The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  Theirs was a “very strict Christian household,” according to David Siriri. At the family’s parish church, Siriri’s mother was head of the Mothers’ Union, an influential Anglican women’s association devoted to upholding Christian values in the home and to teaching children the “habits of obedience, self-control, purity, and truth.” David was an altar boy, so pious and hardworking that it was taken for granted that he would one day be ordained as a priest. The family gathered for prayers every evening, Sundays were devoted to churchgoing and prayer, and the children learned to read by using the Bible as a primer. Alcohol, cigarettes, and cursing were forbidden in the Siriri household. “We were instructed to always live our lives according to the fruit of the Spirit,” Siriri said, referring to the nine attributes of a true Christian life as described by the apostle Paul: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance (Galatians 5:22–23).

  When they were not in school or in church, the Siriri children tilled, weeded, and harvested the family farm. David and his brothers managed the ox-plow, with one boy driving the oxen and another steadying the plow. Cotton-harvesting season was especially intense: even the youngest children were needed to pick, clean, and sort the cotton. As they moved through the fields, trailed by long burlap sacks that weighed up to one hundred pounds when full, their hands bled from picking the thorny plants. If the children did not work hard enough, their father beat them with a stick.

  It was only later that the Siriris realized that they’d been mistaken about the future. On January 25, 1971, exactly six weeks after David Siriri was born, Idi Amin staged a coup d’état, seizing power from the corrupt and oppressive Milton Obote, Uganda’s first prime minister. Thousands of cheering Ugandans thronged the streets of Kampala to celebrate their new president and liberator. “I am not an ambitious man, personally,” Idi Amin assured the people modestly. “I am just a soldier with a concern for my country and for my people.”

  Before long, Uganda was sliding into chaos. Idi Amin was not a liberator; he turned out to be a despot who ravaged the country. During his eight-year reign, his goons and death squads shot or bludgeoned to death an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Ugandans. By the thousands their mutilated bodies were dumped into Lake Victoria. “Even Amin does not know how many people he has ordered to be executed,” Uganda’s health minister, Henry Kyemba, told the journalist Russell Miller when Kyemba defected to Britain in 1977. “The country is littered with bodies.”

  Any hope of prosperity evaporated when Amin ordered the immediate expulsion of all Ugandans of Asian descent, many of whose ancestors had been brought to Africa from India generations earlier, thanks to the British. In Amin’s populist rhetoric, Uganda’s Asians were “economic saboteurs,” when in fact they had propelled the country’s economic growth. Amin confiscated, nationalized, and ruined companies the Asians had built. Thereafter investors scrambled to get out of Uganda; exports of coffee, tea, and cotton dropped by more than half; and the economy came to a standstill.

  Although Idi Amin was forced out of power in 1979, his absence did nothing to stop Uganda’s decline. Instead, the country spiraled into a state of anarchy. In hindsight, it becomes clear that 1970, the year before Idi Amin came to power, had been Uganda’s greatest moment of promise.

  “My parents had been part of the post-independence professional rush,” David Siriri told me. “But unfortunately things turned terribly bad. The period I remember as a child was a horrible one. The scarcity of things—you can hardly imagine! I can remember we had no sugar, no salt, no soap. There was no petrol in the whole country. I remember as a young boy lining up for a whole day to get half a kilo of sugar on the black market. And I remember the war near the end of Idi Amin’s days in power. We had to abandon school because the soldiers were all over and they were looting our homes and stealing and killing people indiscriminately. It was a tormenting time.”

  To save themselves, the Siriri family fled their home and hid in the bush. In their absence, Idi Amin’s soldiers ransacked the house, destroyed the farm, and stole the oxen. Afterwards Siriri’s mother suffered a stroke. Her brain was damaged and the left side of her body was paralyzed. She was twenty-eight years old. “There was nothing we could do to help,” recalls Siriri. “The doctor had abandoned our hospital, there was no medicine, and we couldn’t move her to a bigger hospital because there was no petrol and it was too dangerous to move around the country.” Left with nothing, the family turned to prayer. “Only by clinging to God could we get out of the terrible situation we were in,” said Siriri.

