The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  It isn’t easy to reconcile the former Dr. Shock with the new, humanitarian persona of Jeffrey Sachs, yet Sachs himself sees no conflict. Again and again he insists that his work in the developing world is no different from his earlier work in Bolivia and Poland. One way or another, he is an emergency physician—a “clinical economist” is how he puts it—and Africa is the patient in cardiac arrest. In essence, using shock therapy to resuscitate a nation’s economy, and prescribing humanitarian interventions to save someone’s life, depend on the same model of thought. His goal, he explains, has always been “to take on complex challenges and bring to bear expertise in economics and other disciplines to find workable solutions.”

  More than once, discussing his humanitarian work, Sachs referred to Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild’s inspiring account of how, in the late eighteenth century, twelve determined idealists set Britain’s antislavery movement in motion. If, at the time, writes Hochschild, “you had stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you that ending slavery was wildly impractical.” After all, slavery had existed for millennia: the ancient Greeks and Romans had slaves; the Incas and Aztecs had slaves. As Hochschild notes, “Slavery had existed before money or written law.”

  Have poverty and inequality not existed for millennia? Sachs understands his mission, his vocation, in huge, abstract terms—human rights, social justice, and truth. His ultimate goal is to change the world—to “bend history,” as he once said, quoting Robert F. Kennedy.

  “Look,” Sachs elaborated, “this is not the great titanic battle of morality that I’m on. I’m not saying the only way for the rich and the poor to live together is if the rich cut their living standards by half, give up their cars, understand modern life is a false contrivance and a false consciousness that is destroying the planet and is enslaving and impoverishing the poor and that we have to move away from globalization in the corporate world which owns politics and dominates.…” His voice trailed off.

  “I don’t believe that stuff anyway, but that’s not the kind of battle that this is about,” he added. “We’re just talking about one percent of our income in the world to avert potential calamity!”

  Sachs was becoming impatient. He’d put together a detailed blueprint for ending extreme poverty in Africa by pursuing dozens of “science-based” interventions simultaneously; he’d also shown that his plan was “eminently affordable.” He’d pestered governments, major international donors, the UN, and African government officials to adopt his strategy. The End of Poverty was a best seller, and people were lining up, sometimes for hours, to hear Sachs speak. Time magazine added him to its list of the world’s most influential people. There was even a Jeffrey Sachs fan club, a registered not-for-profit organization that, having purchased the domain name sachsforpresident.org, was dedicated to drafting him as the next president of the United States. At Columbia University, you could buy T-shirts stenciled with the words JEFF SACHS IS MY HOMEBOY. When it came to putting his theories into practice, however, he’d made very little progress.

  In contrast to the celebrities and college students and likeminded idealists who embraced Sachs’s agenda, most development experts dismissed it as reductive and, ultimately, unworkable. Yes, countless people in sub-Saharan Africa are alive because of foreign aid. What no one really knows, however, is whether foreign aid actually leads to long-term economic development. Or which of the many humanitarian initiatives and interventions have a lasting impact on poverty. Or whether foreign aid, by creating economic dependence, does more harm than good. “How do you know what would have happened without the aid?” asks the development economist Esther Duflo. “Maybe it would have been much worse. Or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea.

  “We’re not any better than the medieval doctors and their leeches,” Duflo continues, comparing leeches to theories promoted by development economists. “Sometimes the patient gets better. Sometimes the patient dies. Is it the leeches? Is it something else? We don’t know.”

  Sachs doesn’t ignore his critics; they energize him. “We live in an age of hand-wringing and cynicism—that’s the kind of world we’re living in right now. It’s weird. And it’s unproductive,” he said. “Just get out there and solve the problems. They’re not so hard.”

  In Sachs’s view, if the history of international development is a history of failure, it’s because too many people in the field are complacent, or incompetent, or not accountable. “People generally view systems as unchanging. They have very static views of things. They don’t really see how change comes about,” he said. “Maybe it’s having had the good experience of hearing, as I have many, many times, ‘Impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible, impossible—obvious.’ If you’ve gone through that over a period of twenty-five years, it helps you to filter out a lot of what you’re told. Everything seems impossible until it becomes inevitable.”

  Tired of hearing the word impossible, Sachs decided to take matters into his own hands. “It all started with a conversation I had with Gerry Lenfest about ending poverty in Africa,” he recalled. “We spoke for a long time. Then he asked, ‘How much would it cost?’ Gerry just took out his checkbook and said, ‘Here’s five million dollars. Go for it.’ ”

  H. Fitzgerald (“Gerry”) Lenfest, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, made his fortune when Lenfest Communications, the cable TV company he founded, was sold to Comcast for $6 billion in 2000. He and his wife, Marguerite, have promised publicly to give away at least half of their wealth during their lifetime. So far, among other acts of generosity, their foundation has donated $100 million to Columbia University, $10 million to Teach for America, and $5.8 million to save the historic ship SS United States from the scrap heap. It has provided scholarships to poor students in rural Pennsylvania and funded scientific research projects designed to protect the oceans. Giving money to help Jeffrey Sachs save Africa was uncharacteristic: at the time, the Lenfests didn’t know very much about Africa or the world of economic development, but they admired Sachs and shared his commitment to helping the poor.

