Sunday, 11 March 2007
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Fighting Corruption with Corruption
In June 1998, less than a month into my new employment on a United Nations project in Huambo, Angola, a country at the time on the brink of war, I determined that something needed to be done with urgency to relieve the enormous stress I was under.
This stress was caused not so much by the very insecure circumstances that surrounded me; the grinding poverty, the cynical fatalism and the fear of war.
It was caused by some very basic questions that I was asking myself: “What am I supposed to do?” “How am I supposed to do it?” “Who will support me in doing it?”
I felt that the lives of many people depended on the answers to those questions. I also felt that these were pretty basic questions, and that asking the right people for answers would be relatively easy and that the answers would be, should be, pretty straightforward.
The only reason I found myself in Huambo, after all, was to use other peoples’ money to assist in making the lives of the people in Huambo at least a little better.
In the end, however, I had to figure out the answers for myself, and in doing so, had to come up with many, many more questions. I am still searching for answers to those questions.
My first port of call was the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the agency that had planned and financed our project. I would eventually go round and round in circles but always come back to this agency.
There I met many people, immaculate people, with ready smiles and a ready promise to answer my questions.
It took me years to realise – and it took so long because first my innate belief in the basic decency of human beings had to be destroyed – that what these people were saying was: “Come let us lead you up the garden path, and, guess what?, we are going to make you pay for the journey.”
Because what these people were doing in fact was stealing.
The project that I was working on, and it was and is by no means an exception, had little, if anything, to do with making the lives of local people better. Behind an apparently legitimate façade, and unbelievable, seemingly needless complexity, it was a basic run-of-the-mill scam to siphon of development money for individual benefit.
Behind their immaculate smiles and glib rhetoric all these nice people I met from the UN really were, to put it very bluntly, but a bunch of crooks.
Not real crooks, that one can secretly admire, if one is so inclined, for their initiative and creativity, preying on the greed of others to take what is not theirs.
What we are dealing with here are bottom-feeders, unscrupulous parasites that prey on the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the victims of war, famine, drought and floods. In other words those already so burdened with the effort of basic survival that they are unable to defend themselves from further abuse by those who arrive, often unannounced and uninvited, to steal from them in the name of humanitarian and development aid.
I would come across one Erick de Mul, a thirty-odd year veteran of UNDP, and a man in a senior position, that is so convinced that UNDP has the right to plan and finance all manner of things, yet have no need to accept responsibility for the consequences of what they plan and finance, that he puts forth this argument under a UNDP letterhead, signs it and sends it out into the world with all the smug confidence of somebody that considers himself outside of and above the law.
This is a man who dealt with my questions by courageously instructing his minions to lie, deceive and threaten on his behalf. He is by all accounts a much admired and respected official of the UN system.
Almost too late I realised that it is pointless asking the crooks any questions since that would require them to admit that they are crooks and even to tell me why they are such a thing.
I thought it may be a good idea to write a book.
It was also time to inform The Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) of my misgivings.
There were however several lawyers, with whom I was also in contact, who seemed to feel that it is not recommended to place much faith in this organisation. The problem with this office, created somewhat reluctantly by the UN, only in 1994, after considerable pressure from a small number of member states, is that it is not fully independent of the system, as one would expect it to be. This meant that in effect it was subject to all the weaknesses in accountability so common with in the UN, and it appears as though it was pretty quickly co-opted to provide a façade of transparency that did not in fact exist.
As just one of many possible examples, on 02 June 2006, FOX News published an article “Report Slams UN Investigators” raising questions about the UN’s ability to investigate wrongdoing and Secretary General Kofi Annan's willingness to do so. The article details an independent investigation by Washington lawyers Jerome Ackerman and John Vanderstar into charges that that former Under-Secretary General Dileep Nair was promoting favourites in violation of UN rules and possibly doing so in return for money and sex while serving as head of OIOS. The report revealed that Nair violated UN promotion rules exactly as charged. Nevertheless, Kofi Annan ordered the case closed because the investigation apparently found no evidence that Nair received money or sex in exchange for promotions and even wrote Nair a personal letter expressing “personal dismay” for suffering “unnecessary and unmerited public innuendo.” He also ignored details in the report on how personnel at OIOS stonewalled investigators by failing to provide requested computer records and internal documents, The report stated: “To date, neither a response from OIOS to the March 2006 request nor any further OIOS documents have been provided,” and that OIOS “limited interviews of individuals who might have provided relevant information.”
Dileep Nair, refused to make himself available to investigators and dismissed the investigation as a “witch hunt.”
