The Idealist

by Nina Munk

  In October, in retaliation, Kenyan forces stormed into Somalia—a futile exercise that gave Al Shabab even more reason to terrorize Kenya. The official response from an Al Shabab spokesman: “Mujahideen fighters will force them to taste the pain of the bullets.”

  In Garissa, Al Shabab goons in black balaclavas hurled hand grenades into two churches and fired assault weapons into the crowd of worshippers. North Eastern Province went into lockdown: every Westerner I knew was fleeing; humanitarian agencies were pulling out as fast as they could. Dertu was more isolated than ever. My reporting was done, and my family wanted me home for good. I didn’t have to put my life at risk. But what about the people of Dertu? What choices did they have? To quote Sachs once more: either you decide to leave people to die or you decide to do something about it.

  The drought and violence in North Eastern Province were examples of what the Millennium Villages Project referred to as “artifacts”—unexpected or unintentional disturbances that, through no fault of the project, shatter the bell jar that protects Sachs’s vulnerable experiment. But why in the world were drought and violence and hostage taking unexpected in sub-Saharan Africa?

  Uganda too was in a state of crisis. Everywhere in the country people were being squeezed, the prices of food and gasoline were soaring, and the Ugandan shilling was worth less every day.

  All through 2011 demonstrations, initially small and restricted to Kampala, became larger and more numerous. Protesters were beaten, fired at with rubber bullets and water cannons and tear-gas grenades. The opposition leader Kizza Besigye was arrested, dragged into the back of a pickup truck by heavily armed police officers, and charged with inciting violence and disobedience. In the town of Masaka, halfway between Ruhiira and Kampala, a two-year-old child was killed when military police fired live ammunition at a crowd of unarmed protesters.

  David Siriri prayed that the country was not sliding back to the Uganda of his impoverished youth. He tended to steer clear of politics, but to him it was obvious that the government of Uganda had other priorities: acquiring fighter jets, for example. In the spring of 2011, shortly before he was sworn in for his fourth term in office, it was confirmed that President Museveni had spent $750 million on six brand-new, long-range Su-30MK Russian fighter jets for Uganda’s military. “How can they buy fighter jets while people have nothing to eat, no basic health care, [and] the infrastructure is in tatters?” cried Kizza Besigye. “The money that could be spent to improve our affairs is being stolen or opulently spent on other things.”

  Other unexpected “artifacts” were destabilizing the Millennium Villages’ experiment. In Mali, from one day to another, the democratically elected president, Amadou Toumani Touré, was ousted in a military coup d’état, with the result that one of the most stable countries in Africa was in utter chaos. In the northern city of Timbuktu, Tuareg rebels overran the Millennium project’s offices, stealing everything they could get their hands on, including the project’s computers and its Toyota pickup truck. The staff managed to escape, barely. The project’s team leader, Bakary Yacouba Diabate, paid a member of the Arab militia 500,000 West African CFA francs (about $1,000) to lead himself and his family to safety. They left Timbuktu in the middle of the night, traveling down the Niger River for four days on a pinasse, a long wooden canoe with a small motor. A few days later two other staff members made it out by pinasse, part of an evacuation organized by the World Food Program.

  Before long all of northern Mali, a vast desert region larger than France, had fallen into the hands of radical Islamists linked to Al Qaeda. There were reports of violent repression. Innocent people were being whipped and beaten. A couple accused of having a child outside marriage was stoned to death. A man caught stealing sheep had his hand sawed off.

  There was almost no way to communicate with Toya, the Millennium project’s model village outside Timbuktu; according to people who had escaped by the skin of their teeth, the situation in the village was dire. Tuareg rebels stole the community health workers’ Ericsson cell phones. They stole one hundred tons of fertilizer that had been donated to the Millennium village by the Minnesota-based Mosaic Company. They stole Toya’s entire supply of diesel fuel, with the result that the village’s water pumps were idle and the rice crops could not be irrigated.

