The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  For a long time, the Shifta War seemed far away, remote. Ahmed’s father had never paid much attention to politics, until it became impossible to ignore what was going on. All around him Somali civilians were being rounded up and detained by the Kenyan police. Their livestock was confiscated or slaughtered, and the Somalis were herded into overcrowded, filthy compounds surrounded by barbed wire. Inside these camps, Maalim had heard, populations were being decimated by cholera and measles. No one was permitted to move in or out without official papers. Years later, in Famine Crimes, the British scholar Alex de Waal would describe the Shifta War as “a military onslaught on the entire pastoral way of life.”

  At the time, Maalim knew that he had to save his family. Along with thousands of other displaced Somali-Kenyans, he, his three wives, and his children took refuge in southern Somalia. Hemmed in by war, unable to migrate with the seasons, they found it increasingly difficult to find pastureland for their animals. For the first time, Ahmed became aware of tribal conflict: regularly now his family’s clan battled other Somali clans and subclans for water and grazing rights.

  Eventually, once the Shifta War was over, Ahmed’s family returned to their traditional grazing lands in North Eastern Province. Then, just as they were getting their bearings, the long droughts started.

  The world was full of dangers; Ahmed knew that. When he was five or six, his eldest sister died in childbirth. Another sister was devoured by a crocodile while gathering water from the muddy banks of the Dawa River, where Ethiopia meets North Eastern Province. Once, when a fight between two clans broke out at a water well, Ahmed witnessed an uncle being stabbed to death. But it was not until the great drought of the early 1970s that Ahmed knew what it meant to die of hunger. News reports from the great drought (known as lafaad, or “white bones”) describe a wasteland littered with bleached carcasses. “The hyenas now don’t even eat all the dead cattle,” an Italian priest living in northern Kenya told The New York Times in 1971. “They have had more than they can eat.”

  First Maalim’s cattle died. Then, one by one, the family’s camels died. Ahmed was stronger than most children his age. He could go all day on little more than camel’s milk. But as famine spread across the parched Sahel and through the Horn of Africa, Ahmed too began to show signs of wasting. When Ahmed’s youngest sister died of malnutrition, Maalim, defeated, finally moved his family into town. There, instead of herding livestock, Ahmed and his siblings spent their days lining up for humanitarian food aid.

  “My father was once rich,” Ahmed recalled. “He had about one hundred cattle and camels. Life was so good. Then the rains stopped. Soon my father had only two animals remaining—from one hundred to two. How can he manage life now? He cannot. For a nomad, resilient and proud, to be reduced to a beggar of food aid! My father almost became crazy. He was finished. His motivation, his morale—gone. That is what a drought is.”

  Even after the Somalis of North Eastern Province gave up their battle for independence, the region remained under a state of emergency, marginalized, and cut off from the rest of Kenya for another twenty years. North Eastern Province was never connected to the national electric grid. Roads were left unpaved. The number of schools and health clinics remained sharply inadequate.

  To humiliate and control the restless Somalis, Kenya’s military police continued to detain and abuse them. In the infamous Wajir Massacre of 1984, the Kenyan army rounded up thousands of Somalis, set fire to their homesteads, and forced them to strip naked. Those who resisted were tortured, burned alive, or beaten to death. The official death count at the time was 57. Eventually, however, the Kenyan government revised that figure to 380. In truth, according to witnesses and human rights organizations, the actual number of people killed in the Wajir Massacre was probably more than 1,000.

  In one generation, as the nomadic pastoralists of North Eastern Province fell into acute poverty, more and more Somalis abandoned their traditional way of life. Proud and prosperous herders became beggars, con men, prostitutes, and petty thieves; dependence on relief aid became the norm, an accepted part of life.

