BY TOM WALSH
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Khalid Al-Naif was born Dec. 25, 1959, a night of revolution, gunshots and curfew in the streets of Baghdad. His father named him Khalid, meaning "immortal" in Arabic, figuring if the boy could make it through his first night, he could survive anything.
He would have to endure plenty: a chaotic coup in 1968 that saw his father installed and quickly ousted as Iraq's prime minister; a life of exile in Morocco, Switzerland, Germany, Britain and Jordan; and the assassination of his father, Abdel Razzaq Said Al-Naif, an opponent of Iraq's Baathist regime, in 1978 in London.
In 2004, after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Khalid Al-Naif, by then a successful banker and international development expert, chose to return to his strife-torn homeland -- leaving his wife and two boys in Jordan for security reasons -- to lead a two-year project to grow private-sector businesses and employment in Iraq.
And we think Gov. Jennifer Granholm has a tough challenge reviving Michigan's sluggish economy.
Perhaps she should visit Al-Naif -- for a jolt of can-do optimism about how to grow jobs in a hostile environment -- at his new Ann Arbor office with the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan. Al-Naif signed on Jan. 1 as director of development consulting services for the institute, which focuses on helping emerging economies prosper.
In a two-hour interview Friday, Al-Naif told me the harrowing story of his youth, along with what he insists is the untold story of the Iraq conflict -- the germination of a private-sector economy outside Baghdad's Green Zone and other hot spots of insurgent violence. He also outlined plans to raise the global profile of the Davidson Institute by tackling more high-impact development projects around the world.
When his father was killed in 1978, Al-Naif was a student at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. -- chosen chiefly because "it was out of the way. We were targets. That was the nature of our life," Al-Naif said.
He left Bradley and built a solid career in banking, first with Chase Manhattan Bank and later with Arab Bank PLC in Jordan. In 1989, he joined the U.S. Agency for International Development as a Jordan-based adviser.
Alonzo Fulgham, now chief operating officer of USAID, was Al-Naif's supervisor in Jordan. "He's entrepreneurial but also cerebral. He knows what can -- and what can't -- be done because he understands the politics of talking to the right people," Fulgham said of Al-Naif.
One particularly successful USAID program in Jordan, Fulgham said, was a micro-lending effort to make loans to entrepreneurs -- both men and women. "People said it wouldn't work, but Khalid made it work. The number of loans was incredible, and the default rate was less than a half of 1%," Fulgham said.
When the American-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, Al-Naif wanted to go immediately to Iraq. But USAID wouldn't send him, fearing for his safety because of the family political history. Al-Naif pleaded his case to David Hale, the U.S. ambassador to Jordan, at lunch one day.
"If people like me don't go back, who are we going to leave Iraq to?" Al-Naif asked Hale.
In 2004, Al-Naif got his wish, working under contract with a private consortium to head a USAID-funded, $154-million Iraq Private Sector Growth and Employment Generation Project.
His first act was to move the project offices out of the Green Zone, the heavily guarded area of closed-off streets in central Baghdad where U.S. authorities live and work, to the al-Monsour area nearby where Iraqis could come and go easily.
"We had not one security incident in two years there," Al-Naif said, "because the Iraqis knew we were there to help them."
By last year, many Iraqis had established private businesses -- including one man who Al-Naif said was previously "shooting at American soldiers because the insurgents told him the soldiers would rape his wife and daughters."
Nearly 40,000 loans worth more than $78 million have been made under the project, and 18 private banks have been organized. Al-Naif even put on seminars to get the country moving toward eventual membership in the World Trade Organization, which seems a fanciful notion in the midst of today's violence.
"Someday," Al-Naif said, "the shooting will stop."
Last year, Al-Naif decided that he'd been away from his family long enough and renewed a contact from a couple years earlier with the Davidson Institute, which was looking for a leader to help it move beyond small-scale development projects -- such as training faculty and providing curriculum for business schools in emerging nations -- into more complex projects.
In the past couple of years, the institute has grown its development consulting revenues -- which support other education and research work -- from $200,000 to $1.5 million. Robert Kennedy, executive director of the institute, sees Al-Naif growing that to $5 million or $10 million a year.
His work with USAID in Iraq provides valuable lessons for nations that wish to build free-market economies, he said. "There will be other countries that want change, either with or without U.S. help," he said. "The William Davidson Institute will have a clear advantage in such post-conflict environments."