Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [12]
Beyond the main food halls was a sort of bazaar of dark alleys containing tiny shops—cubicles really—selling everything from bolts of cloth to small electrical items. There I was introduced to several of Wedco’s happily prospering clients, among them a genial but weary-looking woman named Consolata Ododa. Ododa makes a living selling small oddments—batteries, torches, plastic wallets, key rings, playing cards. Like all the women in her group, Ododa works seven days a week, 12 hours a day, then goes home to cook an evening meal for her family, so it’s not exactly a life of luxury. Every two weeks she makes an overnight trip to Nairobi by bus to acquire new stock, returning in time to reopen the stall late the following morning. She had just returned that day from her latest trip, and it was for this reason that she was “a little tired,” she told me. For all this her turnover averages about 3,000 shillings a day—roughly $30—from which she must pay rent, electricity, taxes and interest and principle on her loan. Typically she will clear $6 or $7 for her 12-hour day—hardly a princely sum, but more, she told me, than she had ever dreamed of having before Wedco stepped into her life. And so by such means do people’s lives improve, little by little.
Friday, October 4
Fifty miles or so south of Kisumu is Homa Bay, a listless small city of potholed streets, baking sun and an inescapable air of being at the wrong end of a long road. Most of the drive from Kisumu is along an exceedingly rough and bouncy dirt track. Interestingly, all road maps show it as a first-rate highway. This is because some years ago the World Bank gave money for the road to be paved. In the event, however, some government official or group of government officials decided to spare Kenyan workers the wearying toil of laying tarmac under a hot sun, and pocketed the money instead.
This sort of thing happens quite a lot in Kenya. Once a model of probity and rectitude, after 23 years under the increasingly reviled Daniel arap Moi, Kenya has become a case study in mismanagement and corruption. A group called Transparency International, which monitors global corruption, now ranks it as the sixth least trustworthy nation in the world, ahead of only Bangladesh, Nigeria, Paraguay, Madagascar and Angola. In one year, according to the BBC, $10 billion of public funds went missing in Kenya. Ten billion dollars! In one year! And it didn’t even top the list!
Why institutions like the World Bank and IMF, not to mention our own slumbering governments, allow this to happen is a question I cannot answer, but it has unfortunate consequences for groups like CARE. First, it means that they are left to provide many of the services that any decent government would itself provide. It also means that donations for these services are harder to secure because so many people think that any money sent to Africa goes into the pockets of despots. If anyone ever, ever, ever tries to suggest to you that this is the case, you must poke them in the eyes with something at least as big as a snooker cue, for it just isn’t so.
Money given to aid agencies like CARE—and Oxfam and Save the Children and others beyond enumerating—doesn’t pass through corrupt intermediaries. It goes straight into projects.
Incidentally, Moi is to step down in December 2002 when elections are to be held. The universal hope, it appears, is that things will get better with a new government. “They can’t get worse,” I was told several times.
“It’s not about spending huge amounts of money, but about spending smaller amounts intelligently,” Phillip Makutsa, one of CARE’s project