At an individual level, there were also solid professional reasons encouraging lenders not to rock the boat. In any development organisation, whether USAID or Oxfam, the World Bank or World Vision, career progress is measured in how much money an official succeeds in ‘pushing out the door’. No one gets Brownie points back at head office for closing down a programme or putting a relationship with a client government on ice, even if this was, in fact, the most constructive course of action. Humanitarian organisations may talk about making themselves redundant, but their annual reports rarely boast about offices closed or staff laid off. Organisations’ internalised incentives all work in the opposite direction, and the short stints on which careers are structured also make it all the easier to err on the side of indulgence, militating against the build-up of institutional memory. Fired with enthusiasm, an arriving director is baffled to discover how few projects his predecessor approved. The man must have been either lazy or lacking in vision, he assumes, and sets to work with a will, only to start encountering the same sharp practices that demotivated his colleague. At precisely the moment when he has reached a mature understanding of just how formidable the system he hopes to reform really is, the director is pulled out. As the East Africa correspondent for the Financial Times–itself a short-stint job -even I stayed long enough to be able to accurately predict, purely on the basis of how far on in their postings they had advanced, how naïve or sceptical the donor representative I was due to interview was likely to be.
Finally, there were social and cultural factors working in favour of maintaining the status quo. World Bank directors are hardly average citizens. Often government ministers in their former lives, they belong to the international elite that automatically turns left on entering a plane, rarely does its own driving, and expects lodgings to come with staff quarters attached. The fact that those assigned to Africa usually themselves come from the developing world is of little relevance: these men–and they are almost always men–did not grow up in the local equivalent of Kibera. If they had, one suspects their view of the government of the day would be somewhat more jaundiced and confrontational. As it is, most regard the African politicians and central bank governors they meet in wood-panelled offices to discuss the fate of the nation as social equals. Their children attend the same schools, their wives patronise the same hairdressers. Mixing on a daily basis with the great and the not-so-good, it is easy for them to assume the best of intentions on the part of their hosts. The World Bank’s move in the 1990s to delegate more power to country directors, meant to democratise a top-heavy organisation, exacerbated a latent danger. Staffers showed an alarming tendency to lose their critical distance, over-identify with their clients and start regarding the interests of the local government and the World Bank as one and the same. ‘To those with fragile egos, being seen as someone who has an “in” with the government matters a great deal,’ says one World Bank veteran. Back at headquarters, they dubbed the syndrome ‘governmentitis’, or ‘being captured’ by a host state.
In Kenya, the full, unhealthy intimacy of that relationship was made apparent thanks to Lucy Kibaki, first lady and ageing drama queen, a woman widely feared for her hair-trigger temper and erratic outbursts. Late in the evening of 29 April 2005, a fracas broke out at the Muthaiga residence of Makhtar Diop, World Bank representative of the day. Diop, a former Senegalese finance minister, was throwing a leaving party to celebrate the end of his posting. Kenya’s most popular musicians had been hired for the night, waiters were serving drinks, and the cream of Nairobi’s political and diplomatic set was milling on the lawn when things began to go awry. Diop had reckoned without his next-door neighbour. Never one to wear her privileges lightly, Lucy Kibaki interpreted the loud music as a personal affront. Storming into the garden, she screamed at Diop’s guests–who included two of her own children–that this was Muthaiga, not Korogocho slum, and tried to unplug the music system. She made three such commando raids before being barred by Diop’s guards.
The episode stretched over several days, to the gathering glee of the Kenyan media. When journalists reported that Lucy had driven to her local police station to demand Diop’s arrest, her fury found a new target. During a five-hour overnight scene at the Nation Media Group, staged in front of her mortified bodyguards, she harangued journalists for their disrespectful coverage of the Kibaki family, confiscating their mobile phones and slapping a cameraman in the face.
