The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  The community latrines paid for by the Millennium Villages Project were clogged or overflowing, or else they had caved in; no one could agree on whose job it was to maintain them. In a ditch piled high with rotting garbage, a frenzied flock of Marabou storks ripped apart the carcass of some beast. Flimsy polyurethane bags, officially banned by the Millennium project, clung to every brake and thornbush. The Garbage Committee had ceased to function, if it ever did function. No one knew what had happened to the 60,000 Ksh that Ahmed had given the committee to buy rakes and wheelbarrows.

  It wasn’t easy to impose order on Dertu. The government of Kenya had tried to create a town plan of sorts. But as soon as the people of Dertu heard that their haphazard settlements were to be razed, their aqals torn down and replaced by the government’s version of progress, a fight had broken out: the people weren’t about to move. “They say, ‘Our village was here before you came,’ ” reported Ahmed. “They say, ‘We will not agree to your plan. This is our village not yours.’ ” In a matter of months, the land surveyors sent by the government had been chased out of town.

  Without a formal government survey, there could be no land titles or property rights, and without land titles or property rights, nothing of permanence could be built in Dertu. “Oh dear, oh dear, I am so frustrated!” cried Ahmed. “How can you implement without a plan? How can you design a town without a map? How can you build a permanent house if someone will come along and say to you, ‘My camels used to graze here—this is my land, remove the house’?”

  He paused, apparently to reflect on what he had just said. “You cannot,” he concluded.

  By 2010, over a period of just three and a half years, the Millennium Villages Project and its partners had poured $2.5 million into Dertu. Inevitably, perhaps, there were growing rifts between neighbors, caused by infighting and envy. Clans quarreled for control over the project’s largesse. The village’s growing resources had thrust the people of Dertu into a new economic order marked by inequality. People were more discontented than usual. And neither Ahmed nor Idris seemed prepared to defuse the situation. On such matters, the Millennium Villages Handbook does not offer guidance.

  Sahlan understood that to prosper in the new Dertu, you had to know the right people. Even that wasn’t enough; to survive, you needed ingenuity and cunning. She had half a dozen competitors now, tea shops started by pastoralist dropouts, many of whom, it occurred to her, were more resourceful than she was. At first, she’d been grateful to the Millennium Villages Project for the taste of material wealth it offered her, but now she craved so much more. She realized she’d been mistaken to believe that her future would be any different from her past.

  Squatting over a three-stone fire, still making chapatis and chai for the customers of her tea shop, Sahlan cataloged the Millennium project’s sins of omission; it hadn’t delivered what it promised. “They have not built permanent houses,” she told me sullenly, “they have not brought us more water, they have not put up a secondary school, they have not supported people with money to start businesses, and in the rainy season the road is still not passable.”

  Madame Sofia, Dertu’s school principal, was just as unhappy. For one thing, she had given up her television set; it used more fuel than she could afford. The Millennium Villages Project had given her hope, when in fact there was no hope, or so it seemed to her. The new classrooms she had been promised were never built, a partially constructed storeroom was left unfinished, and the laptop computers donated by Sony had not been connected to the Internet. (Apparently, the computers themselves had vanished.)

  We walked across the school’s dusty playing field. “According to expectations,” Madame Sofia went on, “the Millennium has not been good to us.” Yes, she admitted, two new dormitories had been built, but already they had fallen into disrepair. SUPPORTED BY THE MILLENNIUM VILLAGES PROJECT, read a hand-painted sign outside the boys’ dormitory, OFFICIALLY OPENED 23RD MARCH 2009. She pointed to the broken windows and the flaking walls covered in graffiti. Showers had been installed, but there was no running water. A metal utility sink had been ripped from the wall. The overhead light didn’t work. Behind the top bunk of a rusting bed, someone had scrawled: “Millenion [sic] have done nothing in this school.”

