Press Release (and the resulting tantrum by UNDP)

Talk about corruption is the order of the day. Of all the bad things that are happening in Africa, corruption is slowly reaching the top of the list. Corruption is perhaps not as bad as genocide, but it is also a crime against humanity. Corruption is a killer of initiative and trust. It drives away foreign investment and undermines the development of the rule of law. But most importantly, corruption robs Africans of a better life and African children especially of a future.
The UN has initiated a “Convention Against Corruption” that has been signed by more than 100 countries.
Some of the most infamous incidences of corruption include Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) who allegedly stole somewhere between $5 and 14 billion, and Sani Abacha, former president of Nigeria, who reportedly looted more than $2 billion. Both these former leaders are now dead, but their legacy of corruption continues to afflict their nations.African governments are warned time and again that increased aid flows continue to be compromised by the issue of accountability in the face of serious and well-documented corruption. The South African government most notably wants to be seen as clean and free of corruption.
Chances are, however that you still don’t know about one of the biggest scams of our time: The misuse of foreign aid to Africa by Non-Governmental Organisations, United Nations Agencies and business operating in Africa.
Perhaps it is because it has been such an embarrassment to democratic governments in the developed world and private organizations who keep on believing that foreign aid will help Africa that this issue never gains the attention that it deserves.
Now a new book “Letters to Gabriella: Angola's Last War for Peace, What the UN Did and Why” (ISBN: 1891855670) published by Florida Literary Foundation, takes the reader into the bizarre and murky world of development assistance, an insider view on how UN agencies function and how businesses have latched onto this world of undeserved affluence and excess to earn profits for themselves with very little effort. It names the names and points fingers at the guilty, unlike similar books on the same subject.
The author himself steps into this world when he arrives in the beginning of 1998 in Huambo, Angola, charged with setting up a small business development project in this, the second largest city in the country situated in the central highlands.
The country is on the brink of civil war but a project planned three years previously by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is finally being implemented through an agreement with a South African company, RUTEC. This company, under the directorship of John Dommett has sold themselves as experts in small business development and UNDP has promised them a payment of $1.65 million to transfer this expertise to Huambo. The contract however, turns out to be very vague, amongst other things it fails to state exactly which services RUTEC are to provide. Furthermore the Angolan government claims that they had not authorised this project and does not want it there.
It soon turns out that RUTEC is a company that sells equipment to small businesses and not much else and this demand to sell this equipment is immediately transmitted to the project staff in Huambo. It also turns out that the equipment is not only largely irrelevant to the Angolan context but also prohibitively expensive and of very poor quality. John Dommett also looses no time to inform the UN system in Angola that RUTEC has no staff capable of travelling to Angola.
Nevertheless month after month large amounts of money is paid from UNDP into the RUTEC account. A full scale civil war had also broken out at the end of 1998 with its epicentre in the area surrounding Huambo. Under these circumstances project staff, with no support, technical assistance or even salaries struggle to make a difference, with some success, against overwhelming odds. Blissfully indifferent to the circumstances of the Angolan people that he had promised to assist John Dommett, provides no support either financially or technically; instead uses his UN contract to sell RUTEC to the South African Land Development Bank and the Mineworkers Development Agency at a grossly inflated price and promptly disappears with his share of the loot.
By the beginning of 2001 the author, faced with a project that had achieved some success but had received less than 15% of the funds allocated to it, with staff salaries six months in arrears and a $100 000.00 of unpaid obligations in Huambo, arrived at UNDP’s offices in the Angolan capital Luanda to find out what went wrong and why, and how this can be corrected.
Correspondence to RUTEC quickly establishes that this company has no idea on where and how they had spent $1.5 million received from UNDP over a two year period. The new director was for three months unaware that RUTEC had a project in Angola and was receiving money from this project. An audit is promised.
Instead of this promised audit the author is then drawn into a topsy-turvy world of lies, deceits and threats, a world where nothing is as it seems, where higher and higher level UN officials tell bigger and bigger lies, an organisation with a complete and utter disregard for a humanity that they are supposed to serve, a world of glossy reports, excessive salaries and fraud, corruption and incompetence on a fantastic scale. All of this is being perpetuated by development practitioners who are morally and practically accountable to absolutely nobody. No audit ever took place.
