists lived precariously in the semi-desert around Lake Rudolf. President Kenyatta had spent several years of his detention there during the emergency and made a commitment to lifting the Turkana from their abject poverty. Various rather bizarre ideas were put forward, including an oil refinery, notwithstanding the absence in the region of any oil or any market for its products. The president made clear his displeasure at the Treasury’s blocking tactics and I saw the opportunity to earn some brownie points by promoting one of the more sensible options: to build a road to Lake Rudolf, thus enabling the Turkana to diversify their economy by fishing and exporting dried fish to the fish-eating regions of Kenya and Uganda. After a feasibility study showed genuine promise, an official visit was agreed and I made a perilous journey by jeep with an assistant minister and the chief roads engineer along the proposed route. There were, for me, some eye-opening discoveries along the route, including a sophisticated system of gravity-fed irrigation on the slopes of the Rift Valley, developed by the Elgeyo Marakwet people in pre-colonial times. I was also bitten by an insect on my elbow, which later turned seriously septic. According to Olympia, I barely survived. But the upshot of the expedition was a decision to build the road. I was responsible for mobilizing Norwegian aid for the project and, to my amazement, the money was pledged and the road duly materialized shortly after I had left the country. Regrettably, my colleagues and I disregarded the advice of an anthropologist that the project ran the risk of destabilizing the delicately balanced relationship between the Turkana and their inhospitable environment. Years later, he was proved right. The Turkana, not understanding or liking fishing, invested all their profits in more cattle, leading to serious overgrazing. The project was subsequently often cited in the manuals of development disasters; my defence is that I probably stopped others that would have been worse.

  The best of the expatriate staff I worked with were among the most impressive people I have ever met, though there was a large amount of dross: the UN ‘experts’ and miscellaneous consultants who cost a fortune, lived the lifestyle of princes, and contributed little or nothing. My role models, Savosnik and Joan Tyrrell, were like canaries down a mine: they could detect a bad smell before it became dangerous. The smells were the bad aid projects and the crooked businessmen, and far too often they spread undetected until great damage was done. One of the best books about Africa in the 1960s, False Start in Africa by the French agronomist René Dumont, describes how (if I may switch analogies) a rapacious plague of locusts descended on the green shoots of development that appeared at the time of independence. The most visible signs of their visitation were the snowploughs ‘donated’ to Guinea, the billion-dollar hulks of rusting steel left behind by ‘investors’ in Nigeria, the new hospitals without doctors or medicines, and the Olympic-standard sports facilities almost everywhere. But most of the exploitation and waste was more subtle, which is why the smell-detectors were useful.

  Typical ‘turnkey’ projects were promoted by machinery salesmen offering generous credit terms and, as a major ‘concession’ to Kenya, giving a large slice of the equity to the host government, supposedly in the interests of ‘localization’ and public ownership. Their aim was to shift risk on to the Kenyan government and to make a killing by padding out the costs of the equipment or an associated management and consultancy agreement. Issues of risk transference are, of course, universal and lie behind the contemporary controversy over private financial initiative (PFI) contracts in the UK. For Kenyan ministers, however, it was counter-intuitive to decline such ‘generosity’, and the crooks with whom we negotiated were adept at playing to a nationalistic gallery. It was often the case that the best projects came from local Asian businessmen moving from trading to manufacturing with second-hand equipment, or the traditional multinationals who were there for the long haul. But this was not a message ministers wanted to hear and, too often, snake-oil salesmen with generous presents and impressive visiting cards were able to get through the government’s defences.

  Aid donors, too, were adept at passing off mercenary and self-interested schemes as acts of saintly generosity. One of my main responsibilities was unscrambling the tangled finances of a Russian-built hospital in Kisumu negotiated by the Russian sympathizer Mr Okello Odongo, before President Kenyatta had him locked up. The running of the hospital was to be financed by sales of surplus sugar that Russia had acquired from Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, Kenya had, by now, its own surplus of sugar, grown near Kisumu, so the sugar was declined and the hospital remained empty. I came to appreciate the urbane charms and gold teeth of the Russian ambassador and the culinary skills of his pretty wife, and eventually the Russians stumped up some real money.

  The Americans were worse. Much of their aid was in the form of local cash generated by the sale of US wheat surpluses, which did serious damage to the local grain market. We declined it, much to the irritation of the US embassy, which was now in the ascendancy on the Kenyan front of the Cold War. I particularly enraged the embassy by ignoring their elaborate, bureaucratic financial reporting requirements, and on one occasion was carpeted by the minister for putting at risk the comradely relationship developing with the Americans. There were some dreadful financial deals dressed up as ‘aid’ offered, inter alia, by the French, Italians, Israelis, Japanese, Danes and even the blessed United Nations. There was some really valuable assistance too, from Holland, Sweden, Germany, the soft loan arm of the World Bank, and also from the British. The skill, which I was just beginning to acquire when I left, was to know when to say ‘yes’ and when to say ‘no’.

