Public Sector Reform among the Ancient Hominids

While Jomo Kenyatta was in England before WWII, and Lord Delamere and Sir Jock Delves-Broughton were immersed in White Mischief in Kenya’s Happy Valley, the son of an English Missionary in Kenya, Louis Leakey, was turning the world upside down for Europeans by proving that we are all Africans.

LOUIS LEAKEY

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) was a British / Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist who became famous for his academic work centered on human origins. Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, and their second son Richard made the key discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the first men.

"To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we've have come from." (Richard Leakey, in National Geographic, February 1998)

Louis Leakey was born in Kabete, British East Africa, now Kenya, into a missionary family. At the age of twelve he found his first fossils, and knew that he wanted to be an archeologist. Leakey graduated from Cambridge, and set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland. At that time it was believed that early man originated in somewhere Asia.

Between the years 1926 and 1935 he led a series of expeditions in East Africa in search of man's fossil ancestors. He was interested in particular Olduvai Gorge, a 300-foot-deep, thirty-mile-long chasm not far from the Ngorongoro Crater. His first major discovery was the jaw of a pre human creature called Proconsul.

In 1945 Leakey became the curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum at Nairobi. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he also served as a spy for the British government and acted as a translator in court in 1952-53 during the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the independence party.

From the 1950s the Leakeys expeditions to Olduvai Gorge produced several important discoveries of early primate fossils, named Zinjanthropus (now called Australopithecus boisei), which Mary Leakey found in 1959 from the lowest and oldest excavation site. The discovery of "Zinj" made the Leakeys famous.

Louis wrote an article for the National Geographic magazine and estimated that Zinjanthropus was 600,000 years old, in which he was wrong. Using a new method of dating, the carbon-14 technique, geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley concluded that the site was 1.75 million years old. But the excavations brought to light a rich fossil fauna.

Among Leakey's academic protegees were Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who became famous for her studies of the behavior of chimpanzees. Leakey stayed long periods at the London home of Vanne Goodall, Jane Goodall's mother.

When Louis began spending less and less time at Olduvai, and concentrated on raising funds and lecturing, the place became Mary's domain, where she spent most of the next 25 years. Personally and professionally Mary and Louis lived separate lives from the mid-1960s.

In 1978 Mary Leakey found a trail of clear ancient hominid footprints of two adults and a child - some 3.5 million years old - impressed and preserved in volcanic ash from a site in Tanzania called Laetoli. They belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton, which was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, by Donald Johanson.

"It is tempting to see them as a man, a woman and a child," Mary Leakey later wrote. The Lucy skeleton on the other hand arose a bitter debate. Mary and Richard Leakey criticized Donald Johanson for proclaiming a new species too hastily - the fossils could be a mix of several different species.

From 1961 to 1964 the Leakeys and their son Jonathan unearthed fossils of Homo habilis, "handy man", the oldest known primate with human characteristics and discovered in 1967 Kenyapithecus africanus. The Leakeys claimed that Homo habilis had walked upright.

"Until then the idea that two hominids could occupy the same area at the same time had been unacceptable to most scientists," Mary Leakey wrote in Disclosing the Past (1984).

Louis Leakey died in London in 1972 at the age of 69. In the same year his son Richard Leakey, who directed National Museum of Kenya, reported the discovery of a 1.8 million-year old skull of modern humans from Koobi Fora.

Three years later Richard discovered the skull of Homo erectus, estimated at 1.6 million years old, and in 1984 he and another paleontologist discovered a virtually complete Homo erectus skeleton.

RICHARD LEAKEY: FROM PALAEONTOLOGY TO PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM AND THE ‘DREAM TEAM’

Richard Erskine Leakey was born on December 19, 1944 but at an early age, he decided he wanted nothing to do with palaeontology. In 1964, he led an expedition to a fossil site he had seen from the air and discovered that he enjoyed looking for fossils.

In 1984 his team found the most impressive fossil of his (or, arguably, anyone else's) career. WT 15000, nicknamed the Turkana Boy, is the nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus boy. The following year supplied another major find, WT 17000, the first skull of the species Australopithecus aethiopicus.

Richard's wife Meave continues to work in paleoanthropology. In 1995, she and her team described a new hominid species, Australopithecus anamensis, and, in 2001, another new species, Kenyanthropus platyops. She may not be the last of the Leakey dynasty; their daughter Louise has managed her own paleontological digs. In 1995 she graduated with an honors degree in geology and zoology, and completed a Ph.D in paleontology in 2001.

Richard Leakey has been described as an ageing Indiana Jones - ruthless, unwell and still itching for another adventure - a man with powerful enemies, huge talents, and an almost insatiable appetite for controversy.

"He is a wild man, a fighter," says a former colleague who'd rather not give his name. "He works these crazy hours. I have huge respect for what he's achieved. But as a man, well, he can be difficult - an egomaniac."

