The Task Ahead

MONDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER

The White Man's Graveyard, they call it; the poorest place on God's earth. It looked like a tropical paradise this morning, as I ate a breakfast of pawpaw and mango on the terrace of a four-star hotel, and looked out over two miles of deserted beach. True, when the plane landed last night, we had gone through the most decrepit international airport I have ever seen, but it was too dark to see the city or the countryside on the way to the hotel, so I had not seen any of the signs of a country on its knees.

All I knew at breakfast time this morning was that my job here was to look at Sierra Leone's food situation. I had to do an economic analysis of the food policy, find out if there were any problems and come up with solutions. All by myself. All in four months. Today I was going to have to try to find out what my job really was. Of course, my tasks were set out in the written Terms of Reference in my contract, but these TOR are always a polite fiction. In fact, anybody who has anything to do with drawing them up has their own hidden agenda, whether it is increasing their personal power, firing the Managing Director, getting a large aid budget for the country, or diverting some of the aid into their personal bank accounts. Unless I can find out what these people really want, I will not be able to develop a solution that they will accept and implement.

As I was musing about my programme for the day, a wiry black man of about 35, dressed in a grey safari suit, came up to my table.

'Good morning, Sah,' he said cheerfully. 'I am Mohammed Kasama; I am the World Bank driver for you. I have come to take you to the office.'

We shook hands and I introduced myself. He said that he was going to be my driver for my whole four months here. I was delighted to hear it for several reasons. He is cheerful and speaks excellent English. More important, perhaps, he is a Muslim, and probably does not drink, which extends my life expectancy considerably. In Zambia, there was an appalling death rate because drivers drank heavily, then drove at high speed on excellent roads. A government Land-Rover had a life expectancy of 2,500 miles, and a police motorcycle of 600 miles – and their drivers about the same.

We drove two miles down the coast from the hotel, with the empty beach on one side and a golf course on the other. Then the road swung inland through rice paddies, and uphill into leafy suburbs. The car pulled up outside a 15-foot-high whitewashed wall, with the blue flag of the World Bank fluttering above it. Mohammed hooted, and a uniformed guard opened the high steel gates. We drove in and parked in the compound. I got out and went into the office building, where I asked if I could see the Resident Representative.

While I waited, I wondered what to expect. I was curious about the man who had set up this consultancy project and arranged the finance for it. The World Bank Resident Representative, its ambassador, is the most powerful foreigner in any poor country. A country like Sierra Leone would be getting perhaps three-quarters of its foreign exchange earnings from foreign aid, and three-quarters of its government budget too. The World Bank is the biggest aid donor, so it can exert a lot of power by increasing or reducing the amount of aid, or by switching it from one sector to another. It is not just its own aid: it orchestrates the aid programmes of most donor countries. The Bank uses this power to make the Government adopt right-minded policies. The Bank's local Res Rep has a big say in how the power is exercised.

He did not rise to his feet when I entered his office, but motioned for me to sit on one of the chairs in front of his desk. He seemed to be in his mid-forties, and was obviously French by his accent. When he introduced himself, I heard him to say 'Murat', like Napoleon's marshal, and he seemed to be modelling himself on the beau sabreur himself, with his dapper figure, his moustache, his swagger and his imperious manner. When I looked at his card, I saw it was the more prosaic 'Mauratte' but I had difficulty in seeing him as anything but an aspiring cavalry commander.

He began his briefing, 'You are here to get the Government to change its food policy and its food marketing. The present system is a disaster, and it is seriously damaging the economy.'

I tried not to look surprised, but my Terms of Reference had not suggested that the present system was a disaster, or that I would be doing more than a routine economic study. This was my first glimpse of the hidden agenda.

'The major problem is that there is a government monopoly on exports of the main crops, coffee and cocoa, and on the imports of the main food crop, rice. All of these have to be marketed through the Agricultural Marketing Board, which is a Government-owned company.'

I nodded to keep him talking, though he did not seem to need any encouragement.

'When the British Empire ran this country,' he continued, 'they established monopoly marketing boards to protect the farmers against traders who cheat them and give them low prices. They did it in England first, then in Africa and in places like Australia and New Zealand. We French did the same, especially in West Africa. Perhaps it was a good idea then, in the 1930s depression. Perhaps, but I do not think so. Today there is no question: they are a disaster, you understand. It is World Bank policy to get rid of them.'

I did understand. It was all familiar ground, as I had spent the last few years trying to reform, control or close down state marketing boards. All those that I have seen are corrupt or inefficient, with the result that farmers get almost nothing for their crops.

'The Agricultural Marketing Board originally dealt with export crops only,' he explained. 'It became powerful because it controlled much of the...