This happened at a time before corruption was allowed to be discussed within the UN, before the oil-for-food scandal and before more members of the UN started pressuring the body to start accounting for what it is doing.
This is no isolated incident.
As the Angolan civil war drags on through 2001, and the mortality rate skyrockets along with a dramatic plunge in living standards for almost all Angolans, another South African businessman, Paul Erskine, noted for shady dealings in China and Russia, arrived with a lot of fanfare and a television crew from CNN and Mnet’s Carte Blance in tow. Mr. Erskine claims to represent the “Angolan Refugee Charity” an organisation dedicated to assist the people of Kuito, another city on the highlands as badly affected by the war as Huambo. This charity is registered in South Africa and on his website Paul Erskine requests donations to supply 1500 humanitarian products to the “refugees” in Kuito. These include wine, beer and cigarettes. Ignoring for the moment the fact that there cannot be, by definition, any Angolan refugees inside Angola, in Kuito almost nothing is known about Paul Erskine except for a series of complex business arrangements that he has with the local governor, a person reputed to be one of the most corrupt men in the country. Under his Humanitarian assistance guise he asks for logistical support from the World Food Programme, he calls them the World Food Organisation on his website, to bring his 1 500 humanitarian products into the city. This provokes a lot of suspicion and questions being asked about this man.
Seamus Reynolds, a Carte Blanche Journalist, responded to the authors’ concerns as such:
“We have been in contact with the World Food Program in Kuito and they have also expressed their concern. The Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance has also promised to send through some information about Mr Erskine, but as yet I have not received any correspondence.
We are very concerned that money and supplies donated by the South African public might not be reaching the intended destination, but we need solid proof if this is the case.
We are aware of Mr Erskine's previous dealings in China and Russia, and although we cannot judge the man by those businesses we do include them in our assessment. When we spoke to him originally he explained how he operated in countries where free trade was a problem, and this is obviously the case in Angola. However, the work he says he is doing now is not for gain but purely humanitarian. Now this is the question we are asking. Is Mr Erskine using the aid from South Africa to benefit his business?”
It probably did, but unfortunately for Mr. Erskine, his methods proved to be a bit too crude and after few months of trying to raise funds and profit from the spectacle of compassion, he leaves swiftly, along with the TV cameras and disappears from the scene.
But as long as corruption exists at its current levels in Africa, and as long as both donors and ordinary people, continue to look the other way, foreign aid will simply serve to keep Africans poor. Sub-Saharan Africa has received an estimated $140 billion in bilateral and multilateral aid from 1995-2004. Yet African countries consistently end up as the poorest countries in the world. So one may ask the (literally) billion-dollar question: Where does the money go?
Admittedly kleptocrats do take a large percentage of this money, but the worst transgressors in this regard had been removed from office by the end of the last century and still large amounts of money are unaccounted for.
Clearly the answer to this question must increasingly be searched for elsewhere.
Non-Governmental agencies, the UN, the large number of donors and to a lesser extend private business are generally perceived in a positive light.
There is an assumption that at the UN, in particular, staff are always bound to the high standards of their institution and always act in good faith and are consistently reliable and trustworthy.
Because of this assumption, rather than actual institutional accountability, moral authority is not questioned but assumed; and as such scandals should pose a greater threat to the humanitarian system than they would in a democracy, for example.
It is time to remove the veil of purity that has supported humanitarian institutions. The UN should not only set standards for its own conduct, it should also establish mechanisms to enforce adherence to these standards that goes beyond their tendency to simply say, “Trust us.”
Aspiring as they are to the highest values of mankind, the UN cannot, without oversight, expect its employees to be above corruption, abuse, stupidity, incompetence and ignorance.
The danger that exists is that current positive views, which are not fully supported by the reality, can quickly turn negative. There are some corruption researchers who are concerned that countries are typically seen as either as mostly clean or mostly dirty, with few countries falling within these extremes. For example a 2004 Gallup poll of 41 000 people in 47 countries found moderate concern over corruption in South Africa's courts, customs, business licensing, etc., yet people’s concerns regarding corruption were growing. The poll found that 51% of South African respondents expected corruption to grow worse. They were among the most pessimistic of all the people asked. It is perhaps not surprising considering that they live in what must be one of the most corrupt business environments around.