Tall, red-faced and powerfully built, Leakey is seen by some as a pugnacious Kenyan patriot whose achievements are as remarkable as they are diverse.

He has been beaten up, threatened and badly injured in a plane crash which took away both his legs. He has been branded a racist by the president, lauded by the president, and hired and fired by the president and has faced a possible jail sentence over allegations that he abused his civil service job.

"I think pressure probably suits me," Leakey once said with urbane understatement.

THE DREAM TEAM

In 1999, after secret meetings in London with high-level officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in London, Kenyan President Moi shocked the country by appointing Richard Leakey as head of Kenya's civil service and of a so-called dream team of reformers hired to rescue a country, now being branded one of the world's most corrupt, from a deepening economic crisis.

Supporters said Leakey had been recognised by the president as the only man tough enough and honest enough to pull Kenya out of its troubles but questioned whether he would last long enough in the job to do any real good.

Critics said the appointment of a white man with no university education was an insult to Kenyans and one which had clearly been orchestrated by colonial mentalities still lurking in the IMF and World Bank.

In his new job Leakey certainly helped to improve relations between Kenya and international lending institutions. His appointment may well have been crucial in persuading the IMF to resume lending the government money.

For a while Leakey enjoyed unprecedented popularity as his dream team started a radical overhaul of the country's bloated, corrupt, nepotistic bureaucracy.

But as usual, Leakey ran into trouble. Some complained again about his uncanny ability to make unnecessary enemies. Others said his anti-corruption drive was threatening the interests of too many powerful figures. In March 2001, Leakey stepped down - without giving any public explanation.

THE WORLD BANK’S ROLE

Following the appointment of Leaky as the leader of the Dream Team, six of the brightest and the best were hired, two from the World Bank itself. Two trust funds were set up to pay their salaries; a UNDP fund to pay the Bank staff and Bank fund to pay the others.

Each of those hired was paid the same salary as he (they were all men) earned in his current job. One was paid over $200,000 a year (as he had been paid in his private sector job in Kenya). Leakey himself was paid the least, even though he led the group.

The team worked extremely hard (often late into the night) to improve efficiency and eliminate corruption (for example, in the ports, including customs and excise, and the acquisition of agricultural inputs).

The team met once a week to review progress, discuss problems they had faced, and plan how to overcome these problems.

The team did make progress, but one by one they lost their jobs. Just as the Dream Team had to work in a very hostile political environment, so did the Bank team that prepared the complementary reform and fiscal assistance project.

Just before the appraisal of the project, the President of Kenya demanded that the World Bank’s Task Manager be removed from this task and, in fact, leave Kenya itself. The reason why has never been made public. The Bank agreed to do so.

A new Task Manager was appointed. He remained based in Washington, unlike his predecessor.

The approach that was taken by the World Bank obviously raises all kinds of questions about how far the International Development Agencies have the right to get involved in the national politics of their Developing Member Countries.

It also in this case risked the obvious criticism that somehow Richard Leakey was yet another purveyor of White Mischief – albeit of a much more sophisticated form.

MY INTEREST

Of course, the Public Sector Reform aspect of the story is right up my street professionally. Indeed it is something of a cause celebre of what to do / not to do in mobilizing stakeholder participation in the process of reform.

I was reminded of it again when I prepared some case studies for the Asian Development Bank in Manila last year on the promotion of Anti-Corruption Policies in Developing Countries. The World Bank had suggested that it might form the basis of the Case Study that I was writing.

However, I thought that it was a bit too obvious, a bit too African, and a bit too Washington – particularly for ADB which has always prided itself on taking a softly, softly approach to reform in Asia in the guise of the ‘Family Doctor’.

Delusions in the Middle East and the Little Drummer Girl

I was both appalled and amused to read the story repeated below from the New York Times about Emma Sky.

Emma and I met in February 2000 when I travelled to Jerusalem to take up the post of Director of the Public Administration Institutional Development Project for the supposedly then emerging state of Palestine. The project was being funded by the British Council. Emma had undertaken the pre-feasibility and stakeholder assessment work.

The project proved to have been very poorly conceived. It did not have the approval of the Palestinian Ministry of Finance. Promises that the team would be located in Jerusalem (or Ramallah) were not honoured and Emma told the team members in peremptory terms that they were being based in Gaza. No cars were available with the diplomatic plates that were required to enter Israel from Gaza. No assistance whatsoever was provided with settling in the team.

Emma, who was based in the Jewish sector of Jerusalem, appeared to have some very strange ideas about the Arabs and the Middle East. When I raised the possibility that I might seek the adoption of an orphaned / refugee Palestinian child, she told me that the Palestinians would kill me. On the other hand, she volunteered the view that 'the Israel - Palestine problem would be solved by inter-marriage'.

As far as I could glean, she had absolutely no knowledge or experience in the fields of public sector reform and financial administration. However, she appeared to regard me as a nuisance and commented that 'I could do everything myself except that the Arabs won't always listen to a woman - unfortunately, that's why we need an old man with grey hair like you'.