The leader of the investigation expressed surprise at the low level of cooperation given by OIOS, the very office charged with enforcing UN regulations.
"We did not get what we thought we would get," he told FOX News.
Misgivings that OIOS is not to be trusted seemed to bear out when my attempts between 2003 and 2005 solicited not a single response from them, apart from the occasional acknowledgement that they had received material from me.
On 30 November 2006 I wrote to them once more, more out of habit, than in the expectation of any real results:
“Christopher Burnham, (ex) UN Under-Secretary-General for Management, invites anybody, at any level, with information about UN corruption to come forward and that they will be protected. I am nevertheless unable to find out how to come forward, and exactly how people are protected except through OIOS, an institute which I do not trust and have been told not to trust. On several occasions have I informed OIOS about this issue, without response, then also informed them about my book on the matter, before and after publication also without response.”
Remarkably, on 15 January 2007, I received a response from one Ellen F. Gardner, Investigator, Investigations Division:“Our office, OIOS, received your email and document regarding a book you have written whereby you state there is corruption and misuse of foreign aid to Africa by Non-Governmental Organizations and the United Nations Agencies in particular UNDP. In order for me to look into this case would you please contact me at your earliest convenience at the telephone number below.”
Although a welcome sign of life, in a sea of indifference over many years, I still had some misgivings. In the first instance I felt that the UN should concern themselves with “corruption and misuse of foreign aid to Africa by Non-Governmental Organizations” only once it had gotten its own house in order. I do write about my own concerns on this issue reasonably extensively. I hardly believe that the United Nations has any moral authority to deal with them.
In the second instance I was afraid that the request for me to phone her would once again be an attempt to lead me up the garden path, once again at my own expense.
Therefore, expressing nevertheless my pleasure at hearing from her, I suggested that she rather call me.
It was also a way of asking, perhaps demanding, but doing so as politely as possible, that maybe the organisation should first establish a relationship of trust with me, before making any demands on me to work with them, phone them or making any commitments to them.
OIOS has since that date once again been prominent only in its silence.
One of the main problems that I have with OIOS reports, is that they tend to make large sweeping statements: “The UN has done a great deal to increase efficiency and overall accountability,” that it is working hard to “promote efficient management and reduce waste, fraud and abuse,” that it had “recommended millions in savings and recoveries for the UN and persuaded UN programme managers to implement hundreds of recommendations for improving management and internal controls,” and that “OIOS investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds.”
In spite of all these claims, none of the reports ever mention any names. They tend to be so weak on specific detail that it is nearly impossible to confirm the truth of their claims one way or the other. On the rare occasions when one does manage to find some detail, it is invariably for misdemeanours. With disturbing regularity, complainants, even highly credible ones, are admonished for “harming the good name of the United Nations.”
Some reports go to such extremes not to offend anybody that it does little more than narrate the issues at hand before politely requesting the interested parties to be a bit more diligent. It seems to act entirely in the best interests, not of truth and justice, but of a corrupt and inept bureaucracy, that is self-perpetuating, self-serving and self-absorbed. OIOS often comes across as a farce, acting primarily in the interests of the multitude of the “petty despots” that abound with the UN system.
It is many of these selfsame “petty despots” that I name and that I feel that need to be investigated. For the sake of completeness these are the individuals that I personally name and believe need to answer to allegations, some of them serious: “Mark Malloch Brown, James Lee, Dimitri Samaras, Bisrat Aklilu, Michele Falavigna, Erick de Mul, Michel Balima, Stanislaus Nkwain, Stephen Kinloch, Francisco de Almeida.”
These are by and large senior UN public servants.
Dimitri Samaras for example, is an individual who as Deputy Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) had received in excess of $160 000.00 to provide Administrative and Overhead Support (AOS) to our project in Huambo. With that money he may have visited the project once, although there is no confirmation of this, and had written, or instructed somebody to write, not a single report regarding the support that they were supposedly providing, nor did he ever bother to respond to concerns raised over a number of years.
When those concerns culminated in a request for an audit, he became highly indignant, claiming that a project that he clearly knew absolutely nothing about was a fantastic success, and writing: “So to question it today, as it was done by UNDP new Leadership was indeed not a plus in terms of projecting a positive image but rather was felt as some kind of “retaliation” for which UNOPS is not part of.”
If this Dimitri Samaras considers something as routine as an audit - and surely for the expenditure of more than one and a half million Dollars, an audit should be routine – as “some kind of “retaliation,” is there perhaps not some chance that he may not also consider an OIOS investigation as “some kind of “ retaliation?”
Is he likely to co-operate with this investigation?
Is OIOS capable of taking him to task?
