KENYA
A. INTRODUCTION
After my tour of duty in Kinshasa DRC as Deputy Representative, I was ready to move and assume more responsibilities. I applied for, and obtained the post of Representative in Liberia. In fact, I received a government agrément less than 2 weeks after being appointed by the High Commissioner. I was extant. Then followed a small but important twist to my story: my Director, the very same who got me an expedited agreement, called one morning to plead with me that there was need for a Deputy Representative with experience in Operations Management in Nairobi; would I forsake my position as Representative for 3 years? And that the elevator would be sent back to me if I cooperated.
Difficult to resist a Director who had been my supervisor for the third time in this organization: Angola, Tanzania and Geneva. Marjon Kamara had been a supervisor who skillfully shielded me from the government in Tanzania in the case of financial misappropriation that someone with a bitter axe to grind leaked to the press. A manager for whom I was ready to bide my time and remain in the same position for a further 3 years. So I accepted and went to Kenya to deputize for Representative, Liz Ahua in 2008. Liz proved to be another simple but great woman to whom you cannot sell chicken fat! I know because that was the second woman boss who supervised me three times in this organization. These two ladies, under whose oversight I worked an aggregate of 16 years, were the best examples of leadership I came across.
The year 2008 was the year after the post-election violence in Kenya, and there was some form of cooperation with other organizations in the final days of a response to IDP situations in the Rift Valley. Which gave me the opportunity to travel to the Valley. I did not manage many activities in this area, but it gave me an idea of the prevailing political economy in the Valley, the big commercial farms where historically dispossessed small land owners had become employees of powerful landlords. A classical feudal model of production. The second advantage of visiting the Rift Valley resides in the knowledge of a major feature of the geological formation of the African continent that passes through Kenya: The Rift Valley, that starts above Ethiopia, and creates a complex chain of lakes, into Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, where it sustains natural ecosystems for thousands of wild animals that resulted in the creation of many national parks, and ending in Mozambique’s famous Gorongoza national park. Sorry, this is just so important for an African that I cannot afford not to digress.
B. THE NATURE OF THE KENYA OPERATION
As I said, the post-election violence in Kenya resulted in the displacement of populations for which UNHCR contributed with humanitarian response programs. However, in a country where the National Red Cross was a very solid institution, the response was so efficient that in two years humanitarian operations were no longer needed. The rest was about political solutions.
I came to an old refugee operation with strong emergency dynamics. There were two main refugee groups, and a motley of refugees from the 1994 Great Lakes crisis, mostly living in urban areas, mainly Nairobi. The core of operations was focused on two different fronts: the Somali front in NE Kenya (the Daadab refugee complex) and the Sudan front (the Kakuma camp).
Refugees in the famous Dadaab camp complex, created in 1991, were mostly Somali. When I arrived, the economy of Dadaab town revolved around the exchange of goods and services between the town and the refugee camps, and a dependency relationship had been created between the camps and the town. The refugee operation was taking place in a wider context of resentment to the perceived marginalization of the North-Eastern Province by the central government, the cost of decades of a state of emergency since independence in 1963, which had not been lifted until well into the 1990s.
The operation had become a protracted care and maintenance programme since. Still, by 2008 UNHCR was responding to influxes of Somali refugees, some as result of conflict, but mostly Somali populations fleeing the effects of prolonged drought and famine in Somalia. We created two new camps in a very charged political atmosphere of local competition for jobs in a period where the huge drought affected not just Somalia but also NE Kenya. So, the local MPs exerted continuous political pressure on UNHCR. Still, Dadaab represented an operation starved of solutions, which led the exasperated government to put pressure on UNHCR for other forms of doing away with refugees. Unfortunately, in many cases, government solutions are sudden and respond to domestic political expediency rather than to a rational analysis of the origins of the situation and of the sustainability of proposed solutions. During my assignment in Keyna, UNHCR resisted the proposal to create enclaves of peace just across the border to transfer refugees into their own country. This approach run counter the protection principles and contradicted the regional security dynamics.
Security of operations was a major consideration. The security situation in NE Kenya was such that UNHCR celebrated with the government a “security package”, under which UNHCR was providing the government with the necessary vehicles and fuel for a detachment of the police to support the humanitarian movements in the area. This was for me only the second experiment of this nature, similar to a messy one in Tanzania, where I also served. Just to get a better grasp of the issues, I also travelled to Mandera town, at the tripartite border with Somalia and Ethiopia (in Ethiopia, the refugee camp of Dolo Ado).
We seemed closer to solutions for Sudanese refugees, with the impending emergence of a new country, South Sudan, after a referendum in the Sudan. The role of Kenya as a neighbouring country in seeking peace cannot be overemphasized, in particular the personal role of General Lazarus Sumbeiywo. South Sudan became independent in 2011. Most of the refugees who had decided to return as a result of the new developments had done so during the period before my arrival.
Kakuma is the epitome of the involvement of the government in solutions. We had a senior colleague in Kenya, heading the Supply Unit, who was South Sudanese, and was proud to be able to participate in determining the future of a new nation. He asked me for a two-week leave to go and vote in the referendum that determined the cessation and independence of South Sudan from the Sudan, which virtually ended the war. Unfortunately, this colleague, Kudus Lubanga, would come to die a few days before the independence of his country in July 2021.
In addition, Kakuma was much more prone to be integrated into the town life more than Daadab. I am told that later there was indeed an integrated programme with Kalobeyeyi town. In my time, all we tried was to improve the lives of refugees through limited initiatives on solar energy and lighting. Nonetheless, the seeds for an integration and the end of isolation of refugees from the local community had been sown.