At that time I was 56 years old - I note that her current unfortunate collaborator General Odierno is 55 years old.

She is the West at its absolute worst in the Middle East. Armed with selective facts but with little commonsense or common humanity, she sees herself as a Grand Design puppeteer who controls a masque populated by minatures.

For God's sake General Odierno, talk to ordinary people yourself! Surely General, you don't need a 'cat has the cream / daddy's girl' English public school girl to tell you that bombing civilians is counter-productive?

Robert Fisk must be seething - or quietly weeping into his coffee in a cafe on a Hamra sidewalk.

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From New York Times - November 2009

Rarely does the hulking commander of American forces in Iraq meet with Iraqis or go to a news conference without a slight, dark-haired woman standing just a little to one side — as if to give him space, but almost always in his line of sight and within earshot.

The woman is Emma Sky, and she is an unlikely figure in the milieu of the generally strait-laced American military. She is British, 41, a civilian and a onetime opponent of the war, but nevertheless a political adviser, as well as confidante on many policy matters to the American commander, Gen. Ray Odierno.

She is often compared to Gertrude Bell, a celebrated early-20th-century British adventurer who was an architect of modern Iraq. That may be an overstatement, but Ms. Sky is nevertheless, like Ms. Bell, a woman to be reckoned with.

She has provoked her share of controversy, both because of her outspoken criticism of some military policies and because of her influential position in General Odierno’s inner circle.

Conversant in Arabic and Hebrew, Ms. Sky has worked in conflict zones from Israel to Afghanistan, has spent more time on the ground in Iraq than most soldiers and knows tribal leaders from the northern city of Kirkuk to the southern city of Basra.

“Emma was able to give me a completely different perspective: it was from an Iraqi viewpoint,” General Odierno said.

“We didn’t have a lot of experience in doing these things, so someone with her background and knowledge was able to assist us as to how we could best help civilians.”

One senior foreign diplomat said that the very presence of a civilian political adviser at the right hand of a senior American military commander was a sign of the extent to which military strategy now strives to take into account the political and cultural landscape of conflict.

Outsiders’ points of view on Iraq began to be aggressively sought about three years ago, when counterinsurgency strategy began to permeate every aspect of military thinking. According to the new doctrine, operating successfully in hostile places required understanding how local people saw the situation and whom they viewed as friends or enemies.

Ms. Sky sees herself as part aid worker, part political operator, part cultural translator.

“I’m experienced in working in different cultures. The most alien culture I’ve ever worked in is the U.S. military,” she said with characteristic candor. “I was used to working in the humanitarian space, the diplomatic space. I came to Iraq and that space, the military, is all over it.”

Rather than remaining an outsider, however, she decided to try to effect change from within. Initially she worked as a British Foreign Ministry employee detailed to the American command; more recently, she has become an American contractor.

Despite her insider’s post, she prides herself on retaining an outsider’s view of the military, saying things to top brass that others will not. During the troop buildup in 2007 known as the surge, she said that attacks on insurgents that also resulted in civilian casualties were tantamount to “mass murder.”

“When you drop a bomb from the air and it lands on a village and kills all those people and you turn around and say, ‘Oh we didn’t mean to kill the civilians,’ well, who did you think was living in the village?” she said.

That is now conventional wisdom. The first thing Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal did when he took over the command of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan was to prohibit attacks that might harm civilians.

Just as she has tried to help the military pay more attention to civilian points of view, the commanders have given her a new appreciation for the role of force. She came to believe that increasing troop numbers in 2007 and 2008 was the best way to bring Iraqi civilians the security they needed so badly.

Ms. Sky then tried to find ways to persuade insurgents to give up violence, promoting early efforts by scattered military commanders to give jobs to Sunni rebels and to find a way to work with anti-American Shiite militias.

Like General Odierno, she sees the period between now and parliamentary elections tentatively scheduled for January as central to Iraq’s future stability, but she has no illusions that the job will be done when the elections are over.

“There is going to be a certain level of violence in Iraq for years to come; it remains to be seen how much the society can continue to absorb,” she said.
General Odierno turned to Ms. Sky, he said, because he was seeking a broad range of views in his inner circle. “Her views are controversial; they are different from many of the people around me, but that’s O.K.,” he said. “My inner circle team accepted her into the process.”

An only child who was raised in England, Ms. Sky attended a boys boarding school from age 7 to 13; her stepfather was a teacher there and her mother was a house mother.

After high school, she entered Oxford’s Somerville College, one of two formerly all-women’s colleges and the alma mater of such strong-minded characters as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.

She earned a degree in oriental studies with the idea of working for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. “When I still believed I could change the world,” Ms. Sky says dryly.

After school, she went to work for nongovernmental organizations, spending almost 10 years mostly in Israel and the West Bank.

As there was little progress on the Middle East peace process, Ms. Sky moved back to England, and she was working for the British Council, an arm of the Foreign Office, when the war in Iraq began.