  One of Dertu’s more prominent citizens, Ali Abdi Mohamed, owner of the Al-Aqsa Drug-Store, filed a written complaint against the Millennium Villages Project. With the help of a computer-literate friend in Garissa, he outlined the community’s grievances in a three-page (typed) letter, which he then delivered to Farah Maalim, member of parliament for the district that encompasses Dertu:

  COMPLAIN AGAINST MVP

  1. The project was supposed to be community driven, but MVP staff driven project hence this created dependence syndrome;

  2. The project is supposed to be bottom top approached but it is visa versa;

  3. No sense of ownership of the project;

  4. No transparency and accountability;

  5. Offices operate from Garissa which is 100 kilometers [away]. Most of the project funds is used to hire vehicles;

  6. No planning of project and implementation i.e. sitting together with the community for planning;

  7. Some of the goals were neglected i.e. empowerment of women;

  8. Field office not operational and building is semipermanent;

  9. Maternity wing no light and women are delivering in the dark;

  10. Dormitory constructed by MVP but no beds, mattresses, bed sheets and pillows and also no light i.e. children are lying on the floor;

  11. Incompetent staffs are working on the project i.e. nutritionist as a community facilitator;

  12. Whenever a visitor comes to Dertu they don’t allow community and the visitors to exchange ideas and views;

  13. They use divide and rule system of colonials to carry out their interest;

  14. Four computers donated to the school through MVP and no where to be seen.

  In a nutshell, those fourteen complaints summed up the dissatisfaction felt in all the villages. Hardly perceptible at first, a profound pessimism had settled over the entire Millennium Villages Project.

  At the Millennium Villages’ head office in New York, so many staff members had quit or been replaced that I finally lost track. Peter Kaye, the chief marketing officer (“a strategist with a passion for making a difference”), was gone within a year of joining the project. His position was eliminated, the idea of mining “channels of consumer giving” having been dropped, apparently. Geoff Gottlieb, a young economist whom Sachs had hired with fanfare to develop the Millennium project’s agricultural credit program, also left after a year. Even Rustom Masalawala had been let go. He never did manage to convince a social investment fund to underwrite business ventures in the Millennium villages.

  “In hindsight it’s like we were set up to fail,” said a member of Sachs’s inner circle in New York. “It’s not that Jeff’s ideas are wrong—he’s a big, inspiring thinker. It’s that the project’s ambition moved more quickly than the capacity. It makes me feel like a chump. It makes me feel totally hollow.”

  In Nairobi, the Millennium team for East Africa started to bad-mouth the executives in New York. Sachs and his deputy, John McArthur, were “imperial” and “arrogant.” “They ask no questions, they solicit no information,” said one frustrated manager when I passed through Nairobi. “It’s just one long monologue from New York—orders given to be executed by us. They are utterly out of touch with what is actually going on.”

  The term rural development tourism was coined by the scholar Robert Chambers in Rural Development, his influential 1983 book about why outsiders remain ignorant about rural poverty. His thesis, in short, is this: with their “hectic excursions from the urban centre,” development experts don’t see behind the facade. The more distinguished a visitor happens to be, the greater his ignorance and self-deception. “They come, and they sign the book, and they go. They only talk with the buildings,” writes Chambers, quoting de
stitute Africans. “Ils ne savent pas qu’il y a ici des gens vivant”—“They don’t realize there are living people here.”

  Jeffrey Sachs’s observations on the ground were necessarily limited—by the pressures of time, by language, culture, education, background, preconceptions, and ingrained models of thought. Wherever he went in Africa, he was greeted by a spectacle: villagers danced for him, dignitaries put on their Sunday suits and praised him, dozens of photos were snapped, and just before his arrival, schools and clinics were scrubbed clean. His view of what was happening in the villages wasn’t wrong; it was incomplete. Real progress had been made, by all means; nevertheless, the villages had serious, deep-rooted problems, problems that for one reason or another Sachs refused to acknowledge.