The footage of Lucy lunging at reporters played repeatedly on the television the following day, to shocked gasps and mocking smiles. But Kenyans so relished the sight of a first lady making a spectacle of herself, they virtually missed a fascinating detail exposed in the course of the spat, more worrying than all the diva dramatics. As it happened, Lucy had some justification for feeling events in Diop’s garden directly concerned her. She was more than his next-door neighbour, she was his landlady. The fact that the World Bank representative was renting his house from the presidential couple–living in the very mansion the Kibakis had occupied before moving into another on the same plot–went some way towards explaining her behaviour. Why, the two properties were even linked by a little footpath. The official responsible for telling World Bank headquarters whether Kenya deserved millions of dollars in aid, who influenced donor governments into granting or withholding further millions in bilateral assistance, saw nothing amiss in paying rent to the president of a client nation. That moral myopia was not Diop’s alone, for a team of World Bank auditors who visited Kenya three years before the party had found nothing inappropriate in the chumminess of his lodging arrangements. The failure to detect so much as a whiff of a conflict of interest spoke volumes about World Bank attitudes to those in power.
The entire episode highlighted the dangerous cosiness that can develop between two entities which should, ideally, be in a state of creative tension. In the mid-1990s, following the toppling of Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko by a coalition of neighbouring African states, the donors seized upon the notion that a group of ‘Renaissance leaders’–former rebel commanders turned progressive leaders–had emerged who would apply ‘African solutions to African problems’. In the ensuing years, each of those leaders’ credentials would become tarnished, but those who had engaged with the Renaissance leaders were loath to admit a mistake. It’s hard to believe that influential American economist Jeffrey Sachs isn’t mortified by his citing, in the introduction to his best-selling The End of Poverty, of Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, three countries whose elections saw major bloodshed and systematic vote-rigging, as members of a supposed ‘new generation of democratic leaders’ pointing the way ahead with their ‘powerful and visionary leadership’. The wishful thinking is not exclusive to Sachs. Reading the websites and reports of organisations which lend to Africa, it’s easy to log a series of tactful omissions, from the glossing over of security-force crackdowns to the editing out of eruptions of top-level ‘misgovernance’. The small acts of self-censorship amount to a sympathetic retouching of a battered portrait.
A few years ago, a Kenyan beer company known for the patriotic slickness of its marketing campaigns came up with its most impressive offering yet. Set to orgasmic music, the TV advertisement showed a victory parade passing along central Nairobi’s Kenyatta Avenue in a swirl of confetti. But this was not a Kenyatta Avenue any commuter would recognise. The real Kenyatta Avenue is a decrepit thoroughfare where glue-sniffing street boys and conmen mingle with harried office workers and Somali elders with hennaed beards. A stump-limbed amputee begs in the shade of a bedraggled hibiscus, a blind man holds out a cap, eyeballs rolling. The street’s traffic islands have disintegrated into rubble, and when it rains pedestrians hop like grasshoppers to avoid being splashed by puddles of foul brown water. The advertisement showed the same urban skyline, but every face in the crowd was young and beautiful, every building immaculate, even the sky looked extra blue. How had they done it? I’d wonder every time I saw it. Had t
hey gone out to film at 5 o’clock on a Sunday morning? Had the previous fortnight been spent painting the buildings? Or was this a tribute to a state-of-the-art editing suite? Whatever the answer, the advertisers had managed to conjure up a virtual reality Kenyatta Avenue, a thoroughfare which should exist, but sadly does not.
The donors’ attitude to Kenya resembles that beer advertisement. There is the real Kenya, a poor land of glaring inequalities, and then there is the Platonic Ideal of Kenya, the if-only African state enjoying, in the wake of the 2002 elections, remarkably high growth rates and ever-improving school attendance, and whose ‘progressive’ leadership may occasionally fall prey to temptation but generally tries to do its best. That gleaming, shiny Kenya is the one the donors see in their discussions with government. As the beer ad illustrated, it is not necessary to tell an outright lie to convey an untruth, all it takes is a series of quiet omissions and small exaggerations.
