The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  The Barack Obama who uncomplainingly wrote those memos on behalf of his higher ups was a changed man. Although he had resurrected the title Dr. Obama with aplomb and continued to visit the plush hotels like the elegant Nairobi Serena and the legendary Norfolk with his flusher friends, the old flourish was missing. A white pickup truck had replaced the gleaming Mercedes. Some friends joked he had made the change to limit the number of people who could drive with him. Instead of pricey Benson and Hedges cigarettes, he now smoked 555s or the local Sportsman. The pipe belonged largely to the past. Although Obama continued to beat out a rhumba with any young girl who might join him, the days when he pulled on his elegant white suit and strutted on to the dance floor at the Starlight Club before an admiring crowd were over. There was about him a quieter and more subdued air, especially when he was in the office or with people he did not know well. Obama could always manage to find a battle in which to take a side, not unlike the debates in which he so excelled during his Maseno School days, but the larger war was over. “Even when he finally had the job, the damage had been done. It was too little, too late,” said Aringo. “He had accumulated a great deal of debt and he could not stand that he could not maintain the village family in the manner that he should be able to do as a senior person. His children were not doing particularly well either and that weighed on him.”

  But there also was much about Obama that remained the same. Just as Masakhalia and Mule aimed to reduce Obama’s interactions with other employees, to limit his engagement on teams, for example, so Obama did his best to steer clear of those in the office whom he considered his inferior. He whispered not so quietly that they were “intellectual dwarfs.” When he arrived in the Ministry’s Treasury Department, Obama met another economist named James Otieno who worked as a planning officer in the Natural Resources Section. A Luo like Obama, Otieno and he shared a network of associations back home. Otieno was an intense, highly skilled economist himself and could easily hold his own with the newcomer in infrastructure. Otieno had little of Obama’s boisterous sense of humor, but the two men shared both a passion for intellectual debate and a large appetite for cigarettes and alcohol. Some laughingly likened the pair to “The Two Ronnies,” a popular British comedy show at the time about two men named Ronnie. “Jim was a bit temperamental, a bit touchy, not as social as Barack,” said Alex Obondo, an insurance executive and a close drinking friend of Obama’s. “But they got along well because they were very brilliant and their brains worked on the same level.”

  Impatient with the detritus of the daily office interchange, Otieno also preferred to keep his distance from others. And so it was that Otieno and Obama adopted their own personal working schedule. They arrived at the office as early as 5 a.m., well before the Treasury corridors began to fill, and toiled quietly in their separate offices. By noon they were done. They then headed to the Kaloleni Public Bar, where they would pass the rest of the day until others on a more conventional schedule began to show up toward the late afternoon.

  The Kaloleni bar, with its red tile roof and colorful liquor logos painted on the walls, was a favored Luo watering hole at one end of the historic residential estate. On the more downscale east side of the city, far from the five-star hotels and towering office buildings in the city’s center, the Kaloleni drew a mix of mid-level civil servants, laborers, and small businessmen. The economists and planners favored the outdoor seating area under a sprawling jacaranda tree, where they could keep an eye on the spare ribs and the marinated skewers of beef called mishkaki simmering on the outdoor spit. The talk wandered from work to politics or the outcome of the football game at the nearby City Stadium. Obama and Otieno routinely passed the afternoons there with their drinks in hand—local Tusker beer for Otieno and Johnnie Walker for Obama. Otieno was generally the first to head out in the early evening. Obama lingered on and, usually too inebriated to drive, got a ride home from someone else. “They were like conjoined twins,” explained Meshack J. Onyango, an economist then working at the Central Bank and one of the regulars among the Kaloleni drinking crowd. “They came in early because they didn’t want anybody to bother them. And whatever assignment you gave them they would finish it on time and leave it there for you. That’s why they were prized. These were just two brilliant people.”