  Because of the ongoing catastrophe, the Millennium project was forced to abandon Toya. “What can we do?” said Amadou Niang, director of the Millennium Villages Project for West Africa. “All our gains are lost. All is gone. Five years and four or five million dollars of interventions and everything is lost.”

  Chapter 24

  It Is What It Is

  On October 3, 2011, at the UN Headquarters in New York, Jeffrey Sachs officially launched phase two of the Millennium Villages Project with the stunning announcement that $72 million had been pledged. “Millennium Villages, on Track to Reach 2015 Goals, Launch Final Phase” was the headline of the press release handed out that day. Everything was proceeding according to plan: the project was “an inspiring example” of how to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development goals, a “brighter future” was assured, the end of extreme poverty was in reach.

  Once again George Soros was the project’s lead donor: his foundations were putting up $47 million, nearly two-thirds of the total amount pledged. Standing under the bright lights, Sachs gripped Soros’s hand tightly and smiled.

  The announcement came as a relief to David Siriri. It meant that Ruhiira wouldn’t have to be abandoned after all; he’d been granted a few more years to complete the project. He was determined to solve the daunting problem of the village’s water supply. He would make sure that Ruhiira was at last connected to the national electric grid. He would find cash crops to generate income for the villagers—coffee, for example. Using simple manual pulping machines, local farmers could not only cultivate coffee but process it as well. The idea was promising.

  Sometimes, when he was feeling especially optimistic, Siriri believed he would accomplish all those things and more. Other times, he was not at all sure. The Millennium Villages Project was winding down. Behind the scenes, Sachs was negotiating to raise another $20 million or $30 million from the Islamic Development Bank. Even if that money came through, however, funding for phase two was roughly half of what it had been for phase one: on a per capita basis, Ruhiira’s annual budget would fall to $25 per person. Besides, there were strings attached to the $72 million pledge announced for phase two. For one thing, $20 million of that sum was not guaranteed; it would be made available for loans, contingent on the villages coming up with “investment-worthy business projects” that met with Soros’s approval. For another thing, the $72 million included the value of donated goods and services: mosquito nets from Sumitomo Chemical, antimalaria drugs donated by Novartis, and technical support provided by Ericsson. All through phase one, Siriri had been seriously short of money, and now he was being asked to do with far less. How would he manage?

  According to his bosses in New York, Siriri would have no problem adjusting to this new period of austerity; as soon as funding from the Millennium project dried up, other donors (local governments, NGOs, foreign aid donors) would be stepping in to cover the shortfall. To quote the plan drafted by the Millennium project:

  The Project will work with each host government, both nationally and locally, to ensure a smooth handover of functions over the next five years, so that 2015 does not mark a jarring “discontinuity” when the Project ends. During this time, more of the public services, such as schools and clinics, will rely on the government itself, as funding from the MVP is gradually withdrawn. Timetables will be established with host governments to ensure a smooth handover of leadership positions. Budgetary allocations will be discussed with the host governments as well, so that as MVP support is tapered down, local government and NGO support can sustain or even expand the respective public sector activities.

  To put all that in plain language, interventions that had previously been funded by the Mill
ennium Villages Project—health care, education, agricultural inputs, and infrastructure—would continue to be funded, but only if local governments or foreign aid donors stepped in. How likely was that to happen?

  Siriri doubted that the Ugandan government would make up the shortfall. “The government has even failed to cover its basic budget, so where will they find additional money for Ruhiira?” he told me. “I have talked with them and I can see their sincerity. But they don’t have any money to give. It is not happening.”

  The Millennium villages were well provided for. Relatively speaking, they were “islands of prosperity,” a fact that made it unlikely that they’d be given the government resources that the Millennium project expected and had planned for. Why funnel money to a Millennium village when so many other African villages were in far greater need of support?