By April 2004 the donors were seriously concerned. They had acted in concert over the introduction of multi-party politics, to startling effect, and they knew it was possible to do so again. The envoys of the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Canada and Scandinavian countries started meeting regularly at the British and US ambassadors’ residences to air worries and share information. Everyone was free to throw in their tuppence ha’ penny’s worth. ‘There were a number of streams coming in,’ remembers US ambassador William Bellamy. ‘It was a fertile exchange, everyone had something to put on the table.’ John was invited to these encounters, but Bellamy remembers that when he did turn up he was ‘not chatty, very circumspect’, and always showed ‘unwavering faith’ in Kibaki. The diplomats joked about forming a ‘Gang of Six’ or ‘Gang of Eight’. In fact, it was more a case of ‘the two musketeers’, for there were only two men with the staff numbers, in-house expertise and infrastructural backup to do a serious job of tracking unfolding events. The first was Bellamy: clipped, incisive, mustachioed. The second was Edward Clay, the British high commissioner.
Neither man was shy of airing his trenchant views, but there was a certain irony to the fact that Clay ended up with the far higher profile. Kenya’s former colonial master is not the country’s biggest donor these days: the United States overtook it long ago. What’s more, British ambassadors are not the powerful figures of yesteryear. Since prime minister Tony Blair decided to separate development from foreign policy in 1997, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has shrunk to a ghost of its former grandiose self, overshadowed by the ever-more-powerful Department for International Development (DfID), a thrusting giant with three times the budget. In many African capitals the head of the DfID office has more staff, a bigger fleet of gleaming white SUVs and larger premises than the ambassador, reduced to near figurehead status. But Clay’s story would illustrate that tradition and myth–the myth that what a British high commissioner thinks of a former colony matters intensely–count more than the realities of economic and political clout.
When Clay first dared criticise the Kenyan powers that be, the irate foreign minister claimed such sentiments were only to be expected from the son of a colonial-era district officer. He was getting his Clays confused. Edward Clay is in fact the son of a former editor of the Yorkshire Evening Post, and very nearly became a journalist himself before veering off into the foreign service. The first time he set foot in Kenya was in 1970, as a twenty-five-year-old diplomat on his first overseas assignment. A lowly third secretary in Chancery, his job was to monitor Kenya’s parliament and political scene.
First postings always leave a particularly strong impression. When Edward and Anne Clay returned to Nairobi three decades later, this time to occupy the high commissioner’s residence in Muthaiga, Kenya felt very much like home, despite the tripling in population that had taken place in the intervening years. In Kenya, British high commissioners have traditionally tended to be cut from emollient cloth. But there were several factors working to ensure that this particular incumbent did not fade quietly into the background. Clay was fifty-six, with retirement just four years off, and this was going to be his last posting, so in career terms he had nothing to lose. His youthful stint in Nairobi meant he barely needed a briefing to get up to speed. A useful network of friends and contacts–many of whom had now become influential politicians and businessmen–was just waiting to be dusted off. Then there was the character of the man himself. A boyish figure with a flop of grey-blond hair and a playful sense of humour, Clay made for the least stuffy and most approachable of ambassadors.
There is a type of resolutely silly humour at which clever English people of a certain class and education excel. Based on a keen appreciation of the absurd, it is associated with achingly bad puns, dirty limericks, quotations from the poems of Hilaire Belloc, vainglorious Latin mottoes, and a propensity for reciting long sections from Alice in Wonderland. Its whimsicality should never be mistaken for childishness, for it can mask ferociously serious intent, and the self-deprecation that often goes with it–another very English characteristic–is in fact a form of intellectual arrogance: so certain is the holder of his worth, he sees no need to force that understanding on others. Clay has that fey quality, and the misleading modesty that goes with it. Such individuals are hard to keep in line, for what they value–and mind losing–does not fit the conventional pattern. And Clay had already demonstrated his willingness to stick his head above the parapet before his arrival in Kenya, along with a knack for the florid turn of phrase.
