The Other Barack (33 page)

On a warm morning in December a genial Vermonter named Edgar O. Edwards sat in his second-floor office heavily scented by the scarlet bougainvillea just outside his window as he perused the résumé of a young economist he was about to interview for the job of planning officer. A professor at Rice University in Texas under contract with the Ford Foundation, Edwards was one of a number of expatriates who had been hired to provide technical and management expertise in the formative period of the
uhuru
government. Edwards was a sharp-minded economist, and due to his extremely close relationship with Mboya, he had been granted a wide range of responsibilities, including hiring.

Edwards liked what he read. The candidate, Barack Obama, had done graduate work at Harvard University and now worked at Shell/BP, just a few doors down the street. One of the outgoing British managers had recommended Obama to Edwards for a planner's job and, given the Ministry's sweeping mission, it was precisely the kind of job that Obama had long dreamed about.

When Obama arrived a few minutes later, Edwards was even more taken in. Not only was Obama well versed in econometrics and economic modeling, both of which the Ministry keenly needed, he was impeccably turned out in an elegantly cut suit and a royal blue silk tie. The only problem was that Edwards already had someone else in mind for the job, another young economist whom he had met at a wedding recently named
Philip Ndegwa. A graduate of Alliance High School and Makerere University, Ndegwa was a versatile and soft-spoken Kikuyu who had already been pegged for advancement by Kenyatta's inner circle. Edwards had no idea that the two men knew one another and decided to offer both of them a job as senior planning officers. In time, he reasoned, one of them would surely rise to the chief planning officer's job, which would also soon be available. “Obama was an impressive guy, no doubt about it,” Edwards recalled in an interview in his home in Poultney, Vermont. “So I told him he could start as a planning officer and it was possible in six months or so we could make a decision about something more.”

Obama was miffed. Here he was, up against Ndegwa already, a man
he
had helped to educate himself. But Obama restrained himself and said nothing about his rival; instead, he argued that he was well qualified for the chief planning officer's job and asked for that position instead. “He was adamant that he was up to the post,” sighed Edwards. “But I did not feel I knew him well enough to give it to him. I gave him time to think about the planner's job, but in the end he turned it down.”

A few days later Obama ran into Francis Masakhalia, his old Maseno School friend who had recently accepted a job with the Ministry himself, and he angrily railed against Edwards's offer. The specter of Ndegwa was only part of it. The job came with a salary of 2,000 Kenyan shillings. Masakhalia had accepted a position as an economist statistician at the same rate of pay, which he thought very reasonable. But Obama insisted it was not enough. “He said, ‘They are paying
peanuts
. I am not going to take it,'” recalled Masakhalia. “He said, ‘You bachelors, you don't know what it's like.' And we said, ‘You with your foreign women and children. You always need more money.'”

Then there was Ndegwa—always Ndegwa—a step and then a mile ahead. The truth was that Ndegwa's difficulties with math were only part of what galled Obama about his rival's success. Ndegwa was a circumspect man, ruminative and cautious in his outlook—all things that Obama distinctly was not. He too was married to a white woman. And Obama did not like him. His annoyance turned to outright anger when Ndegwa was eventually given the chief planner's job, and just three years later he was promoted to Permanent Secretary of the Ministry. Ndegwa was only thirty years old when he was awarded the post, usually reserved for far more
senior men. In time Ndegwa would hold some of the most prominent positions in Kenya's government and business arenas and would advise the nation's political leadership for generations. With each successive step he took, Obama resented him more deeply.

Nor was Ndegwa particularly fond of Obama. Several close to Ndegwa felt that for all his success, he was self-conscious about his earlier difficulties with math and the fact that he did not get the Harvard degree he had set out to achieve. When Obama frequently pointed that out and publicly declared his superiority over the other man, this served only to widen the gap between them. “We all knew Obama had tutored Philip. We knew the problems Philip had because he was being pushed by his fellow Kikuyus for these big jobs,” explained Masakhalia. “But Obama could not let it alone. Every chance he got, he would say, ‘Philip knows nothing.' And Barack was not going to take a job where he might have to work under him.”

Obama's encounter with the Ministry darkly presaged what was to come, for he would repeat the same laments time and again in coming years: The money was never enough, he was employed below his abilities, or those above him were out of their league. Among the close community of economists in Nairobi, Obama was well liked and deeply respected for his considerable skills, at least in the early years after independence. Many who started out at the MEPD would rise steadily in government, including Ndegwa, Masakhalia, and Kibaki, and they would all cross paths time and again. But some of the key players in this close-knit group were dismayed to see that Obama's attitude was causing serious problems in the workplace, and by the decade's end his troublesome reputation would become widespread. When his effrontery became so flagrant that Kenyatta himself took note, Obama's predicament became another matter altogether. Some who had worked with him would reach out to try to help him. Others did not.

Part of Obama's difficulties clearly stemmed from his own public posturing and brazen disregard for the rules in later years. But it is also true that within the political culture of the time, criticism of or dissent from the ruling powers was increasingly forbidden. In a more forgiving political era, Obama's bluntness might have been overlooked, thereby allowing his career to span a different arc. But it quickly became clear in the months after independence that critics could expect to be dealt with unsparingly. The first in a succession of political assassinations inscribed in the Kenyan
history books was that of Pio Gama Pinto, a journalist and avowed communist who was gunned down in his own driveway in 1965. Pinto was closely aligned to Odinga, the spokesman for the opposition, and many believed his death was directly attributable to Kenyatta's men.

Obama's own collision with the Kenyatta government extended over the course of four years, a simmering confrontation that spiked over several key events. It was triggered by the government's celebrated blueprint for economic development, called “Sessional Paper No. 10, African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya.” The document, released by Mboya's office in May of 1965, was a broad summary of the country's philosophical underpinnings and specific programmatic plans.

