The Score Card

Looking back over its first fourteen years, the over-riding impression is how narrowly CDC survived its initial structural disabilities, its own mistakes and the subsequent threats to its continuation. The fact that it did overcome them was due to the happenstance of two remarkable personalities, Reith and Rendell, and their somewhat improbable partnership over six years. In the hands of less determined – or more consensus-seeking – characters, it is doubtful whether CDC would have been given the opportunity to become a major development agency. Evidence that this is no idle speculation is provided by two contemporaneous institutions that were less fortunate in their leadership. The sibling Overseas Food Corporation, which was set up under the same Act as CDC in 1948, never recovered from its failed groundnut scheme in Tanganyika. Its operations were drastically reduced in 1951, and then in 1954 it was decided to transfer its assets to the colonial government to form the nucleus of its Agricultural Development Corporation. The Tory inspired Commonwealth Development Finance Corporation never attracted a board or management with appetite or capacity for overseas project finance. It was reactive and timorous and became increasingly irrelevant as a significant source of development finance for the Commonwealth. In a melancholy end in the 1980s its portfolio was sold off to a large pension fund and, ironically, CDC purchased some of the investment paper at the break up, as narrated in Chapter 12.