On 01 Apr 2004 Business Day published an article “South Africa Plans Law Against Corruption By Local Companies In Foreign States” which stated that “Government plans to enact legislation that will make it possible to prosecute South African companies accused of corruption in foreign countries.”
According to the article Public Enterprises Minister Jeff Radebe, “called for South African companies operating elsewhere in Africa to make sure they were ethically beyond reproach and to act in such a way that they would not be deemed the "new imperialists."”
He furthermore said that government was considering a special code of conduct for state-owned companies operating in other parts of Africa, and trusted “that most in the private sector would agree with our approach.” Does he in all honesty believe that the private sector would by themselves and left to themselves agree to this approach?
Organized business responded to him by saying that “it would welcome the cabinet's proposed initiative, (but) it called for avenues other than legislation to be explored.” If not legislation, then what are the alternatives? One can then only turn ones hopes to the International Community.
For the past decade at least we have heard how corruption and mismanagement at the UN has bruised its image. Time and again the world and especially the Third World are promised that “steps are being taken to correct the situation and refurbish the image of the UN.”
“Letters to Gabriella” clearly demonstrates how the United Nations in general, and its so-called principle agency, UNDP, in particular, perform in countries where they claim to be assisting local economies and people.
Time and again we find out that it is all whitewash; the UN remains as corrupt and mismanaged as ever; in fact, as this book amply demonstrates, “its standing in many countries has "never been lower".”
In 2003 Mark Malloch Brown, then the UNDP Administrator, claimed in a report that “Today, UNDP has come to the close of the most dramatic four-year internal transformation in our history. We are more capable than ever before of responding to the world’s development challenges because our organization is stronger, more focused and better connected.”
“Letters to Gabriella” is set against the background of this promise and shows clearly that on the ground that at best this “transformation” had not done much more than entrench old habits in an already corrupt and incapable UNDP. Survey after survey (except for UNDP surveys), demonstrate that confidence in UNDP in particular and the UN in general remain as low as ever. Recently Mr. Brown has been appointed UN Chief of Staff, specifically charged with overseeing UN reform. Could we now look forward to more empty words and more whitewashing?
Mr. Tharoor, Under-secretary General to the United Nations, states that no charge against the organisation goes unanswered. “Letters to Gabriella” clearly demonstrates how a contractor to UNDP spent six years trying to get answers from an organisation regarding their ineptness and corruption, without any success. These questions are unanswered in the book and remain so today; leaving in its wake but an account of a series of lies, threats and deceit that does nothing to instil any confidence in the UN system.
Mr. Tharoor also likes to state that a “blizzard of public information initiatives” is unleashed by the UN to counter attacks in the media.”
Would it not be more productive to unleash a blizzard of dismissals of the freeloaders, the charlatans, the corrupt and incompetent officials that form the bulk of UN staff and tarnish its image? Would not then UN reform be more productive and more believable?

Corruption thrives in secrecy. When corruption prevails, the resultant misallocation of resources hits not only the poor but also the pockets of taxpayers and shareholders worldwide. Even so by far the most damaging effects of corruption are felt by its victims in the developing world, ordinary people who lack the political skill or economic leverage to bring about change.

Amazon Review:
If you hate the UN, this book is for you, January 12, 2006
Reviewer:
Dr. W. Martin James (Arkadelphia, AR USA) -
If you believe, as I, that the United Nations is a bloated, corrupt, inept, inefficient, and arrogant organization then this book is for you. The author spent several years in Huambo, Angola working on a development project under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). UNDP could not account for money spent, who it went to or for what purpose. Meanwhile, the author and his staff struggled without salaries, supplies, and guidance while still making a meaningful contribution. Plus, Huambo was in the middle of a civil war. I'd give the book 5 stars, but Kukkuk really delves into the contracts, booklets, and correspondence as he struggles to save his project. It can get to be too much, but then again, he suffered through the time period. The book has an excellent account about the Angolan civil war, but the main focus of the text is the author's unbelievable struggle with UNDP. For a program designed to help the less fortunate, UNDP in Angola, at least, does nothing but worry about glossy reports, avoiding responsibility, and waiting for pay day and the chance to go on holiday paid for by the UN. A stunning indictment of the arrogance and condescending attitude shown not only to the people they are suppose to serve, but the host government as well.


Below is the reaction that this article as originally posted at www.publishedauthors.org received from UNDP.