WND EXCLUSIVE

OBAMA'S LATEST PLAN TO SPEND TAX MONEY ... IN KENYA

'Venture capital' proposal not intended to help American economy

Steve Peacock

The Obama administration yet again is expanding one of its aid initiatives to Kenya, but is attempting – however clumsily – to keep details secret as it creates an agribusiness financing mechanism “similar to a venture capital fund.

A heavily redacted Justification and Approval, or J&A, document that WND discovered via routine database research makes clear the administration’s intention to keep the American people in the dark about how it will “increase the total estimated cost” of the expanded Kenya Feed the Future Innovation Engine, or KFIE.

The J&A,, likewise blacks out the name of the vendor selected to carry out a newly created phase of an existing project, which expands the scope of the initiative by giving greater authority to the contractor doling out grants to private Kenyan entities.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, on first reference even redacted the name of the official who submitted the J&A request for higher-level approval. The agency also attempted to hide the identity of the official responsible for reviewing the request.

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The sloppily redacted document, however, neglected to cover the typed but unsigned name of Agency Competition Advocate and Approving Officer Deborah Broderick at the end of the final page.

Likewise, despite the J&A’s multiple redactions of references to the contractor’s name, the agency failed to redact a single reference to an entity solely identified as “LOL.”

An exhaustive search of the FedBizOpps database produced zero contracting documents governing earlier stages of the program. Among the recently released program documents, however, USAID makes a single mention of the Minnesota-based Fortune 200 agribusiness Land O’Lakes Inc., prime contractor of KFIE.

Though it appears likely that Land O’Lakes Inc. is assuming control over KFIE’s new private-sector financing component, the redactions make it unclear.

USAID’s press office did not respond to questions submitted about the project’s partial secrecy.

While the unnamed agency-contracting official approved the J&A in early July, the agency waited until the end of August to publicly release it with dozens of lines blacked out.

A separate but related “presolicitation notice” dated Aug. 26 reiterated the agency’s intention to award the no-bid contract to an unspecified vendor. That one-page document, whose final lines contain the name of Contracting Officer Caroline Bertolin Hillas from USAID’s Regional Acquisition and Assistance Office, is not redacted.

The synopsis from the program’s FebBizOpps database page says the initiative is designed to facilitate “private sector solutions to persistent poverty and food insecurity.”

KFIE will accomplish that task by harnessing “the power of innovative private sector approaches to leverage resources and integrate new approaches to agricultural solutions, thereby accelerating efforts to address poverty and food security needs in Kenya.”

The latest phase will provide Kenyan organizations with money to get started, though USAID claims the goal of the activity is to put the groups on the path to long-term independence.

Past secrecy

This is not the first time WND – which has provided comprehensive coverage of U.S. assistance to Kenya during the Obama administration – has encountered such bumbling attempts by USAID to keep secret or to even remove information from public scrutiny.

WND had discovered, for example, that publicly available documents revealing the administration’s unwieldy portfolio of Kenyan projects – which included a formal plan to manipulate Kenyan and global media – had been removed from a federal contracting database following a series of reports on USAID’s self-described “exponential increase” in U.S.-funded initiatives.

Though total spending in Kenya had been greater under the George W. Bush administration – cost-wise, overall aid dropped from a high of $830 million in FY 2009 to $460 million in FY2013 – the growth in various U.S.-financed Kenyan projects had become so voluminous that USAID admitted having difficulty managing them, requiring additional contractors to assist existing contract-award winners.

The rise in aid to Kenya continues into Obama’s final year of his second term, with $630 million in spending planned for FY 2016 and no congressional efforts to interfere with the plan.

WND additionally broke the story on a USAID propaganda initiative to sway how “opinion leaders” – including those in the media – were depicting U.S. operations in Kenya. The “strategic plan” mapped out how the federal government intended to take its cue from the public relations industry to “target specific journalists at key media outlets to be groomed to cover targeted issues over time.”

USAID one year later released a revised Kenyan aid plan, dropping the propaganda package from the endeavor and simultaneously repackaging it as a health-specific project.

See all the reports about Obama’s spending in Kenya:

• Obama spending helps economy – in Kenya!
• Obama bails out Big Pharma – in Kenya
• Obama funding urinals in Kenya … again
• Obama now probes everyone’s health – in Kenya!
• Obama moves to protect taxpayers … in Kenya
• Obama studying spending more … in Kenya
• Obama finally fixing health care … in Kenya
• Obama funds Kenya project during shutdown
• Obama can’t stop spending — in Kenya!
• Obama drops hundreds of millions on (Kenyan) farmers
• Obama repackages Kenyan aid scheme
• Obama pushes $50 million more for Kenya
• Obama expands reading program – in Kenya!
• Obama pushing Kenyan ‘peace’ projects
• New Obama projects to boost Kenya power companies
• COVER-UP! Contracting system sanitized of Kenya documents
• White House rolls out Kenya propaganda plan
• Obama’s spending grows ‘exponentially’ – in Kenya!

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/obamas-latest-plan-to-spend-tax-money-in-kenya/#Qyr1hvBhRpcwlKWC.99