  I cannot say, in all honesty, that I made a major, or even a positive, contribution to the development of Kenya. But Kenya made a massive contribution to mine. Simply learning how to navigate a way through the minefield of racial sensitivities was an education in itself. I learned much, too, from watching politicians in action, albeit in a rather different environment from Westminster. Kenyatta himself was a towering figure. Yet, unlike Mandela, who has become a latter-day saint and an iconic, inspirational figure far beyond South Africa, Kenyatta is now seen as a diminished, tribalistic and tarnished character. Like Mandela, however, he was a father to his country, suffered many years of imprisonment, showed forgiveness and magnanimity towards the settler farmers and the colonial power on his release, displayed a pragmatic understanding of the need for a mixed economy, and prevented a slide into racial and tribal strife. But human failings, greed and acquisitiveness, undid his reputation and opened the way to the rampant kleptocracy of Daniel carap Moi. When I served in Kenyatta’s government, his reputation was still largely intact and ‘Mzee’ enjoyed genuine respect and popular support. This could be seen at his mass rallies, some of which I attended out of curiosity. He was a mesmerizing orator in Swahili (though laboured in English). I had only a rudimentary grasp of the language but I was gripped by his wonderful, deep, rich voice, flowing cadences and rapport with the crowds.

  His close entourage of ministers was altogether less impressive. Almo
st all had acquired top-of-the-range Mercedes (the ‘Wabenzi’), large stomachs, sizeable land holdings and personal fortunes. The only white member of the government, Bruce Mackenzie, the agriculture minister, competed well on all these counts (he was, it later emerged, also an MI6 agent, before he died in an air crash). As civil servants, we were, of course, party to the gossip about our political masters, and it was mostly very unflattering. There were some exceptions: Tom Mboya, who was assassinated shortly after I left Kenya; Ronald Ngala, who died later in a suspicious car accident; and Mwai Kibaki, who frequently deputized for our Mr Gichuru.

  Kibaki was clever, incisive, conscientious. Unlike most ministers, he did not owe his place to the ‘independence struggle’ or to close tribal links with Kenyatta; he was a Kikuyu, but from a different, Nyeri, clan. He had taught economics at Makerere University in Uganda and was the only minister to be not only economically literate but able to engage with technically complex development issues. The four decades that elapsed before he became president seem to have knocked the physical and moral stuffing out of him. Perhaps the most damning indictment of Kenyatta’s rule is that the genuinely talented among the next generation were corrupted (like Kibaki and Michuki) or killed (like Mboya, Ngala and Ouku) while the mediocrities accumulated wealth and power. Just as Lenin will be forever tainted by creating the conditions under which Stalin could succeed him, Kenyatta paved the way for Moi.

  While I was in Kenya, Moi took his first decisive steps up the ladder to the presidency when the half-Masai, half-Goan vice president, Joe Murumbi, died. Moi succeeded him and presented himself as a simple farmer and former schoolteacher with undemanding tastes and Christian virtues, including large numbers of children. He had been chosen to provide balance, coming from one of the pastoralist tribes of the Rift Valley, like the Masai and Turkana, and having been a leader of the pre-independence opposition party (KADU) which had brought together the smaller tribes that feared domination by the Kituya and Luo. He was already showing his mettle by leading the charge against the breakaway Kenya People’s Union. Its leader, Oginga Odinga, was a proponent of a kind of populist African Marxism that would have been as disastrous in Kenya as in Nkrumah’s Ghana, Mengistu’s Ethiopia or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But it had potential appeal, not just to Odinga’s Luo but to the growing numbers of impoverished Kenyans of all tribes who were not experiencing the fruits of independence and liked the KPU’s ‘free things’ policy (free education, free land, free food, and, it was sometimes suggested, free beer and free women). Kenyatta and Moi did not want to take the risk of losing an election: Odinga and his associates, including Olullo-Odongo, were locked up. A general election took place on a single-party basis, with competing candidates from the government party, KANU. Half of the MPs lost their seats, which suggested to optimists that there was a real democracy at work and to pessimists that the government was desperately unpopular. For all Kenyatta’s faults and Moi’s even greater venality and thuggery, this semi-democracy was allowed to continue and, in due course, KANU was voted out of power.

  What disfigured Kenyatta’s administration most, and Moi’s even more, was corruption. The process by which corruption entered and rapidly took over a group of hitherto honest people alarmed and fascinated me. Colleagues who had been absolutely fastidious in declaring gifts and living within their means would, according to the rumour factory, suddenly be ‘on the take’ and luxury cars beyond the reach of their civil service or ministerial salaries would appear. In some cases there would be pressure from acquisitive wives or from extended families to pay for school and college fees and health care. Widespread reports that powerful people, from the president down, were accepting, then demanding, gifts, and were apparently immune from investigation, let alone prosecution, were hardly an incentive to behave well. I guess that, for many, once a psychological threshold had been breached, succumbing to temptation became much easier. I noticed, too, the unalloyed cynicism of many overseas, including British, businessmen, who did little to hide their belief that bribery was a necessary – indeed, entirely defensible and proper – way of conducting business with foreign governments. (The British government’s reaction to BAe Systems’ allegedly corrupt dealings with Saudi Arabia suggests that little has changed for the better.) Corruption became a self-reinforcing process, and clumsy attempts to regulate and plan the economy rather than let markets operate freely created yet more opportunities.