An email received from a human rights campaigner Clay befriended during his second African posting, this time to Uganda, would come to seem ironic in the extreme. ‘You did tell me and I still remember,’ wrote the Ugandan, ‘that I should avoid being confrontational because nobody would want to listen to what I have to say.’ Clay himself had been nothing like as discreet at this stage of life as the exchange suggested. As high commissioner in Kampala in the mid-1990s he had felt increasingly dismayed at the uncritical support London gave president Yoweri Museveni–one of the most high-profile and indulged of ‘Renaissance’ leaders–as he allowed a vicious guerrilla movement to devastate the northern third of his country, sending Ugandan troops instead to plunder neighbouring Congo. Such experiences suggested to Clay that donors did ordinary Africans few favours by constantly shifting the goalposts on what they considered ‘acceptable’ behaviour from aid-hungry leaders with no real intention of changing their ways. Frustrated by what he saw in Uganda, he spoke out on constitutional issues, helped shame a minister caught rigging an election into conceding victory to her rival, and repeatedly challenged Museveni over inflated defence spending. After he moved to Cyprus, his feistiness continued undiminished. When a Cypriot MP–a former pathologist–staged a seven-hour vigil on top of a British radio mast to protest against the presence of British bases on the island, the resident high commissioner dismissed him as a ‘medical monkey up a stick’, an expression that won almost as much attention as the protest itself.
Finally, like many of those who worked in the Great Lakes region in the 1990s, a horror story tugged at Clay’s conscience, preventing him from relaxing into his last assignment. In Uganda he had also been responsible for Rwanda and Burundi, two small countries, he’d been confidently told by his Foreign Office bosses, he could expect to occupy just 1 per cent of his time. The Rwandan genocide, which began within weeks of Clay presenting his credentials in Kigali, made a mockery of their words. He was haunted by a feeling of undefined inadequacy in the face of the killings. ‘If I’d been five years younger,’ he said of his posting to Kenya, ‘I wouldn’t have had the confidence. I’d have felt constrained by lack of experience. But one thing I’d absorbed in my previous African posting was the costs of not speaking up.’ Those in the Kenyan state apparatus who would later view Clay as the sinister hand of a Kikuyu-hostile British government missed the point just as thoroughly as they misunderstood John Githongo’s raison d’être: Edward Clay, by this stage of his life, had all that it took to become a rogue ambassador.
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br /> Arriving in Nairobi in December 2001, when John Githongo was TI’s energetic young director, Clay noted with puzzlement the roller-coastering attitudes of diplomats posted to Kenya. ‘In the first year, there was great enthusiasm: “We must increase aid.” In the second year, revision set in. In the third year they all seemed to go bonkers, so disillusioned they couldn’t speak or think rationally. I thought they’d all gone mad.’ It never occurred to this diplomat, who would go down in history as one of the Kenyan government’s most flamboyant critics, that his own attitude might trace a similar arc. Moi was on his way out after twenty-four years in which, whatever his failings, he had managed to keep the nation intact. So much seemed possible. This was a time to engage, not carp. ‘There was a great feeling of a new departure, which is why I’d wanted the job.’ And for quite a while Clay was happy to talk up a country he loved. When the US State Department issued a terrorism alert in December 2003 which threatened to devastate Kenya’s tourism industry, already battered by a series of travel warnings, the local media learnt that Clay would be breakfasting at two of the hotels identified as possible terrorist targets, and would be available for photographs. It was a gesture of support appreciated by the Kenyan media, and he was briefly dubbed ‘the two-breakfast diplomat’ by the BBC.
But worries about terrorism, development and constitutional reform were soon subsumed by an overarching concern: Kibaki’s loss of control. The comparison with his predecessor, a fitter man despite his extra seven years, was telling. ‘Moi always had a grip on what was going on in the country and in his office. After Kibaki’s accident, his authority fell into the hands of those around him. The sense of disarray was palpable. The donors were lining up, ready to engage, and they weren’t getting any guidance.’ As the vacuum persisted, stories of shady goings-on began surfacing. At first, nothing seemed connected. But as time went by, and connections between the various stories became apparent, an ominous pattern seemed to emerge.
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