‘POV: Good Fortune’: Snap of the Fingers

“I’m not poor,” says Jackson Omondi. “I have a resource where I can exploit and maybe make me become rich. And that resource is being taken away, by a developer.” Jackson is a farmer, as well as a schoolteacher, and he and his family have worked their land in western Kenya’s Yala Swamp for generations. Now, however, he and his mother are feeling crowded out by Dominion Farms Ltd, an Oklahoma-based company that means to change the landscape, literally, via a dam that provides the company with what CEO Calvin Burgess calls “1100 acres of water reserve for the irrigation of rice.”

In fact, that irrigation project isn’t quite so precise as Burgess suggests. As such, it’s a little too typical of grand-sounding projects aimed at African resources. As recounted in the deeply affecting documentary, Good Fortune, premiering as part of PBS’ POV series on 13 July, the past half century has seen some $2.3 trillion in aid sent to Africa, with remarkably little to show for it. Sulemana Braimah argues that corruption, exploitation, and unfair trade have undermined efforts to “develop” the continent. Good Fortune offers concrete illustrations of how devastating these seemingly abstract problems can be.

Jackson and his mother, Mary Aware, describe their struggle as director Landon Van Soest shows them at work, bent over their dwindling crops or tending to diminishing herds of cattle. Though Jackson once aspired to increase the size of his farm, now he worries that Dominion will put the entire acreage under water. “We cannot allow him to flood our area,” says Jackson. He and other farmers gather to discuss the situation, but they can’t figure a way around the men with money. As Dominion’s country director Graham Vetch puts it, “The benefits far outweigh any sort of detrimental effects the locals may have, or the perceptions of detrimental effects they may have.” Eventually, he asserts, the farmers will see it his way.

But even as Dominion posits its perspective as inevitable, Good Fortune reveals how such attitude in itself is a problem. A similar story is unfolding simultaneously in Nairobi’s Kibera neighborhood, home to about a million impoverished people. Midwife Silva Adhiambo goes about her daily life — tending to her clients and her children — while also worrying about the imminent loss of her home. The film follows Francis Omondi, secretary of the UN’s Settlement Executive Committee, as he approaches her door to explain (a stagey scene that makes the point eminently clear) that UN Habitat will be moving residents out in order to build new and better housing. Though he assures her that she will be able to return to the improved buildings, Silva knows better. She walks past apartment buildings erected years before, still empty. “I don’t think we’ll be brought back here,” she says, “because the government has lied to us so many times before.”

Sometimes such failure is institutional and predictable; as Silva points out, “Kibera could have been built a long time ago,” except that the UN and other relief agencies continue to work through the government, and “the government wants to profit from it.” This means the money does not reach needy populations, despite the efforts of aid workers like Sara Candiracci, a UN program manager. “All the strategy to move people and to move them back is not clear,” she tells an interviewer. “So I prefer not to, you know… I can give you my opinion, but maybe it’s better if I don’t.” And so the story of where the money goes and who makes decisions that affect Kenyan residents remains unspoken. “There are so many institutions doing small programs,” she continues, “But in the end the impact is low. The challenge is that a lot of people need to be relocated.”

As the film reveals, the situation is further complicated by the presidential elections of 2007, when Raila Odinga, self-described “president of the poor,” ran against the notorious incumbent, Mwai Kibaki. When Kibaki’s victory was disputed, the tribal roots of both campaigns shaped the conflict that followed: Odinga’s anti–Kikuyu position evolved into violent street protests, and Kibaki’s supporters initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing, looting, and sexual violence. The UN reported that some 800 people were killed, 300,000 displaced, events evoked in Good Fortune by glimpses of frightening destruction and abuses and clashes between civilians and police.

Most poignantly, Silva’s husband Fred sits near his doorway in the dark, wearing a suit and holding a machete. “I heard gunshots outside,” he says quietly. “I’m sleeping outside to protect Silva and the kids so they won’t die in the house because of the bad outcome of the election.” Inside, Silva declares, “I have made up my mind not to even vote again.”

The film makes visible the profound rifts between citizens and the government, between natives and foreign aid workers, and between longtime local farmers and corporations. Even as institutional representatives like Candiracci declare their desire “to improve the livelihood of people and the situation of people,” those people feel overlooked and worse, ill-treated. A white man walking through the slums with Candiracci says of the people they pass by, “They need to see the advantages rather than the obvious disadvantages of taking away, what did you say? 200 shacks?” Silva sees those disadvantages plainly: “This thing is dangerous because if you refuse to move, they will come and evict you with a bulldozer.” Repeated shots show Silva walking the muddy streets of Kibera, bulldozers grinding behind and before her, hulking and ever-present.

Again and again it appears that the interlopers — however good their intentions — do not consult the people whose lives they’re affecting. Dominion’s rep observes,

The average person is pretty happy with what we’re doing. There are always some distractors who want it to stay the same. The people have grown accustomed to their poverty and that’s all they know, so trying to take them from poverty to prosperity, that’s a transformation process that doesn’t happen with a snap of the fingers.

And yet the fingers keep snapping, at least as the “situation” is laid out in Good Fortune: At first, Jackson walks alongside his cows, the flat grassy horizon stretching behind them in long, long shots. “We’re not against Dominion’s practices,” he says, “But what he’s doing is what makes us to become afraid.” A few scenes later, the effects of the dam come raging into view, when rains bring flooding and his family’s land is submerged in water. Dominion submits that the “transformation” should include learning to fish, rather than farm. As Good Fortune exposes the collisions of ambitions and traditions, promises and disappointments, it poses a most cogent question: how might mutual respect and genuine dialogue alter this seemingly certain “progress”?

RATING 9 / 10