  The Lenfest Foundation’s $5 million was more than enough for Sachs to test his theories in one or two villages in sub-Saharan Africa. “What we’re trying to show is that with just a few interventions and not a lot of money, lives can be transformed,” explained Sachs. “It’s what MTV would call Extreme Village Makeover.”

  Every year for five years, Sachs’s “Extreme Village Makeover” would allocate $120 per person in those villages to implement the “interventions” outlined in The End of Poverty: high-yield seeds and fertilizer, mosquito nets, better schools, improved health care and sanitation, bore wells and protected springs, diesel generators, and so forth. In order to bypass corrupt government officials, the project would hire its own teams of highly trained locals and deliver aid directly to the villages. The ongoing results of the five-year project would be tested and monitored by academics at Columbia University, their goal being to demonstrate that Sachs’s systematic, scientific approach to ending poverty could be used on a grand scale—in which case, millions upon millions of rural Africans would be rescued from the poverty trap and lifted to “the first rung on the ladder of development” (Sachs’s phrase).

  Sachs named his makeover experiment the “Millennium Villages Project,” a reference to the UN’s Millennium Declaration of 2000, in which every UN member state promised to “spare no effort to free our fellow men, women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty.” He viewed his project as a proof-test of the UN’s declaration’s stated goals—eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating disease, and ensuring environmental sustainability by 2015. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that the Mil
lennium Villages Project was a hugely ambitious social and economic experiment, a petri dish in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.

  The first Millennium village was officially launched in 2005 in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya; in no time at all, Sachs declared his work in the village a success. Less than a year into the project, he called for a fifteenfold increase in foreign aid to Kenya, from $100 million to $1.5 billion a year, to fund Millennium villages all across the country.

  The results of Sachs’s interventions in Sauri were encouraging. Thanks to the introduction of fertilizer and high-yield seeds, the production of maize there tripled from one harvest to the next. The incidence of malaria fell by two-thirds after the villagers were given free mosquito nets. As well, attracted by the free school lunches provided by the Millennium Villages Project, more children than ever were attending the Bar Sauri Primary School. “This is a village that’s going to make history” was how Sachs described Sauri in The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa, an MTV documentary produced a few months after the launch of the Millennium Villages Project. “It’s a village that’s going to end extreme poverty.”

  Sachs was convinced that his work in Sauri could be replicated, not only across Kenya but across all of rural Africa, one village at a time. If he could somehow raise $120 million, he’d launch a dozen model Millennium villages, encompassing half a million desperately poor people in ten sub-Saharan countries. Then, once his approach was validated, surely it would be embraced by development experts, by big international foreign aid donors (USAID, the United Kingdom’s DFID, etc.), and by African governments. The result would be billions of dollars in foreign aid dedicated to establishing Millennium villages everywhere on the African continent.

  In early 2006, Sachs made an appointment to see George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations were primarily dedicated to fighting totalitarianism, not to ending extreme poverty in Africa. Since the early 1980s, Soros’s foundations had given away more than $7 billion to support dissident movements, to promote independent media, and to protect human rights. Its mandate was shaped by Soros’s childhood: born in Budapest in 1930, he had survived the brutal occupation of Hungary, first by Nazi Germany, then by the Soviet Union. The purpose of his foundation, Soros once said, was “to help to build a country from which I wouldn’t want to emigrate.”

  At a breakfast meeting with Soros, Sachs appealed to the billionaire’s conscience: at stake was nothing less than the lives of millions of people. He compared the yoke of poverty to the yoke of totalitarianism. By promoting economic development in Africa, Soros could play a vital role in promoting global stability—after all, countries destabilized by poverty tend to be havens of unrest, violence, and terrorism. “Most of the work can be done in just one year,” he assured Soros. “The rest is just footnotes.”

  Soros’s board of directors was not convinced. Even if the Millennium Villages Project worked in a few model villages, as some directors argued, it could never be taken to scale. Others said it was a “top-down” (as opposed to a “bottom-up”) approach to development; devised by technocrats in New York, it relied far too heavily on outsiders. A few of Soros’s directors dismissed the project as nothing more than an overpriced monument to Sachs’s ego. “Almost unanimously,” Soros told me, “everybody was opposed to it, because we don’t believe in magic bullets.”

  Soros wasn’t blind to Sachs’s shortcomings. “There’s a certain messianic quality about him,” he noted, “and it needs to be kept under critical control.” That said, Soros is a gambling man, and investing in the Millennium Villages Project appealed to his instinct as a speculator. In 1992, famously, he made $1 billion by betting against the British pound before it collapsed. Two years later, trading currencies in Japan, he lost $600 million—in a single day. As for betting on the outcome of the Millennium Villages Project: in Soros’s opinion, the project offered an attractive “risk-reward ratio.” “I would not consider the money necessarily badly spent if the venture did not succeed,” he said casually, “because, you know, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  Soros proceeded to override his board of directors. In September 2006 his foundation announced that it would invest $50 million in the Millennium Villages Project. It was a huge amount of money—easily the biggest single donation Sachs would receive from any source—and together with other, smaller sums that Sachs had raised, would get him close enough to the $120 million he needed to launch his five-year experiment in ten countries: Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, and Senegal.