  Salvation came in the form of the Christian Children’s Fund, an American charity that pioneered child “sponsorship” programs in Africa. Using heartrending footage of starving children, and starring the actress Sally Struthers (All in the Family), CCF’s television commercials in the 1980s persuaded tens of thousands of Americans to donate seventy cents a day to “help change the life of a child forever.”

  One of those children was David Siriri. Sponsored by an American family who paid for his tuition and his lunch (a bowl of posho, or cornmeal porridge), Siriri returned to the local primary school. A few years later, in the national exam required for admission to secondary school, Siriri received the highest possible grade, outperforming every student in Pallisa District. Once again CCF came through with a sponsor willing to underwrite Siriri’s secondary school education, in the town of Budaka.

  Meanwhile, like most Ugandans, Siriri’s parents were sinking into extreme poverty. His mother was too weak to work, and with the collapse of the Ugandan shilling, his father’s salary was almost worthless. Unable to afford oxen or laborers, the family regressed to the most basic subsistence farming. At first, they made a bit of money by renting out their land. Then, acre by acre, they were forced to sell off their one asset.

  Only by the grace of God, thought David Siriri, did he go on to university. At the time, there was just one university in Uganda—the esteemed Makerere University, established by the British in 1922 and free to anyone who could pass its entrance exam. The year Siriri applied, he was one of approximately 100,000 Ugandans competing for 2,000 spots. He’d long ago dropped the idea of becoming a priest; now he hoped to be a medical doctor. For one reason or another, however, on that Monday in the summer of 1991 when Makerere announced the results of its entrance exam, he found out that he’d been accepted at the School of Agricultural Sciences. So be it: it was a blessing, a sign from God.

  At university, Siriri became his family’s main income producer, living so frugally that he was able to send home practically all the money awarded to him for living expenses. By borrowing textbooks from friends, he freed up at least half his 100,000-shilling book allowance. On weekends, by hauling two-hundred-pound bags of corn on his bicycle, he earned another 30,000 to 50,000 shillings—money that paid his younger siblings’ school fees.

  On earning his B.Sc. in 1995, Siriri ranked first in a class of eighty-one agriculture students. He stayed on at Makerere University, completing a master’s degree while working part-time at the World Agroforestry Center. The job paid $300 a month. “Boy, that was a lot of money for me!” Siriri later recalled. “I was living on the bare minimum. I used one hundred dollars to cover tuition for my brothers and sisters, and the rest I saved.” Within a few years, he had saved enough to build a permanent house for his parents. He also bought himself a quarter-acre plot of land in a suburb of Kampala. It was his first hard asset.

  In 2003 Siriri won a Commonwealth Scholarship to attend the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, where he would earn a Ph.D. in agroforestry. Married by that time, and the father of a two-year-old girl, Siriri now supported more people than ever. In Nottingham, he worked in a restaurant six nights a week, from six p.m. until midnight, earning enough money to allow him to send home much of the £750 monthly stipend that came with his scholarship.

  Soon after being granted his Ph.D., Siriri was hired to launch the Millennium Villages Project in Ruhiir
a. What impressed him most was the project’s deep pockets: $120 million to end poverty in a dozen villages! “I was used to organizations where you were always having to write proposals for more money,” he said. “But in this case, the money was already in place—enough to last for five years! I’d never heard of that before.”

  What did concern Siriri was his job description; it was vague. “I spent a week in Nairobi at an orientation workshop,” he said. “The principles of the Millennium project were explained to us—the objectives, the template. They emphasized the holistic, integrated nature of the project. I understood that we were working on a hypothesis; that on a hundred and twenty dollars per person per year, you can get people out of poverty. But to be honest, the project was not well defined. The objectives of the project were clear—what was less clear was how to achieve those objectives.”