  Apart from attending a dugsi or madrassa, where boys memorized, recited, and wrote out the Koran on wooden tablets known as loh, few Somalis in North Eastern Province attended school. Ahmed’s parents were illiterate and innumerate; they’d never gone to school. After all, what could formal schooling offer a nomadic Somali herder? Besides, the languages of instruction in Kenyan schools were Swahili and English. (Somali wasn’t a written language until the 1970s. Even today the Somali language is not taught in Kenyan schools.) “We were not sent to government schools for fear of being converted to Christianity,” Ahmed said.

  Ahmed was lucky: “When the drought came my father was told, ‘You will only get water if you put your son in school.’ That is how my father was forced to send me to school.”

  Every day Ahmed walked two hours to get to school in Rhamu, on the Ethiopian border. He’d leave his family’s homestead before dawn, cut a path through the scrubland, and move as fast as he could to avoid lions and pythons. Ahmed’s school was rudimentary; the few available textbooks were leftovers from the colonial era, and there was one teacher for every fifty students. Nevertheless, Ahmed thrived at school. When the rains came and his father moved on to better pastures, Ahmed, encouraged by his teachers, refused to drop out. His father abandoned him. “Livestock was his number one priority, not education,” said Ahmed. It was 1974; Ahmed was around ten years old.

  Supporting himself by doing odd jobs—fetching water, digging and hoeing, selling camel’s milk and mangoes—Ahmed managed to complete primary school. When he graduated, he was offered a job as a clerical worker at a refugee camp. It was assumed he’d take the job. If he was careful with the money he earned, he’d have enough each month to help support his mother and his siblings. But Ahmed hesitated. He had bigger ambitions than clerical work. If he could find a way to pay for secondary school, he might one day get a civil servant’s job—there was no better job in postcolonial Africa. He’d seen men with fine government jobs: they wore European suits and drove black Mercedes sedans; they lived in permanent houses with tin roofs and servants. That was the life!

  Eventually, after sitting outside the office of the deputy district commissioner for days, Ahmed convinced the man to recommend him for a government scholarship. “Either I succeed or I don’t leave the office,” Ahmed recalled. “I told him, ‘I need your help.’ He told me, ‘We are sorry, but we have no support to give you.’ I said, ‘Look, I have gone to the chief, to the assistant chief, to the counselor, to the member of parliament, and now I come to you as the last resort.’ He was an old man. He removed his eyeglasses. I said, ‘Mr. Deputy District Commissioner, you are a Big Man and I need your help. If you don’t help me, I don’t know where I am headed to. I want to be like you. Please tell me how you made it so I can one day become like you. I have nothing.’ The man was moved. He started shedding tears. He took my hand. Then he wrote a letter that changed my whole life.”

  At first Ahmed lagged behind the other secondary school students. But in a short time he became an outstanding student. From being ranked twenty-eighth in his first year, he moved to twelfth rank and finally to third rank. In 1984 he gained entrance to Egerton Agricultural College in Njoro, earning a three-year diploma “with distinction.” From there he was accepted at Kenya’s Moi University in Eldoret, where in 1991 he earned a B.Sc. degree in forestry. A few years later, while working on a Kenyan agroforestry project funded by the Belgian government, he won a scholarship to Gembloux Agricultural University in Belgium.

  Everything about Belgium was a shock to Ahmed. He knew Europeans were rich, but he’d never imagined how rich they really were. He spent hours in supermarkets staring at shelves stocked with food. His dorm room was the most comfortable room he’d ever seen. Sometimes he amused himself by fiddling with his sink, marveling at how water—clean water!—rushed from the taps. In the letters he wrote home, he found it hard to descr
ibe his life in Europe; he knew it would be unimaginable to a nomad in North Eastern Province.

  In Ahmed’s last year at Gembloux, when he was still months away from completing his Ph.D. thesis (on the management of natural resources in dry lands), his scholarship money ran out. Right away one of his professors intervened, personally paying for Ahmed’s room and board through the end of the school year. To Ahmed, this act of kindness was a sign from God. He was not especially religious—nonetheless, as Ahmed explained, he had discovered his calling, his vocation: he would use his education to help his people, the Somalis of North Eastern Province.