  “I don’t know whether I want to describe it as investment or speculation,” Soros said. “It’s somewhere in between.” Pausing, he stood up from his chair, poured himself a glass of mineral water, and looked out the windows of his midtown Manhattan office. “Even though it’s a large amount of money—fifty million dollars—I thought there was really very little downside,” he went on. “As a humanitarian action, it was a good investment on its own. But if it succeeded, then of course you’d get a reward that would be way out of proportion to the investment made.”

  Part Two

  We have no water. We have no oil. We have no minerals. We have only animals. If you say to me, “One day you will grow crops,” I will ask you, “From where will you get water?” If you say to me, “One day there will be industry,” I will ask you, “From where will you get water?”

  —Ahmed Maalim Mohamed

  Chapter 4

  It Doesn’t Get Harder Than This

  When Jeffrey Sachs first heard about Dertu, it wasn’t on the official map of Kenya or any other map he’d seen. He wanted each of his Millennium villages to represent a different agro-ecological zone, and someone, perhaps a well-connected government official from North Eastern Province, proposed Dertu as an exemplary semiarid, nomadic pastoralist community. It is located somewhere in North Eastern Province, a degree or so above the equator and not far from the Somali border. Insofar as Dertu existed, its reason for being was a borehole—a water well drilled in 1997 by UNICEF in an otherwise arid, inhospitable stretch of land.

  Thanks to the borehole, Dertu had become a crucial stopping-off point for the region’s nomadic pastoralists. All day and sometimes through the night, they arrived with their caravans of camels, long-horned cattle, donkeys, and sheep. You could tell they were approaching by the clouds of dust that rose and drifted across the dry savanna—camels piled high with bundles of twigs, cooking utensils, wooden milk bowls, plastic buckets, woven-grass mats, and small children; donkeys loaded down with yellow jerry cans secured with braided-leather ropes.

  There was no economy to speak of in Dertu. Here and there the nomadic herdsmen passing through would trade or sell livestock, and a modest business was established to sell camel’s milk; otherwise, the only economic activities were gun running and cattle raiding.

  After the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic in 1991, guns, smuggled across the poorly guarded border, had become as common in the region as drought. Foreigners who visited the region (humanitarian aid workers, mainly) were advised to travel with armed escorts. The U.S. embassy in Nairobi had designated the entire North Eastern Province “restricted without prior authorization.” A report issued by the Institute for Security Studies cautioned against “highway banditry and hijacking, raiding and stock thefts, robbery and looting, intimidation, physical injury and mutilation, rape, and murder.”

  Over the course of a decade or so, gradually, a ragtag community of ethnic Somalis settled in the vicinity of Dertu’s water hole. Their dome-shaped aqals, designed to be temporary and mobile, became semipermanent structures. Having abandoned their lives as nomadic herders, they were living on handouts from humanitarian aid agencies: bags of cornmeal, rice, and pasta supplemented their accustomed diet of camel’s milk and nyiri nyiri.

  A small mosque and a primary school were constructed in Dertu in the early 2000s. As soon as the surrounding population numbered a f
ew thousand, the World Bank, together with UNICEF, funded a “dispensary” to provide the people with basic health care. A rough adobe structure with no power or running water, the dispensary was staffed by one overwhelmed nurse and, like most dispensaries in rural Kenya, was chronically short of even the most rudimentary medical supplies. In life-threatening cases, patients died.

  Ever since the Shifta War of the 1960s, Dertu and the surrounding region have existed in a permanent state of catastrophe: wars, droughts, famines, floods, pestilence, tribulations, biblical woes. Natural resources are scarce and getting scarcer. The limited supply of firewood, water, and vegetation is strained by the growing numbers of refugees from Somalia. The sprawling Dadaab refugee camps, not far from Dertu, opened in 1991 in a space designed to accommodate 90,000 people. By the 2000s, with interclan warfare still raging in Somalia, the camps housed an estimated 300,000 refugees who, over time, settled permanently in an area entirely unsuited to human settlement.

  Camels, which outnumber humans in North Eastern Province, only make things worse, devouring entire trees, top to bottom, and depleting the water supply, whatever the source. The water table keeps sinking: in one decade alone, it has dropped from 160 to 200 meters below ground. Every year 650 hectares of pastureland disappear in North Eastern Province. With few trees and plants to anchor the soil, the place becomes a dust bowl in the dry season.

  Scare resources fuel violence. Competing for water and grazing rights, the province’s various Somali clans and subclans have a history of beating, raping, mutilating, and murdering one another. Tribal elders intervene, settling disputes by forcing one clan to pay diyal or blood money to the other. (In Dertu, fifty camels is the standard compensation for homicide—less if the victim is a woman.) Before long, the cycle of violence starts all over again.