World Affairs
World view - Michela Wrong learns a lesson about sleaze
Published 23 May 2005
What we can learn from the curious story of the noisy party, the irate First Lady and the World Bank's top man in Kenya
Whenever current affairs seems in danger of growing predictable, an event comes along that is so offbeat, so bizarre, you can only shake your head in wonder at the connections that life throws up. A perfect example has been the curious story of the noisy party, the furious First Lady and the World Bank representative to Kenya. It is a tale that reveals more about the tenuousness of government in that country and the complacency of the World Bank than any in-depth report ever could.
It all began on the night of 29 April, when Makhtar Diop, the World Bank's outgoing country director in Kenya, threw a farewell bash at his rented villa in Nairobi's leafy suburb of Muthaiga. Diop had ordered a stage and hired some of Kenya's best-known singers. But he had reckoned without Lucy Kibaki, the famously short-fused wife of President Mwai Kibaki who occasionally stays next door. She stormed round, shouting at Diop to stop the noise and yelling at his guests to leave.
Once stoked, the First Lady's fury grew. On 2 May, she marched into Muthaiga Police Station to demand action against Diop. She then turned her attention to the press, which had been reporting her antics with impish glee. During a six-hour overnight scene at the offices of the Nation Media Group, and flanked by mortified bodyguards, she lectured journalists for their disrespectful coverage, confiscated notebooks and slapped a cameraman in the face.
The scene played incessantly on Kenyan television the following day to incredulous gasps and mocking smiles. But journalists were too busy savouring the First Lady's self-immolation to register the light her behaviour shed on oh, so many things.
First, the episode reveals the vacuum at the heart of Kenyan government. Since surviving a car crash and weathering a stroke, 73-year-old Kibaki is a changed man. He rations his working hours. In macho African society, a man who is not master of his household cannot expect to remain master of the country. That his wife was allowed to stage not one, not two, but three scenes in public in quick succession has exposed a gaping absence where a president is supposed to be.
The media also failed to grasp the full significance of a detail that surfaced in the brouhaha. Mrs Kibaki had a reason for feeling proprietorial about events next door. Diop, as it happens, was renting his villa off the presidential couple. The man who tells the World Bank whether Kenya deserves million of dollars in aid, the man who can - by dint of argument and example - influence donor governments into granting or withholding further millions in bilateral assistance, had been a tenant of the Kibakis for three years.
This fact needs to be set in context. Thoroughly looted by corrupt politicians under the former president Daniel arap Moi, Kenya is experiencing a fresh explosion of top-level sleaze. The plundering of public funds has been so shameless that many Kenyans expected donor representatives to issue a severe reprimand at a crucial meeting with the government last month.
The ambassadors, I am told, were considering doing just that when one man took the meeting in hand, waved away objections and insisted that instead of issuing a rebuke, the donors give their backing to a hastily cobbled-together, stale-as-old-toast government plan promising action on graft. The man responsible for this soft soap was - you guessed it - Makhtar Diop.
There is no suggestion that Diop, who paid the going rate for his villa, pressured donors to indulge a wayward government out of loyalty to his landlord. Yet the disclosure of this connection highlights the overly cosy relationships World Bank representatives too often forge with ruling elites in Africa. A man with millions to disburse should maintain a healthy distance from those after his money. The Bank's failure to notice such a conflict of interest takes one's breath away.
I rang the World Bank press office to ask if it thought it appropriate for its representative to rent accommodation from the president of a client nation. "When Diop signed the lease in August 2002, Mr Kibaki was not president, he was head of the opposition," the Bank said.
Well, as a regular visitor to Kenya, I can attest that by August 2002 it was
obvious to all that Mwai Kibaki was going to win the elections and become the next president. In any case, I'd feel no happier about the World Bank man renting his house from the head of the opposition than I do about him renting off the president. It's still a conflict of interest.
Snug in the certainty of its own righteousness, the institution sees no reason to launch an internal inquiry, because the arrangement - even more bafflingly - was approved by a team of World Bank auditors that visited Diop in 2002. Strangely enough, ordinary Kenyans (witness the internet blogs on the subject) see the matter rather differently. So thanks, Lucy, for allowing us all to understand so many things just a little bit better.
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