Word: moi
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...mercurial relationship between Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi and renowned paleoanthropologist and wildlife advocate Richard Leakey has transfixed Kenyans for more than a decade. After first meeting Moi in 1968, Leakey gave occasional advice to the President, and in 1989 Moi made Leakey head of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Then came drama. Leakey quit and helped form an anticorruption opposition party; Moi branded him a neocolonial racist; a state-owned newspaper tied Leakey to the Ku Klux Klan; and progovernment thugs beat him when he attended a colleague's court hearing. "How much of it was deep [hatred...
...startled Kenyans, the President turned to Leakey for salvation. He named Leakey head of Kenya's civil service and secretary to the Cabinet, presenting him with a power base some insiders say is second only to the President's. "Leakey is recognized as a man of determination and integrity," Moi said in his announcement. "These are attributes which are greatly needed." Leakey, a white third-generation Kenyan, is given the job of overhauling Kenya's corrupt and inefficient public service and jump-starting the country's economy. Moi also hopes Leakey will have better luck loosening the purse strings...
...tackle corruption and balance the country's books in the process. "There is cynicism that the bad guys are still in power, but they're not in power," he says. "Delivery of service is now in the hands of the professionals." To help Leakey with the colossal task ahead, Moi has created a kind of shadow ministry by appointing a small team of technocrats as permanent secretaries. As the latest episode in the two-man soap opera unfolds, Leakey and Moi insist their struggles are behind them. "I have little doubt that there will be a number of issues...
Leakey's powerful personality and outspokenness drew the wrath of government insiders. In 1994, following a series of attacks against Leakey in Parliament and the state-run press, Moi announced an investigation into alleged improprieties at the Wildlife Service. Leakey quit. "I could no longer achieve," he says. "Everything was too combative." The simmering animosity between the two men boiled over a year later, when Leakey helped form an opposition party. Though never a major force, the party attracted enough attention to provoke attacks from the ruling Kenya African National Union party...
...facto leader of what Moi calls Kenya's recovery strategy is Leakey's biggest challenge yet. Kenya was once one of the most successful developing countries in Africa. But its economy and image have deteriorated over the past decade--not in an explosion of violence or at the hands of a military regime, as in other parts of the continent, but through the pathetic slow drip of corruption and inefficiency...