  Chapter 3

  The End of Poverty

  What was the solution to global poverty? After his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 1995, Jeffrey Sachs started reading everything he could find on global health, disease, epidemiology, and development. He sat in on lectures at Harvard’s School of Public Health and visited dozens of poor countries. In the central plateau of Haiti, in the village of Cange, he studied the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, whose charity, Partners in Health, cares for people in some of the most poverty-stricken, godforsaken places on earth. According to many experts in the field of international health, Farmer’s efforts to treat AIDS and tuberculosis among the poorest people on the globe were all very well, very noble, but highly impractical—too ambitious, too expensive, too complicated, unsustainable. In Sachs’s opinion, however, Farmer wasn’t being ambitious enough.

  “I remember when [Sachs] came to Haiti,” Farmer said. “He went to visit patients in their homes, and to meet community health workers, and I remember what he said to me: ‘This is doable, but you guys’—meaning, you people in medicine and public health—‘you have to stop using the M-word and start using the B-word.’ In other words, you don’t need millions of dollars to fix this, you need billions of dollars.

  “We had everyone saying, ‘It’s not doable,’ ” Farmer continued. “Then Jeff got involved and said, ‘Buck up, stop whining, and start getting work done.’ ”

  What came next was one of Sachs’s most significant contributions to the cause of ending world poverty: a gigantic seven-volume report, published by the World Health Organization in 2001, Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development. Sachs spent two years directing the report—supervising a commission of seventeen economists and policy makers, six separate task forces, and more than one hundred experts in fields related to the project.

  The WHO report laid out the facts in stark terms. Every year eight million people die of poverty on the planet. Many of those eight million people, children especially, are killed by diarrhea, measles, malaria, and respiratory infections like pneumonia that can easily be prevented or treated. Others die from AIDS and tuberculosis. Others starve to death.

  Spending money on health care in the world’s poorest countries is more than a humanitarian imperative, Sachs’s report argued; it is at the same time the key to driving economic growth. Taking over the rhetoric of corporate America, cunningly, Sachs’s report managed to transform a health catastrophe into a business proposition: saving lives can offer huge returns to investors. With an annual investment of $66 billion, we can save eight million lives a year and generate economic benefits worth $360 billion a year.

  In the language of Jeffrey Sachs, macroeconomist, inconceivable numbers sound reasonable, even modest. “He’s not embarrassed by large numbers. And he’s not apologetic for large numbers,” said Richard Feachem, who served on the commission for Sachs’s report and was the first executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. “What he’s saying is, ‘If it needs billions for health and development, don’t be ashamed to ask for it.’ And by the way, to anyone who says, ‘Oh, that’s a lot of money,’ say, ‘Well, by whose standards?’ because by the standards of military expenditure it’s not a lot of money.”

  “Jeff really changed the way we think about the problem of health,” said Paul Farmer. “What we were always saying is, ‘Do this because it’s the right thing to do,’ but Jeff said, Yeah, it’s the right thing to do—and it also is going to open the door to real development. Because you can’t have development if everybody is sick all the time.”

  By the early 2000s, Sachs’s life was devoted to one cause: ending extreme poverty. The stumbling block, he concluded, was a “poverty trap”: an overwhelming, interconnected burden of disease, illiteracy, high fertility rates, dismal agricultural productivity, lack of capital, weak or nonexistent infrastructure, debt, hunger, drought, malnutrition.… Tackling one problem at a time, piecemeal, was pointless, he concluded. The way out of extreme poverty depended on a “big push” in foreign aid—a massive, coordinated investment designed to lift countries up and out of poverty, once and for all.

  “It is often said that past aid to Africa has little to show for it,” Sachs wrote in a hundred-page paper, “Ending Africa’s Poverty Trap,” published by the Brookings Institution in 2004. “In fact, there has been too little aid to make a difference.”