  Ali Abdi Mohamed had suggested in his written complaint that Sachs and his team were guilty of neocolonialism. Anthropologists might phrase it differently: in their view, economists like Sachs tend to approach development with a set of assumptions that are “breathtakingly ethnocentric and empirically incorrect,” to quote Katy Gardner and David Lewis’s Anthropology, Development and the Post-Modern Challenge. Blinded by an “inherently optimistic” Western view of modernization, they begin with the premise that there is one path to economic growth—their own.

  “This is not meant to be a command-and-control project,” Sachs told me, “so I’m glad to hear I don’t know everything happening in the field.” Sometimes, however, I suspected that Sachs didn’t really want to know what was going on in his villages. His theories were trumping reality. By 2010 the Millennium Villages Project had become a cumbersome bureaucracy with hundreds of dependent employees. One hundred twenty million dollars and Sachs’s reputation were riding on the outcome of this social experiment in Africa. Was anyone prepared to smash the glass and pull the emergency cord?

  Chapter 21

  What Mistake Has Ahmed Done?

  Exactly four years after he joined the Millennium Villages Project, in the spring of 2010, Ahmed Mohamed was fired. He never saw it coming, and months after the fact he was still in disbelief. The slope of his shoulders, the long, deep lines on his face, the listless gait—he looked defeated. “They sent auditors,” he said when we met one evening for dinner in Garissa. “They spread misinformation. Money is missing, but God forbid I have not taken the money or even a small baby cow in Dertu! I have my morals!”

  Again and again Ahmed replayed the chain of events that had led to his dismissal. “For me being a very straight and honest person, I went to Nairobi to discuss the problem,” he explained, justifying himself. “But I am not aware that already a decision has been reached by the Millennium system. I am too sincere. In the middle of the meeting, I am told, ‘Ahmed, a decision has been made—you will not be in Dertu anymore.’ ”

  That night, unable to sleep, he wrote an e-mail to Jeffrey Sachs. “I wanted to know what he felt about it,” he told me. “I was trying to cool myself at this trying moment of my life.” The following day he received in response a brief e-mail. “It is an internal matter,” wrote Sachs. “I can do nothing about it.”

  “That was the last communication we had,” said Ahmed. “I am feeling betrayed. I am feeling I was abandoned. I had worked with this project very, very sincerely, even putting in my own money, and all my own time. For the community of Dertu and the future generations of Dertu, I know I did a lot. I changed many people’s lives. I am proud of that. It is always good to be sincere, and one day we will know the truth. If you are a sincere person, truth will always prevail. In myself I know I have contributed—I have contributed immensely, I have contributed sincerely, I have contributed tremendously. So in me I feel I am a giant, and I know one day I will get my likeness. The rest, God knows. I have no regrets. I will forgive, but to forget is difficult.”

  He poked at his uneaten plate of rice and chicken. “Please,” he said, “I am asking Jeff one question: What mistake has Ahmed done to deserve this?”

  What mistake had Ahmed made? According to his immediate boss, Belay Begashaw, an Ethiopian responsible for the Millennium Villages Project in East Africa, “The reason Ahmed left us is because he finished his contract with us. You know how many people’s contracts we terminate each week? It’s a totally normal process. If your contract is finished, it is finished. Ahmed finished his contract with us.”

  Sitting in his office in Nairobi, Begashaw crossed his arms defiantly. A short, solidly built man with a small mustache, he was wearing a gray suit and an open-collared purple shirt stretched tightly over his broad stomach. When I asked for a copy of the auditor’s report on Dertu, he scowled. “Which report?” he replied with a straight face. “Honestly I do not know of this report. There are many reports. Every month we are sending people to the villages to review work. People are coming with all kinds of reports.”

  He looked at his watch. It was big and very shiny. He went on: “We send people every day to write reports. This is a very normal process. This is absolutely normal actually. Like other villages there are some issues to be corrected. It’s just a normal course.”

  Back in New York, I was given the same story, more or less. “Look, these are internal HR issues, not public information. I’m trying to be as helpful as I can,” John McArthur said unhelpfully. “If there was a management change with my staff, I’m not going to talk to a—well, frankly, I’m not going to give a journalist the exact details on that.”

