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USAID wins fight against book bans

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I don’t think Michela Wrong was comparing me to the devil (or at least I hope not). But I was responsible for helping an accomplished author distribute a book, helping her to let go, and as a bonus, having her eat crow!  What Other People Said "[Galeeb] was already hard at work, pulling together a multi-pronged distribution operation to bypass a gagged retail industry… As a devout atheist and hardened aid sceptic, I’m aware of the acute irony of being thus beholden both to the churches of Kenya and a US development agency. But I’m happy to eat crow. My critics will no doubt mutter darkly about CIA plots, but I wouldn’t mind if the Devil himself wanted to distribute It’s Our Turn to Eat. I am rather more concerned about the agenda of those who were determined to ensure no Kenyan ever got to read a book on sale across the globe. But knowing that 5,200 copies of my book—for that is what it will be—have reached the wananchi will allow me to let go." Source: Michela Wrong, “Advent...
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State Department slams its own Ambassador to Kenya

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This post presents verbatim excerpts of a Department of State Office of Inspector General Inspection Report on Kenya in 2012. I did not make them up. Please visit the page https://www.stateoig.gov/reports, enter Kenya in the first field (Keyword of Phrase), select “inspection” in the Category drop down, and open the August 2012 ISP-I-12-38A report (not the 2018 report). Enjoy.


  1. The Ambassador has lost the respect and confidence of the staff to lead the mission. Of more than 80 chiefs of mission inspected in recent cycles, the Ambassador ranked last for interpersonal relations, next to last on both managerial skill and attention to morale, and third from last in his overall scores from surveys of mission members. The inspectors found no reason to question these assessments; the Ambassador’s leadership to date has been divisive and ineffective.
  2. The Ambassador has damaged the cohesion of Embassy Nairobi’s country team by underscoring differences between offices working directly with Kenya and those with regional responsibilities. …Unless corrected there is a risk that the country team will become dysfunctional.
  3. The Ambassador needs to broaden his understanding of why various agencies are part of his mission, cease avoiding contact with them, and work with the assistance of a senior Department of State (Department) official and the next deputy chief of mission to restore country team harmony. 
  4. The Ambassador’s greatest weakness is his reluctance to accept clear-cut U.S. Government decisions. 
  5. Notwithstanding his talk about the importance of mission staff doing the right thing, the Ambassador by deed or word has encouraged it to do the opposite.
  6. The Ambassador’s initiative to redirect programming for nearly $550 million in U.S. health assistance, while well intentioned, has proven disruptive and created confusion about its relationship to existing programs. He announced to the Kenyans the establishment of a new unfunded program, called Let’s Live, with the unrealistic aim of reducing by 50 percent in 1 year Kenya’s premature mortality rates for infants, mothers, and noncommunicable diseases. 
  7. After his first year at the embassy, several have still not been given time on his calendar to explain their programs and have stopped asking. Like many multiagency missions, Embassy Nairobi is not easy to manage; the Ambassador has made the task much harder by compounding its complexity.  
  8. He is rarely available to consult personally on evolving issues with senior staff, some of whom also tried unsuccessfully over a period of many months to schedule a time to brief him on plans and activities. In his first year in Kenya he has met only between a third and a half of the prominent Kenyans the mission recommended he see in his first 100 days in country. Several of those he met subsequently conveyed a message of complaint to the embassy about the Ambassador’s patronizing tone
  9. The OIG team also observed that the Ambassador very infrequently logs onto his classified account, which would allow him to read cables and classified emails. 
  10. In the inspection questionnaires provided to OIG, the Ambassador’s score for attention to morale is the second lowest of more than 80 recently inspected chiefs of mission, and his score on interpersonal relations is the lowest. (Personal questionnaires are distributed to all Department U.S. direct-hire employees and also to the heads of other agencies represented in the mission. The embassy response rate was approximately 72 percent, which is higher than average.)
  11. Assessing mission morale to be low, the Ambassador designed and deployed his own climate survey of mission personnel. When the results pointed to him as the cause, he told embassy employees that senior officers had done a bad job of explaining his objectives. He subsequently sought—but did not obtain—access to individual survey responses that would have violated the anonymity of the respondents.
  12. During the inspection, the Ambassador was in the process of altering a U.S. memorial monument to the victims of the 1998 embassy bombing without Department authorization, contrary to restrictions on the use of government funds
  13. Very soon after the Ambassador’s arrival in May 2011, he broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff. Because the information management office could not change the Department’s policy for handling Sensitive But Unclassified material, he assumed charge of the mission’s information management operations. He ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system. …The Ambassador’s requirements for use of commercial email in the office and his flouting of direct instructions to adhere to Department policy have placed the information management staff in a conundrum: balancing the desire to be responsive to their mission leader and the need to adhere to Department regulations and government information security standards. The Ambassador compounded the problem on several occasions by publicly berating members of the staff, attacking them personally, loudly questioning their competence, and threatening career-ending disciplinary actions. These actions have sapped the resources and morale of a busy and understaffed information management staff as it supports the largest embassy in sub-Saharan Africa. 
  14. Stocks of representational alcohol at the chief of mission residence are not clearly marked, and physical separation between personal and representational stocks is minimal…Inventories of representational alcohol from the chief of mission residence indicate missing items. The OIG team observed that these items likely were mixed with personal stock.

Leave a comment indicating your favorite quote and why! Comments can be anonymous. My favorite has always been #14. Note that I was at the US Embassy in Kenya at the time this study was conducted and I am intimately familiar with many of these issues.  

Other perspectives

I can’t vouch for information on Wikipedia, but judge these statements for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Gration 

  • "He was also found guilty by the Inspector General's Office of mistakenly falsifying at least 3 combat missions while commander of the 39th Wing. He later advised and stumped for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama.
  • "In 2009, Obama named Gration as the United States Special Envoy to Sudan. Gration subsequently worked as United States Ambassador to Kenya from 2011 to 2012 before resigning in the face of potential disciplinary action for unclassified email use and other issues
  • "He spent his early childhood in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (then the Belgian Congo, later Zaïre) and Kenya, while his parents worked as missionary teachers. The first sentence he ever spoke was in Kiswahili, and he has been a Kiswahili speaker his entire life.During the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s, his family was evacuated three times, and they became refugees, relocating to Kenya after the third evacuation in 1964." (Wikipedia)
  • "News reports stated that Gration resigned weeks before the scheduled release of a U.S. government audit highly critical of his leadership at the embassy and the start of potential disciplinary action against him." (Wikipedia) (this part I can vouch for since I was there at the time)

Kenyan Press

Lastly, read the perspective of the Daily Nation, one of Kenya’s top newspapers. The article is called “Scott Gration: Memoirs of the shortest serving envoy” dated August 12, 2016 https://nation.africa/kenya/life-and-style/weekend/scott-gration-memoirs-of-the-shortest-serving-envoy-1227630 

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the United States Government or any of its current or former agencies.

What do others say? "Galeeb Kachra truly is one of a kind. A unique combination of optimism, can-do determination and relentless energy, he has the wiliness and moral integrity required to shake up sclerotic systems and sweep away logjams." (Michela Wrong, 2021)

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