  Consider Sachs’s provocative claim: “there has been too little aid to make a difference.” Since the end of the colonial era—since the 1960s, that is—more than $700 billion in foreign aid has been poured into sub-Saharan Africa—yet for all that, sub-Saharan Africa is poorer than ever. “Money down a rat hole” was how the late Jesse Helms, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, famously dismissed foreign aid. Sachs’s counterargument is simple: if foreign aid has failed to produce obvious and long-lasting results, it is because we haven’t spent enough money to get those results.

  In one of his favorite analogies, Sachs compares the crisis in sub-Saharan Africa to a forest fire. If you try to put out the fire with one hose and the fire keeps raging, do you conclude that fighting fires is hopeless? From his point of view, the only logical conclusion to draw from a fire that’s out of control is simple: you don’t have enough firefighters.

  In that case, how many firefighters do we need? How much money would it take to eradicate extreme poverty? Sachs’s estimate is somewhere in the range of $250 billion a year, a figure that’s twice what the developed world spends annually on foreign aid. Yet from Sachs’s perspective, $250 billion a year is a bargain: at that rate, he claims, extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025. The cost of ending extreme poverty is less than 1 percent of the total income of the “rich world,” according to Sachs: “It’s much cheaper than having wars. And it’s much cheaper than having mass migration.”

  Not long after I met him, Sachs invited me to hear him address the General Assembly of the United Nations. His message was clear: “Millions of people die every year for the stupid reason they are too poor to stay alive.… That is a plight we can end.” Afterwards, over lunch in the crowded UN cafeteria overlooking New York’s East River, he continued. “The basic truth is that for less than a percent of the income of the rich world, nobody has to die of poverty on the planet,” he said, eating his Cobb salad. “That’s really a powerful truth.”

  Day after day, without pausing for air, it seemed, Sachs was making one speech after another, as many as three in one day. At the same time he lobbied heads of state, testified before Congress, held press conferences, attended symposiums, advised government officials and legislators, participated in panel discussions, gave interviews, published papers in academic journals, wrote opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines, and sought out anyone, anyone at all, who might help him spread the word. The only time he seemed to slow down was when he was sleeping, never more than four or five hours a night. “I’m a happily married single parent,” said his wife, Sonia, a pediatrician and the mother of his three children.

  “It feels like we’re running a campaign—all the time,” remarked one exhausted member of his staff. In a way, Sachs was running a campaign. In 2002 he’d been made “special adviser” to the United Nations secretary-general. And in a triumph for Columbia University, he’d left Harvard that year to become Columbia’s Quetelet Profess
or of Sustainable Development; professor of health policy and management; and director of the university’s Earth Institute. For all his titles, Sachs’s true vocation is to draw our attention to the scandal of global poverty and to force us to do something about it. In his words, his job is to be “a pest.”

  “He’s an irritant,” confirms his friend Bono, not without respect. “He’s the squeaky wheel that roars.” Mark Malloch Brown, who was deputy secretary-general of the United Nations under Kofi Annan, describes Sachs as “this magnificent battering ram,” adding: “He’s a bully; for the record, he’s a bully.”

  One of Sachs’s idiosyncrasies is list making—he keeps a precise tally of the countries he has visited in his role as global economic adviser. The number jumps every few months: 103; 118; 124; 130—like Leporello’s catalog of Don Giovanni’s conquests. A week after he addressed the UN, Sachs scheduled three overnight flights in five days. First, after a full day of teaching at Columbia, he flew from New York to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brasília for two days of meetings with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s cabinet. From there he headed to Washington to attend the White House Summit on Malaria. Afterwards he left for San Francisco, where he made a presentation about ending poverty to the founders of Google. That same day, a Friday, he flew home to New York. Over the weekend he attended a dinner with the secretary-general of the United Nations.

  What keeps him going at such a frenzied pace? Is his crusade to eradicate poverty fueled by his failure in Russia, as some have suggested? Was his apparent shift from one end of the political spectrum to the other a way of atoning for, compensating for, his errors of judgment? Sachs dismisses such talk out of hand. “If you haven’t noticed,” he snapped, “people are dying—it’s an emergency.”