ETHIOPIA & PRESIDENTIAL ADVISOR
9986 Short Story- Every Man Has His Price
The unsavoury antics of politicians and business leaders alike seem to suggest that this proverb holds a great deal of truth. What is more, the selfish behavior of their constituents seems to prove them correct in their cynical view of mankind.
Yet I am not certain that this is wholly true in my own case. Certainly I have, on occasion, been attracted by the highest offer - though this has sometimes turned out to be a mirage. Thus I left Gallahers, for a job at Cussons which paid a third more, only to find that the cost of commuting absorbed all of this extra income. But then I was also going from Brand Manager to Marketing Manager, in theory gaining in status, so that there may be other than purely monetary `prices' which influence the more vain of us. But, as I later found, the organization itself may hold as much status as the job title - which was why I then went to IBM.
Just as influential, in terms of the `price', may be the fulfillment offered. Thus I joined the Open University for half the salary, because the job was exactly what I wanted to do. Moreover, the university was dedicated to all the values you might wish held true in a civilized story. The fact that this no longer holds true will have to wait for another story.
I guess the acid test of the saying, though, came when I was confronted by a potentially life-changing decision; in the context of my role as a go-between for the Ethiopian Government. They had simply asked me to find foreign investors. The most obvious of these was RTZ, in terms of mining for gold and other precious metals which reliable surveys had shown were present in the hills of northern Tigray. The standard method used by RTZ was to dig a hole a kilometer square and a kilometer deep; costing no less than £500 million! Indeed that cost was their first test for any potential project, and fortunately the Ethiopian project, costing around £1 billion, was worth their interest.
When I asked the Minister of Defence, one of the three man junta which ruled the country, what leverage I had to offer RTZ his answer was succinct "Do you know anyone else who has such influential friends?" Fortunately, RTZ agreed with this view!
I did not handle the negotiations very well. Not least, I forgot about the meeting with their divisional board; and they had to hold this up for three hours while I made my way to it! They must have been keen, however, for the meeting was very positive.
The one thing I was not expecting, however, was the final question they posed: "So what do you want to get out of it?" I was totally thrown off guard by this, so - in the awkward silence that ensued - they followed up with the very direct statement: "Our intermediaries usually expect between 5% and 10%." I was even more stunned by this revelation. They were offering me something like £100 million for my part in the action!
Maybe this was just too much money for me to cope with, or maybe it was that all my previous work in Ethiopia had been directed to the good of the people there, or maybe that was how I later rationalized what might have been a very foolish decision on my part. For, after regaining something of my composure, I heard myself saying "The members of government really are my friends. I would feel very uncomfortable about taking any money, almost as if I was betraying them." Thus did I - almost in a dream - give away £100 million!
In fact, soon afterwards, Burundi - near Ethiopia where RTZ had another £1 billion investment already under way - exploded into a civil war. Having lost hundreds of millions there, RTZ chose to leave the region overall and the whole deal fell through. Accordingly, I felt much better. I had done the decent thing and, since I would in practice never have received the sweetener, I had lost nothing! Perhaps, though, it might have been better had I taken the bribe and with it the inside track on the negotiations, and the people of Ethiopia had got their mine.
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