Urban refugees
We had serious difficulties serving urban refugee, not just because of the fluidity of this group in an urban environment, but also because we did not carry out a social study to understand better this diverse group. Some interesting examples were the involvement of local NGOs in training of refugees on housekeeping, making most of the graduates employable locally, and other community support mechanisms.
I interpreted UNHCR’s (our) inefficiency in dealing with urban refugees as the consequence of the easier approach we had defaulted into, of assisting refugees regimented and isolated in poor and desolate camps. Kenya (and Sierra Leone, my next assignment) highlighted well for me the inefficiency of our responses, and that was a reflection I took forward with an initiative in Chad that was successful (to be continued).
C. OPERATIONS AND SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
My role, beyond servicing and responding to operational needs in the field, included also orchestrating efficient Operations management in Nairobi, ensuring that Programme and Supply Units responded adequately not just to field demands, but also to headquarters exigencies: planning, budgeting, reporting and systems records maintenance.
Given the issues affecting the refugee operation, which were somehow not immune to the country’s own patronage system, the Representative asked me to focus on risk management and due diligence. Unfortunately, many colleagues offered passive resistance to the efforts of ensuring that resources spent effectively improved the living standards of the refugees. In that sense, a few colleagues turned quite unfriendly and had it not been for my managerial position, my work would have been much more frustrating.
While in Kenya, new organizational methods of operations management were introduced, such as FOCUS, a new tool that attempted to integrate a budgeting module with the operations planning processes, integrating also a monitoring and a reporting function. It was an institutional attempt at incorporating the logical framework in the way we managed our annual business cycle. A very good attempt that however suffered a lot of glitches. As an operations manager, and having observed them first-hand in the field, and then from headquarters, I had an enviable solid experience of seeing the impact and efficacy of these our processes. I therefore provided systematic feedback to system developers at headquarters and I am sure these helped solve some of the bugs/malfunctions, and showed the limitations of the tools, particularly when it came to data interface with another giant function called MSRP (Managing Systems, Resources and People). FOCUS, introduced in 2007, had phased out by the time I was retiring (2021). Increasingly, the organization’s systems solutions detracted from its fundamentally field-driven nature. We spent more and more time feeding the system and less in monitoring the impact of our decisions in the field.
It is in Kenya that I learned to look at operational risks more seriously than in DRC. In their own way, these two operations were equally highly risky. The Representative asked me to pay particular attention to warehouses that we were renting commercially. When I visited one of them, the owner surprised me with information that we (UNHCR) had seven new Land Rover vehicles that had apparently been parked and forgotten in the ware house for six years. And what did I want to do with them!
Risks included processes that escaped management: for instance, in Human Resources, local vacancies were circulating internally to a few staff before they were posted for the public just two days to the deadline!
With the support of a few colleagues, I wrote essays on operational risks and promoted training on how to identify and manage them, before the organization introduced Risk Management as an institutional approach. Without the benefit of the organized and structured publicly existing literature and without the body of knowledge later developed and officially issued/adopted by UNHCR, I can still claim to have initiated a matrix that I tried to introduce to senior colleagues in order to change our business-as-usual approaches. Neither did I understand the import of what I was attempting, until later in other assignments.
D. THE PERSONAL LESSONS BASKET
1. In 2008, I was in my 19th year with UNHCR. After my first nine years, during which my contract with the organization was renewed periodically, I moved into a permanent contractual status. The permanency created a bond between me and my organization. I never felt the contractual relationship except in the salary, and this was so regular that I stopped paying attention to the monthly episode. This was my emotional environment, where accepting to postpone my evolution from Deputy Representative to Representative for another 3 years was a decision that came easily to me and I never regretted it. Neither have I spent time thinking about it, once made. That was because I acknowledged that in times of need, my supervisor had stood by me and shielded me from a potentially revengeful government that was quick to declare foreigners PNG in Tanzania. Her solid character helped me solidify my own public character. May I exaggerate and say: “if you hang for me, I go hang for you”. If a manager can create such levels of allegiance!
2. During my work in DRC, interpersonal relations was the weakest point in my country experience, to a point where I was the subject of character assassination by a few colleagues. An investigation team followed me to Kenya to interrogate me for malicious acts that I had supposedly committed in DRC. Of course, I later received a letter from the Inspector General, Arnauld Akodjenou, clearing me of the accusations and closing the matter. In the letter, the organization avoided apologizing and blandly said that if I wanted, I could ask for a copy of the letter to be placed in my files. Nothing like “sorry for a wrong assumption and for the emotional disturbance suffered by you and your colleagues” who were interrogated for having believed in my management approach. In some ways, I felt that the organization clearing me without apologizing was a devaluation of the character I spent years building with purpose. But the reality is that institutions are unemotional. And your enemy could be your own colleague.
3. Risk management and due diligence: it was clear years later when I returned to Geneva for a second assignment that my efforts in improving systems, risk management and due diligence, including the materials and matrices that I developed around these themes, were ahead of the organization itself adopting these. I will deal with my encounter with these new approaches in Geneva in my blog related to that assignment (Article 11). My managerial position allowed me the courage to take risks and innovate for the team.
4. You are of course forgiven for not creating the opportunity, but working in Kenya without visiting the great Rift Valley and Mombasa would seem to me like a waste of a great chance to understand East Africa, including the colonial structure and relations of production that still prevails in the mega-farms.
Jose, 21 July 2023
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