  And as long as the “Two Ronnies” got their work done, they were pretty much allowed to come and go as they pleased. “The truth is Obama was not in the office much during the day,” said Johnson M. Hungu, the senior planning officer in Human Resources who later became the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry. “People tolerated him because they knew they could not change him. He knew what he was talking about so he could get away with it. He’d work until noon and then he’d go drink his lunch. The day was over.”

  Well, almost over. If a matter arose in the afternoon that needed the attention of either of them, the Ministry often dispatched a car over to the Kaloleni. “If there was something urgent in the office that required them the car would go and bring one of them back,” said Gondi Hesbon Olum, an economist who worked at the Central Bureau of Statistics in the same ministry. “Or the driver would say, ‘So and so is stuck. What do you think, or what would you advise we do?’”

  Although just forty years old himself, Obama was older than many in the Treasury corridors, and his Harvard training still carried considerable clout. More than a few found Dr. Obama, as he insisted the younger economists call him, a highly entertaining mentor who was more than willing to discuss the latest econometric formulas and mathematic technique. Meshack Onyango, nearly fifteen years younger than Obama, had just completed a course on financial programming not long after Obama had been hired when he ran into him at the Big Five. The two immediately plunged into a conversation about domestic credit and its relation to foreign assets, and Onyango was deeply impressed. “He was a really a genius at financial programming,” says Onyango. “I think he was the first Kenyan who did econometrics. He was just very, very good at analysis and simulations, all of that.”

  After nine months on the job Obama’s status was made permanent in August of 1976.19 With that, he was given steadily greater responsibility and soon began to travel on behalf of the government. Two projects in particular defined Obama’s years in the Treasury. The first was a longrunning plan with Ethiopia to develop the Lake Turkana-Omo River Basin along their joint border. Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world, is fed by the Omo River in Ethiopia and is the site of extensive prehistoric research. The project, which the European Economic Community was to fund, called for the development of the region’s basic infrastructure and improved management of the wildlife, fisheries, and tourism in the area. Obama was assigned to develop projections on the project’s financing and oversee a feasibility study that an international consultancy was preparing. By 1980 Dr. B. H. Obama, as he was referred to in government documents and press accounts of the projects, was often the lead negotiator for the Kenyan delegation in a series of meetings held in Addis Ababa.

  Obama was also instrumental in several road development projects with neighboring countries considered critical to developing markets outside the country as well as for the enhancement of tourism. The largest was a proposed road link between Kenya and Sudan, a 580-kilometer stretch that would connect Lodwar to Juba in southern Sudan. By 1979 Norway had committed to finance the engineering study, but Kenya had to secure the financing for the bulk of the project. Obama traveled extensively to Europe and the Sudan starting in the late 1970s to consult with both technical committees considering the project and potential financiers.20

  Obama’s higher profile was made possible in part by the death of Jomo Kenyatta on August 22, 1978. The death of the Mzee, the Swahili term of respect for an elder, the father of the Kenyan nation, was mourned throughout the country, as many of his flaws and excesses were forgiven in the grief over his passing. His legacy was mixed: He left behind a country that had benefited from relatively steady economic growth, but it remained heavily de
pendent on Western countries for funds and guidance. Although human rights in Kenya had largely been safeguarded, Kenyatta’s intensely autocratic, heavy-handed style of governing had allowed freedom of speech for only a sanctioned few. The election of Kenya’s second president, Daniel arap Moi, a longtime political presence and the vice president for eleven years, marked the beginning of a very different era, at least in the beginning.

  Moi, of the Kalenjin ethnic group, acted quickly to earn the good will of the Kikuyu elite by bringing several Kikuyu leaders into his government, one of them Mwai Kibaki, who became his vice president. At the same time, the genial former teacher declared an end to political factionalism and corruption as he released Kenyatta’s political detainees and assembled a broad multiethnic coalition. The more relaxed political atmosphere eased the career limitations on Luos, many of whom remained stagnant in government and the private sector since Mboya’s death. Moi’s domestic programs, including a national literacy campaign and free milk for school children, also won broad-based support.21 The economic problems that would plague his presidency, stemming in part from worldwide recession, would take more than a year to develop.