The paper was intended to address a growing cleavage within the KANU ranks between Kenyatta's conservative supporters and a more radical group critical of some of his economic plans, rallying around the left-leaning Odinga. Kenyatta had never been an advocate of radical economic change of any kind, and in the early days of the new government's formation he had swiftly emerged as a friend to both the British political establishment and its financial interests. Alarmed by government strategies that left much of the country's pre-independence framework untouched, the radicals called for a more public-minded approach to land and economic policy on a number of fronts. They wanted less dependence on foreign capital, a quick end to emerging class divisions, and a redistribution of land that was being amassed in the hands of an emerging propertied elite.

They also called for more rapid Africanization. But finding Africans qualified for the jobs that needed filling was a more complicated process than had been expected: Most Africans had virtually no business experience other than small-scale shops and even less in the sphere of management. Those Kenyans who had worked in the city in pre-independence days, such as Hussein Onyango, had been employed largely as house servants for Europeans, and the very idea of a nine-to-five office job or something called credit was novel. Because of this, a substantial expatriate community remained in control of key positions for many years after independence. Of 1,690 of the highest-ranking professional jobs in Nairobi surveyed by the government's Directorate of Personnel in 1967, Europeans still held two-thirds of them, and Africans occupied virtually all of the jobs at the lower end of the scale.
¹⁸
Obama and many other
Kenyans found the continuation of white control infuriating, and racial tension in the workplace was not uncommon during the several years of the transition.

But Kenyatta was tired of debate over the country's direction. Sessional Paper No. 10 was designed to nip it all in the bud. Though declaring the government in favor of neither capitalism nor communism, the paper called for a form of socialism that would draw on the best of African tradition while pursuing a vigorous path of economic growth. Shrouded in a rhetorical embrace of socioeconomic equality, the document nonetheless heartily embraced a free market economy and kept the door open to foreign investment. In a personal note introducing the paper, Kenyatta made crystal clear that far from encouraging discussion of such issues, the paper was intended to close the door on debate once and for all. “When all is said and done we must settle down to the job of building the Kenyan nation,” Kenyatta wrote. “Let this paper be used from now as the unifying voice of our people and let us all settle down to build our nation.”
¹⁹

A few objected openly. Dharam Ghai, a lecturer at Makerere University with a PhD in economics who went on to become the director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, wrote in the June 1965 issue of the
East Africa Journal
that the plan was unlikely to increase the African stake in the economy and that it would exacerbate emerging inequities in wealth.
²⁰
But his criticisms were milquetoast compared to Obama's.

Obama's critique, published in the following month's issue of the
East Africa Journal
, derided its authors first for failing to adequately define African socialism. He then moved on to warn that the government's proposal largely perpetuated an existing economic system that left Kenya dependent on foreign capital and did little to resolve economic and class disparities that the colonial government fostered. He took particular issue with the paper's endorsement of land titles and privatization over the African system of communal ownership, writing, “It is surprising that one of the best African traditions is not only being put aside in this paper but even the principle is not being recognized and enhanced.”
²¹

But Obama by no means embraced communal ownership for tradition's sake alone nor did he employ stale African clichés. Instead, he argued for a
novel approach to land consolidation through the creation of clan cooperatives that could provide for the equitable distribution of any gains while avoiding excessive concentration of economic power. Although he did not go into detail about how such cooperatives might work, what he proposed was a creative blending of the opposing economic principles that were under debate. Why could land not be used as an asset even if it was held in collective hands? However, if individual ownership was to be the chosen route, he insisted that the size of farms should be restricted in size. And in a provocative shot at Kenyatta himself, he added, “This should apply to everybody from the President to the ordinary man.”
²²

Sessional Paper No. 10 states that the country has no class divisions such as those in European society. But Obama bluntly—and accurately—declared, “This is to ignore the truth of the matter. One wonders whether the authors of the paper have not noticed a discernible class structure has emerged in Africa and particularly in Kenya.”
²³

Although Obama accepted that foreign capital was vital to the country's growth, he called loudly for a wider distribution of the nation's assets and a greater commitment to genuine Africanization. Noting that it was not Kenyans but rather Europeans and Asians who controlled the bulk of the country's commercial enterprises, Obama argued that the government should focus less on how the country's resources could be used to make profits and more on how they could benefit society at large. “We have to give the African his place in his own country and we have to give him his economic power if he is going to develop,” declared Obama. “The paper talks of fear of retarding growth if nationalization or purchases of these enterprises are made for Africans. But for whom do we want to grow? Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country? It is mainly in this country that one finds almost everything owned by the non-indigenous populace. The government must do something about this and soon.”
²⁴

In conclusion, Obama sarcastically praised the government for producing a paper at all. “Maybe,” he wrote, “it is better to have something perfunctorily done than none at all!”
²⁵

It was a courageous piece of writing, a blunt appraisal of the government's capitalist orientation and a heartfelt appeal on behalf of the common man. In eight pages Obama attempted to respond to a major position
paper drafted by dozens of experts and resolve the complex issues confronting underdeveloped economies. It was also an extraordinarily risky public stand on several fronts. In defending such socialist concepts as nationalization and land cooperatives, Obama had put himself squarely in the Odinga camp of radicals, which was in ever-increasing disfavor with the government. That he had even gone so far as to publicly question Kenyatta's considerable accumulation of land, however indirectly, meant that he was a marked man. The paper likely also threw a shadow over his relationship with Tom Mboya, who was responsible for drafting the paper. Although Obama was seeking to reach a compromise position, he was nonetheless critical of his friend's handiwork.