  And what about the auditor’s report? “It was an internal audit, not an external audit. KPMG was brought in to do an internal report, which is different from calling it an external audit for formal public review,” McArthur said, unraveling the semantics of forensic accounting.

  “In these management systems, you have a process,” he continued. “You know—program planning, budgeting, resource tracking, checking of outcomes. And we had—well, there were concerns that were raised that this wasn’t tight enough. You know, ‘How does A link to B link to C?’ And we had questions as to how A was linked to B was linking to C. In a very difficult environment, obviously, you need to have a systematic check on that stuff. And there’s no bank in the middle of Dertu with transactions slips and everything, so there’s just a lot of complex systems to check. And so that’s what they did—they went in and said, ‘How are these systems working? How are plans being linked to resources being linked to tracking on these resources and linked to outcomes?’ And we learned that the systems needed to be strengthened considerably.”

  He paused, composed himself, and then went on, slowly now: “Look, I can only say the same thing in so many ways. We decided they needed to be strengthened, all these pieces. It’s a systems issue. There was no finding of mass misbehavior, but you still have to submit receipts so that you can cross-reference—you know, is the thing there in the end, is everything being tracked appropriately, and is there an accountant sitting there managing every entry and cross-referencing, and are the appropriate dual signatures going on every check and all that stuff. That doesn’t mean the money’s gone missing. It means that your systems aren’t tracking everything. That’s an accounting function. So that’s the type of thing we decided needed to be strengthened—how all this stuff is tracked.”

  Was he trying to say that money had not been stolen in Dertu? “You know, I can’t say that with certainty—and frankly I don’t really want to get into it,” McArthur replied. “I can’t say that no money was stolen because I’m not there and I don’t have the report in front of me.… One of the problems was that there wasn’t proper accounting staff in place. And so in that environment certain people can take advantage and they can do marginal misbehavior or they can do significant misbehavior. Might people have done marginal misbehavior? It’s possible. I do know that the reporting systems weren’t what they needed to be to track, you know, every expenditure in a way that we felt was adequate.”

  Would it be possible to get a copy of the KPMG report? “I don’t think so,” he answered. “No, I don’t think it’s possible.”
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  One afternoon in late spring, a few weeks after Ahmed was fired, I sat down with Jeffrey Sachs in the garden of his town house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. How much did he know and care about the loss of his top man in Dertu? “Basically, I don’t really know in detail the story of what happened in Dertu,” he began casually. “I liked Ahmed and was, you know, impressed by him, but apparently the community was not.”

  Columbia University had paid $8 million for Sachs’s town house in 2002, part of a package of benefits designed to lure him from Harvard. Apart from its six bedrooms and working fireplaces, what makes the house particularly appealing is its south-facing garden. The day we met, with the tulips in full bloom, he was grateful for that garden. He’d been up most of the night working to meet the deadline on his new book, The Price of Civilization, a critical diagnosis of America’s economic and political ills. Of course, Africa and the Millennium Villages Project were of foremost importance to him. Increasingly, however, Sachs found himself preoccupied with catastrophes in his own country. Paralysis in Washington, the budget deficit, a president beholden to lobbyists, the decline of civic virtue—“a first-rate mess,” he called it.

  Sachs returned to the subject of Ahmed: “I think he was, or they felt he was, forming cliques and not doing the right things, and we heard also—you know, we heard from the community, we heard from the local parliamentarian, and I heard internally that they were not impressed by him. I wasn’t part of the review, but apparently there was a lot of community unhappiness. The parliamentarian felt Ahmed wasn’t doing a good job, that he was losing a lot of opportunities, that things should be moving faster, and that the community was not happy, you know, in terms of openness, participation, transparency, and all the rest.”

  Sachs went on: “For me it was hard to judge, but anyway I don’t follow these things site by site, so I’m not going to get into the details. You know, we’ve changed lots of staff in this project. It’s a big project. There are hundreds of people, and I believe, I mean, there are just so many things going on, this is not a major stumbling block. There’s lots of staff changing over time.