  As for depending on international donor agencies, it was wishful thinking. In the first place, the G8 had fallen far short of its promise to double foreign aid to Africa. Moreover, in 2011, for the first time in over a decade, the G8 had actually reduced spending on foreign aid. The United States had cut back its foreign aid budget—not counting “war-related” aid going to Afghanistan and Iraq—and Congress was calling for still more cuts.

  Where on earth would the money come from to complete the work in the Millennium villages? I asked Sachs. “It is what it is,” he replied. “And that’s not meant to be callous.”

  It was 2012. He was fifty-seven and his hair was grayer than I’d remembered. He looked tired—“battle-scarred” was the phrase later used by one member of his staff. In a long, rambling interview in his office at Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library, he answered my questions slowly, with less energy and more caution than usual.

  Back in 2005, Sachs had set out to end extreme poverty once and for all, definitively: the title of his book, The End of Poverty, made clear the huge scope of his ambition. “This is a village that’s going to make history,” he had proclaimed in 2005, while visiting his first Millennium village with Angelina Jolie. “It’s a village that’s going to end extreme poverty.”

  Now, seven years later, he insisted that I’d misunderstood him. “My goal was to help end extreme poverty,” he demurred. “And that remains my goal.” His quest was more modest, more realistic than I had assumed: the Millennium Villages Project was not the definitive answer to poverty, he hedged, but a “working model.” He was “optimistic that he could reach his targets in most places.” He “hoped” (but was no longer certain, I inferred) that the project would continue and that it would be “as self-sustaining as possible.”

  “Am I trying to help governments see why this model is feasible and useful? Yes,” he said. “Do they believe that? Yes. Do they want help doing that? Yes. Is that happening? In many ways, yes. Is it happening as well as it should happen? Not yet. One has to keep pushing.”

  Officially, the Millennium Villages Project wasn’t scheduled to end until 2015, yet it seemed to me that Sachs had distanced himself from his ongoing African experiment. His impassioned articles and speeches and interviews and tweets now centered on income inequality in the United States, climate change, the collapse of Greece, tax reforms, greed on Wall Street, the decline of moral standards, chaos in the euro zone, gun control, and the political vacuum in Washington. He was all over the place.

  Along with other left-leaning economists, he lobbied for a “Robin Hood tax” on Wall Street (take from the rich, give to the poor) and for raising America’s minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9.80. Shouting from a soapbox at Zuccotti Park, he joined the Occupy Wall Street protesters, decrying the immorality of the rich and powerful and accusing “reckless billionaires” of destroying the nation. “That’s why we’re here!” he roared, in the midst of the crowd. “It’s not because we’re envious! It’s not because we think wealth is bad! It’s because we think you cheat! It’s because you don’t follow the law! It’s because you don’t pay your taxes!”

  He’d had a realization: the world’s problems were so deeply interconnected that it was no longer possible to focus solely on poverty, hunger, and disease in Africa. “For a long time,” he said, “I wanted to simplify the problems by putting aside the rich world’s issues and so forth and focusing on extreme poverty. But it’s all interconnected.” A huge storm (“this very, very dark cloud,” in his words) was moving in: humanity was facing an overwhelming number of urgent and overlapping economic, environmental, and social threats. The title of one of his many jeremiads is “A World Adrift.”

  In one of his op-eds published in The New York Times (“The New Progressive Movement”), Sachs outlined a manifesto for radical change in society: “To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all.” In the Financial Times, he accused both Democrats and Republicans of being “accomplices to the premeditated asphyxiation of the state.” Using his Twitter account (@JeffDSachs), he fired off hundreds of 140-character screeds: “The ancient Greeks called it kakistocracy: government by the most unprincipled”; “The people who ‘won’t’ help themselves are the Wall Street bankers getting $$$$ taxpayer bailouts”; “Incompetent German leadership is killing the Eurozone”; “The ‘debate’ on energy shows the deceit & shortsightedness of our politics. Not a word about climate change. Gutless”; “America’s a corporatocracy now”; “Memo to the next president: Need a plan to reduce carbon emissions and help save this planet”; “News Corp is neck deep in corruption. Fox, WSJ: lies & more lies”; “Washington caters to the rich, ignores the rest.”