  By 1980 Obama was promoted to Planning Officer I, a position with more seniority and a slightly higher salary. But Obama had never surrendered the belief that he was chronically underemployed, and once again he began to give himself occasional promotions. It began with small elevations of his title. Particularly when meeting people who did not know him, he often presented himself as a senior economist or other high-ranking officer. Masakhalia, who by then had been promoted to permanent secretary of the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, got wind of Obama’s exaggerations. But Masakhalia was not overly concerned. By this time Obama’s quirky behavior—his use of the title Dr., his claim of higher positions, and even his routine drinking on the job, any of which would easily have gotten him fired back in the United States—had been accepted as part of his character. Government officials from the highest level downward seemed willing to tolerate it in return for his high level of expertise. “The fact is that in general conversations with audiences he would attempt to throw his weight around and assume titles he did not have,” said Masakhalia. “His demeanor was always that of an important man and he wanted people to think of him that way. But what did it really matter. Nairobi at the time was a small place and everybody knew who he was. I did not think it something I needed to take action about.”

  Masakhalia, who went on to work as an adviser with the UN Development Programme and served as a member of the Kenyan Parliament for several years, acknowledges that he found it difficult to take a firm hand with Obama. “You see the thing is we were friends,” he shrugged. “Our friendship began a long time ago.”

  Emboldened, Obama became more daring. On a trip to Ghana in 1980 Obama was a member of an advance team assigned to prepare Ghanaian officials on the Kenyan team yet to arrive. But in the meetings Obama claimed to be the Minister of Economic Planning and Development himself, a position actually occupied by Dr. Z. T. Onyonka.22 When Onyonka arrived the following day and introduced himself, the Ghanaian negotiators looked at him in astonishment, presuming he was an imposter. When Onyonka finally figured out what had happened, he dispatched Johnson M. Hungu to have a sharp word with Obama. “Like everyone else, Onyonka knew how Barack behaved and so he wasn’t too upset,” said Hungu. “I took Barack out for a beer and I told him what he had done was improper and he had to stop doing it. He just laughed it off.”

  Although Obama made good use of his salary increase and had rented a narrow two-story, government-owned townhouse at Mawenzi Gardens, a significant comedown from his lush Woodley estate, his financial problems continued to plague him. His worn pink personnel file, held in what is now the Ministry of Planning, National Development and Vision, bulges with requests for salary advances, international cables begging for funds to pay for his hotel bills, and demands for payment of unpaid bills from utilities and merchants. Funeral expenses topped the list. A sister-in-law and her unborn baby had died. A first cousin was shot in Kampala. Another cousin died in Mombasa. A son was kicked out of school “because I had not paid the fees for 2d term and I have not paid for this third term. I would have paid all these fees but because I have had two deaths, one in July and one in August, 1977, all my money went for these funerals.” Adding that his son’s school would not permit the boy to sit for his exams until the fees were paid, Obama urgently requested an advance, writing, “This would be disastrous particularly when I have spent so much for his education for so long.”23

  Obama’s file also contains multiple requests beginning within months of his hiring for funds to cover the costs of traveling on home leave to Alego with his “wife and five children.” At that time, however, he had no wife living with him. Two of his children, Mark and David, were living with Ruth, and Auma and Malik were often living at boarding school. Another child lived in Hawaii, and Bernard and Abo lived with their mother, Kezia. Nonetheless, the Ministry routinely approved funds for rail fare for the mythically happy family to travel together.