  Chapter 11

  A Green Revolution

  From the moment he arrived in Ruhiira in 2006, David Siriri recognized that the easiest way to increase household income was by cutting out as many matoke middlemen as possible. Every farmer in Ruhiira grows the green matoke banana, and traditionally those farmers sold their matoke to “banana boys”—enterprising traders who trekked far into the hills, climbing the steep footpaths that lead from one remote farm to another.

  Sebuuma Sadati, age fifteen, was one of Ruhiira’s many banana boys. Enrolled off and on at the local primary school, he hoped eventually to complete grade seven. In the meantime, he’d staked out his turf on one of Ruhiira’s isolated hills, buying matoke from farmers at 3,500 to 4,000 shillings ($1.50 to $2) a stalk. Buying as much as he could carry, usually five stalks, Sadati would push his overloaded bicycle for twenty miles along the dirt road to a collection center in the town of Mbarara, where he resold his produce to brokers at a markup of 1,000 shillings a stalk.

  You had to be strong to work this job, and you had to be able to protect your turf from competitors. Sometimes, to fend off other banana boys, Sadati pulled out his panga machete—but only as a theat. All things considered, it wasn’t a bad job, and as far as Sadati could tell, the pay was good: for a full day’s work, he could earn 5,000 shillings, or $2.50.

  Sadati and his fellow banana boys were the first link in the matoke market chain; then, as matoke made its way north, from Mbarara to Kampala, four more middlemen got involved, each one taking a cut of the profits until finally, at grocery stores in Kampala, the matoke sold for 10,000 shillings a stalk. “A typical, inefficient exploitive market chain” is how Erastus Kibugu, country director for TechnoServe Uganda, described the disorderly sale of Ruhiira’s matoke to me. “And the farmers are the most exploited of all.”

  Backed by TechnoServe, an American NGO whose slogan is “Business Solutions to Poverty,” David Siriri encouraged individual matoke farmers to join cooperatives and sell their crop, in bulk, directly to buyers from Kampala. By carrying their matoke bunches to a central location in Ruhiira, and selling them to traders by the truckload, the farmers were now selling their matoke at an average of 8,000 shillings ($4) a bunch, twice what they earned by selling to banana boys. It helped too that Siriri had trained the farmers to increase the space between matoke plants—with more sunlight, matoke grown in Ruhiira was bigger and healthier than ever.

  Almost overnight you could see the impact of higher earnings from matoke. In the village center, wedged between Newkars Tea House and Classic Saloon & Barbers (“All Hair Styles”), there was now a bar with a pool table. At 1,600 shillings, a bottle of Pilsner Lager was still a luxury for most villagers. But the local moonshine, a banana gin known as waragi, sold fast at 500 shillings (25 cents) a glass. No one seemed to mind that waragi is illegal in Uganda, or that thousands of Ugandans are poisoned each year by toxic waragi.

  Siriri didn’t approve of alcohol; he had never tasted beer, let alone hard liquor. Nevertheless, it was a sign of Ruhiira’s increased prosperity that on almost any day of the week a dozen men or more could be found hanging around outside the bar, idly drinking waragi and shooting pool at 500 shillings a game. The bar’s owner was earning as much as 6,000 shillings a day from pool games alone, all because of the villagers’ increased earnings from matoke. He couldn’t believe his luck, he told me, grinning widely.

  Siriri too was pleased with the surge in earnings from matoke. As he was the first to acknowledge, however, matoke alone could never be profitable enough to support the people of Ruhiira. To actually end poverty—to make a decisive difference in household incomes—the people would have to diversify their crops. “Agriculture,” Jeffrey Sachs told his staff in one of their meetings, “is the economic pillar of this whole project. Without gains in agricultural yields, nothing else can be accomplished.”

  As a Ph.D. student, Siriri had focused on ways to reduce soil erosion and improve yields. To regenerate leached soil, he’d proposed planting tree fallows (as opposed to natural fallows) and had conducted experiments to discover which species had the greatest impact on fertility. In Ruhiira, where the depleted soil had led to years of declining agricultural yields, Siriri set out to put his academic studies to good use.