  The debates in the press, and outside, about corruption overlapped with a broader argument about the strategy for development. In 1967 Tanzania embarked on a fundamentally different path, ‘Ujamaa’, stressing ‘ self-reliance’, socialism and cooperation, rather than engagement with Western capital and free enterprise as in Kenya. The Tanzanian model did not work well and arguably further impoverished Tanzania, not least because it destroyed incentives for peasant farmers. But this was not known at the time, and President Nyerere’s simplicity and transparent honesty provided an attractive counterpoint to the Kenyan theme of acquisitiveness and rampant greed. With the possible exception of Botswana, Africa has yet to produce a model that works and combines the best of both approaches.

  Exposure to these debates and to the reality of development on the ground clarified, for me, a set of fundamental ideas that I carried through subsequent decades and different roles: the importance of a genuinely competitive, liberal model of capitalism (as opposed to ‘crony capitalism’); property rights and security for entrepreneurs, particularly small farmers; government doing a few essential things well – such as policing, education (especially primary education), basic healthcare, water, roads, agricultural extension and research, and the regulation of basic utilities – rather than lots of things badly and corruptly; openness to trade and foreign investment; an aggressive approach to the removal of racial and other barriers restricting opportunity and social mobility based on merit; and a commitment to breaking up concentrations of wealth, particularly in land ownership.

  I was eager to understand the country better than could be gleaned from newsworthy politicians, the rarefied world of the Treasury and my economist friends. It was necessary, first of all, to escape from the trap of spending one’s time exclusively in the world of white Kenyans. There were, of course, some genuinely interesting and worthwhile white people. But the endless barbecues and dinner parties usually degenerated into a prolonged whinge about the unreliability of the servants, the decline in standards, and the last or next trip to the game parks. This refrain came typically from people who had until then led modest, unpretentious lives in cramped semis in Croydon and had been catapulted into a setting of space and beauty, waited upon by houseboys, cooks, ayahs for the children and gardeners. Most lived in the green suburbs with large gardens full of gorgeous tropical shrubs and drives flagged up by the owner’s name – a style derived, I think, from the posher bits of Surrey.

  When the novelty had worn off, boredom followed. Boredom was not much alleviated by Kenyan television or radio, whose idea of world news was a speech to a village meeting by the assistant minister for cooperatives. Drink and sex were popular distractions and many aspired to the kind of lifestyle captured in the film White Mischief: ‘Are you married or do you live in Nairobi …?’ Few felt any real sense of belonging or involvement in the country, and many of the long-standing white residents made little secret of their wish to escape to the better-ordered, safer, more civilized environment of Rhodesia or South Africa. There was, however, a sufficient critical mass to sustain a film society, the occasional concert, and a national theatre in which I occupied a modest niche playing minor Shakespearian roles. An attempt to broaden out into a multicultural repertoire with A Passage to India was a dramatic and social failure. Apart from a small number of mixed families, university academics and culturally aware Goans, the different racial groups coexisted in different silos. All of this I found suffocating and I tried to escape.

  Pamela Ogot had provided an entrée to the world of young, educated Africans and to the univer
sity, where I additionally ran an evening class in economics. The university occupied an important but precarious place in the new Kenya. Its graduates would in due course become the professional elite and would fill jobs like mine. But it was in transition from a substantially Asian to an overwhelmingly African student intake, and from British sylla-buses and degrees to a Kenyan identity. Rapid expansion and the dilution of quality led to resentment by many students who saw their efforts and degrees devalued. Poor African students from rural areas were thrown together with other races and tribes, causing considerable friction. Students who were the repository of all their families’ hopes worked prodigiously hard but could not accept failure, however poor their performance.

  There was also the intoxication of new ideas. Radical academics questioned the official view of politics and history. At a public lecture I heard, for the first time, a detailed historian’s account of the Mau Mau which brought out the scale of the killing (of Africans), the abuses on both sides, and the state of virtual civil war between rebels and ‘loyalists’: subjects over which the government preferred to draw a discreet veil in the interests of ‘unity’. The year 1968 also brought reports of student unrest throughout Europe and North Africa. For their part, the Kenyan authorities regarded the university as a potential threat and source of subversion. Many politicians (and soldiers) were uneducated and resented the privileged young men and women being subsidized to study. The inevitable happened: student demonstrations led to over-reaction. In 1969 the army was ordered on to the campus and many students were gunned down, raped or taken into detention. From then on, students kept their heads down.