  Nor had Obama’s heavy drinking slowed in the slightest. “Double-Double” drank consistently on the job and most people knew it. In fact, some of his colleagues observed that he performed better with alcohol in his system than without it. During one trip to Addis Ababa to discuss the Lake Turkana project in 1980, members of the Ethiopian delegation watched in consternation as Obama downed one whiskey after the other during the course of the evening, alarmed that he would be unable to function at their meeting the next day. But by the following morning Obama was in high-performance mode and stunned the Ethiopians as he rattled off statistics and details of the project that they could barely recall.24

  Not long after Kenyatta’s death, Mule was promoted to the position of permanent secretary of the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. 25 Even in his high-ranking job, Mule managed to keep an eye out on Obama, of whom he was fond. And when he felt that Obama was stuck on a particular task or could not make his calculations work out as they should, Mule handed him fifty shillings and suggested he go get a shot of whiskey at his own favorite bar down on Moi Avenue—or maybe two shots.

  “I encouraged him to go get a drink,” said Mule. “I knew that he had difficulty working without any whiskey in him so if I saw he was having a mental blockage of some kind, I’d just send him off to Tina’s. And then he would come back and do a wonderful job.”

  Sometimes, however, Obama’s alcohol intake was less than conducive to work. Most Mondays, Obama’s colleagues noticed that he smelled of alcohol, the residue of his heavy weekend intake. More than once Obama managed to burn through his travel advance while on assignment, and sometimes he did so before he had even left town. Sebastian Okoda, an assistant secretary in the Ministry of Finance who briefly shared an apartment with Obama, tells of a night in 1976 when Obama had a travel advance of 7,000 Kenyan shillings burning a hole in his pocket. Instead of heading to the airport and preparing for his journey, Obama decided to take half a dozen of his friends out drinking at the popular Revolving Tower Restaurant on the twenty-seventh floor of the iconic Kenyatta International Conference Center that dominates downtown Nairobi. By early the next morning the group was still cavorting at the bar and Obama was broke. “Barack had to borrow money from everyone for the trip and then he raced off to the airport,” Okoda said.

  Obama’s alcoholic exploits were easily tolerated among the largely male crowd with which he drank. Nairobi was a hard-drinking culture, so heavy consumption was de rigueur. As some of his friends saw it, Obama was just a bit extreme. That his mother and a handful of close friends had pleaded with him to stop drinking was a telling measure of how extreme his drinking had become by the late 1970s, but anyone unfamiliar with his drinking patterns and the way in which the Ministry indulged him found his demeanor shocking. For instance, Clive Gray was a consultant with the Harvard Institute for International Development working with the Kenyan Ministr
y of Agriculture in 1981 when he happened to see Obama walking down a corridor in the ministry. Gray had been a graduate student at Harvard at the same time as Obama and instantly recognized him. He was thinner, yes, but Gray couldn’t mistake that broad face and the heavy-rimmed glasses. As he watched, Gray noticed that Obama was staggering slightly, raising his hand to the wall to steady himself. Clearly, Obama was drunk. And it was still an hour before lunch. “I asked a friend what had happened to him. You know, I remembered him from Harvard,” recalled Gray. “And I was told that he was drunk most of the time. It was a shame, just a real waste.”

  IN JUNE 1980 BARACK OBAMA TURNED forty-four years old. He was by then a middle-aged man with a complex domestic history, even by Luo standards. He had three wives in his wake and five or seven children, depending on who was doing the counting. His relationship with virtually all of them was strained at best. And then things got even more complicated.

  Obama met a woman.

  Her name was Jael Atieno. In the Dholuo language, Atieno means “born at night.” She was tall and soft-spoken with long braids that reached down her back. When his half-sister, Marsat, with whom she attended school, introduced Jael to him, she was twenty years old—the same age as Obama’s only daughter, Auma, and twenty-four years younger than him. The following year she moved in with him and the two agreed that they would marry. Because Jael was pregnant, the traditional dowry payment of cows could not be made. According to traditional Luo custom, payment of dowry when a woman is pregnant results in bad luck such that the baby might die. But one of Obama’s brothers paid her mother 1,000 shillings in ayie, the first step of a Luo wedding process that is a gesture of appreciation to the bride’s mother and an indication that both sides are committed to continue with the marriage. The wedding ceremony was scheduled to take place in December of 1982, when the baby would be about six months old.26