  In Ruhiira, farms were so small (officially, 0.32 acres per household) that the people could barely grow enough food to feed themselves. Agricultural practices were outdated. No one used chemical fertilizers or high-yield seeds. There was no irrigation. As for tractors, or even ox-powered farming implements: for the small-hold farmer in Ruhiira, a hand hoe was as far as it got.

  Jeffrey Sachs was determined to change all that. Just as he had persuaded the world to distribute mosquito nets to people in malaria-prone areas, so he set out to bring fertilizers, high-yield seeds, and irrigation not only to Ruhiira but to all of rural Africa. “It’s a little more complicated than distributing bed nets,” he told me, “but it’s not the most complicated thing we’ll ever do on this planet. In fact, it’s relatively straightforward.”

  As a model for Africa, Sachs pointed to India, where until the late 1960s the subcontinent couldn’t grow enough food to feed its exploding population. India was heading toward mass starvation, warned Paul Ehrlich in his best-selling book of 1968, The Population Bomb. And yet by the early 1970s, thanks to an initiative financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, modern agronomy was introduced to the Indian subcontinent: high-yield and disease-resistant wheat seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, training. In a single decade, between 1967 and 1977, rural poverty fell from 64 percent to 50 percent—and then to 34 percent in 1986. India was saved by the so-called Green Revolution, “one of the most important triumphs of targeted science in the past century,” according to Sachs.

  Sachs was proposing nothing less than a Green Revolution for Africa. “The good news to me is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with African agriculture that can’t be quickly improved,” he said in a speech delivered in London in 2007. “There’s overwhelming systematic evidence that you can improve yields by a factor of two or three … and that productivity won’t take a generation to double, but could be doubled actually from one growing season to the next.”

  Improving yields for small-hold African farmers would end malnutrition. It might also eliminate the need for emergency food aid. For Sachs the ultimate goal of a Green Revolution for Africa was economic growth. “It’s like hitting the sixty-four-billion-dollar jackpot,” he continued enthusiastically. “If you can double agriculture productivity in a few years, you’re talking about ten or fifteen percent aggregate GNP growth in a very short period of time. As a macroeconomist, I can tell you I believe absolutely seriously in that. Easy!”

  In meeting after meeting, he lobbied the World Bank and international donors to subsidize agricultural inputs in Africa. In articles and in chapters of his books, he argued that fertilizer and hybrid seeds were the answer to extreme poverty. He lectured on the subject. In the United States, he noted, farmers receive $15 billion a year in subsidies. In Europe, the figure is around $70 billion. Why, even the average European cow is better off than the average African
farmer: a Swiss dairy cow receives an estimated $4,000 a year in subsidies! And yet when it comes to African farmers, railed Sachs, we balk at subsidies of any kind.

  It did not escape Sachs’s notice, of course, that whether they were opposing mosquito nets or opposing agricultural subsidies, donors and development experts tended to fall back on the same stale talking points. Some experts insisted that subsidies would smother ambition and create a culture of dependency. Others worried about sustainability: Given the lack of credit available to poor Africans, how would farmers finance inputs once their subsidies were withdrawn? Still others were skeptical of Sachs’s claim that Africans don’t use fertilizer because they can’t afford it.

  In her study of agricultural inputs in western Kenya, the development economist Esther Duflo found that nearly every farmer intended to use and could afford to buy at least a small amount of fertilizer; by the time planting season actually arrived, however, only one-third of the farmers actually followed through. Yes, they understood the economic benefits of using fertilizer, she reported, but most of them chose to spend their money on other things. The gap between intention and outcome was not unlike an American worker choosing not to invest in his company’s retirement plan, despite the obvious long-term benefits. In the language of behavioral economists, Duflo’s African farmers displayed “present-biased preferences”; in other words, they preferred immediate gratification to future rewards.