  Sachs was like a sawed-off shotgun, scattering ammunition in all directions, and the result was a watering down of his message, whatever the message happened to be. The media no longer portrayed him as a “virtuoso” or a “wunderkind.” The “Jeff Sachs for President” committee, established at the height of his celebrity in 2005, had been disbanded, its sachsforpresident.org website a blank. His most recent book, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity, published in late 2011, had not been particularly well received: The New York Times hadn’t bothered to review it.

  For a brief time in the spring of 2012, Sachs put himself in the running to become president of the World Bank, though he had no hope of being elected. “Mr. Sachs’s chances of getting the job are slim,” to quote The Economist. “Mr. Sachs has … ridden the wave of celebrity, teaming up often with such stars as the U2 singer, Bono. But those days of poverty porn at rock concerts (slo-mo famine on giant screens to accompany the music) have also drawn to a close.”

  Sachs’s office window was streaked with rain. He had spent nearly two hours answering my questions, and they were starting to irritate him. It had been a long day. For a few moments, we sat in silence. Then he said: “I believe in the contingency of life.” There are no certainties. Nothing can be predicted. “When I say I have conviction, it’s the conviction that this is the best we can do. I’m not betting the planet on anything. This isn’t one grand roll of the dice. The world is complicated, hard, and messy.”

  In the beginning, Jeffrey Sachs had set out on a quest to validate his scientific approach to ending poverty. He’d used the Millennium Villages Project as a laboratory to test his theories and to prove that his series of “interventions” could transform the lives of the world’s poorest people. He’d spent more than $120 million on his experiment. For all that, however, he had misjudged the complex, shifting reality in the villages. Africa is not a laboratory: Africa is chaotic and messy and unpredictable.

  “You can have a firm conviction even in an uncertain world—it’s the best you can do, actually—and that is the nature of my conviction,” Sachs concluded. “I don’t feel it’s worth asking if this is the best of the best—it’s the best we can do with what we have.”

  Author’s Note

  For many years I reported on big corporations and on people we now refer to as “the one percent,” first for Forbes, Fortune, and The New York Times Magazine, then for Vani
ty Fair. I interviewed billionaires on their Gulfstreams, on their yachts, in Greenwich, Connecticut, on the island of Mustique, and one time on a chairlift in Sun Valley, Idaho. I wrote about a hedge fund manager who was building a house for himself that was bigger than the Taj Mahal. I published a book about the failed $163 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner.

  By 2006, I’d had enough. That year somebody spent $140 million for a Jackson Pollock—the highest price ever paid for a painting, apparently. For the first time in history, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 12,000. That was also the year that housing prices hit their peak. Something was out of whack, off-kilter. And suddenly it struck me: the one story that really mattered was the story of poverty.

  Beginning in the fall of 2006, on assignment from Vanity Fair, I spent six months reporting on Jeffrey Sachs’s campaign to end extreme poverty. I traveled with him to three sub-Saharan African countries, sat in on meetings with heads of state, heard him give countless speeches, and threw myself into the task of understanding the history, or failed history, of international development. Eventually, the six months I spent following Sachs stretched out to six years and resulted in this book.

  I wanted to write about Africans who live in extreme poverty. I wanted their stories to be heard. “Above all,” I wrote in my initial proposal for this book, “I would like to write a story of hope.” It was a sobering task, illuminating, and far more difficult than I imagined.

  Tracing the flow of foreign aid to Africa, and sitting in on backroom negotiations in New York, Washington, London, and in the presidential palaces of some of Africa’s capital cities, I started to grasp the complex politics of poverty. I recorded hundreds of hours of interviews and filled so many notebooks that, stacked up, they looked like model skyscrapers on my desk.