I need some sort of assurance on these sorts of issues, and not having heard anything from OIOS in almost a month I wrote to them on 14 February 2007:
“I am following up on the e-mail that I had received from you in order to establish if you are indeed following up on this case, and if so, what progress you had made to date.
Notwithstanding the fact that I had refused to phone you (it is a matter of principle), I am nevertheless pleased that finally there seem to be at least the possibility of some meaningful progress regarding my concerns.
I am sure that not many people go through the trouble of reading all OIOS reports, but I do, and based on this as well as my previous experience of being dragged into all sorts of UN “investigations” (read cover-ups), invariably at my own expense in terms of time and money, I am reluctant to become the recipient of the apparently standard OIOS procedure that invariably finds a few token irregularities (usually in procurement), mildly admonishes the wrongdoer(s) for this, then concludes by castigating the complainant(s) for “harming the good name of the United Nations.” I would be far more co-operative once I have some confidence in the process.
I would also be very interested in finding out exactly what it is that you are investigating (or intend to investigate). Although my concerns are often framed within the context of my own experiences, they do in fact go a lot deeper than that, in the manner that funds are managed by the UN (specifically UNDP) in general. It is encouraging to read that the Secretary General has now ordered an investigation into all UN Programmes and Funds, yet it still remains to be seen to what extent it will be able to penetrate the quagmire of abuse and fraud that it is bound to encounter.
From the literature you may pick up on the fact that for a long time there had been some concern about the manner in which UNDP had decided to micro-manage the UNDP Trust Fund in Angola (worth some $100 million) and how most project proposals were not authorised even years after they had been submitted.
Locally it had been felt, and there is probably some truth in this, that the reason for this state of affairs was that all project proposals were subjected to a single requirement, and if it did not meet this requirement, then it was simply ignored by the staff at UNDP.
This requirement was “What is in it for me?”
That is probably the reason why the RUTEC project was implemented, in spite of being totally inappropriate, in spite of local objections, in spite of not following the required procedures for authorisation, why it always bounced out of the way of any audit and why such a large succession of UNDP officials went to such lengths to cover it up.
It remains nevertheless only the tip of the iceberg, maybe of importance only because one person had the courage (or stupidity) to keep on asking questions. I hope that it would contribute in its own way to having far larger concerns and questions raised and finally answered. I had perhaps to date been singularly unsuccessful in having even basic questions answered, that may be disturbing in itself, and indicative of how much may in fact be wrong within the UN system, but I am convinced that by asking questions for long enough, eventually the lack of any response will become its own answer.
Finally I would like to request your assistance in two other issues that I am following up upon.
Regarding the claim that “OIOS investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds” that has made an appearance on the OIOS website and several reports over the years; I attempted to track down some such convictions.
Although my efforts have resulted in a number of interesting responses from various authorities, I have not been able to track down any specific cases. I am most interested in finding out if any staff at UN development agencies had ever been prosecuted, specifically in Africa or as a result of programmes implemented in Africa. Specific, but not necessarily comprehensive, information that can both quantify and qualify this OIOS claim would be particularly useful to me.
I am also interested in following up on the statement made by a number of Secretary General documents published in 2005 and 2006, that UN staff responsible for waste and abuse of funds would be required to reimburse the organisation for those losses.
Has this ever happened?
I hope that you would either be able to get this information for me, or alternatively put me in touch with somebody that can do so.”
It is not only important that justice is done. It is not even good enough to be told that apparently justice is being done. It has to be seen to be done. It may be highly embarrassing to the individuals involved, but claims that “investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds” is virtually meaningless unless one can also follow up on who was convicted, for what, through which system of justice and what was the sentence that was passed down.
Without that the “fight against corruption” becomes but a façade; and that façade is in itself but a form of corruption.
This stress was caused not so much by the very insecure circumstances that surrounded me; the grinding poverty, the cynical fatalism and the fear of war.
It was caused by some very basic questions that I was asking myself: “What am I supposed to do?” “How am I supposed to do it?” “Who will support me in doing it?”
I felt that the lives of many people depended on the answers to those questions. I also felt that these were pretty basic questions, and that asking the right people for answers would be relatively easy and that the answers would be, should be, pretty straightforward.
The only reason I found myself in Huambo, after all, was to use other peoples’ money to assist in making the lives of the people in Huambo at least a little better.
In the end, however, I had to figure out the answers for myself, and in doing so, had to come up with many, many more questions. I am still searching for answers to those questions.
My first port of call was the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the agency that had planned and financed our project. I would eventually go round and round in circles but always come back to this agency.
There I met many people, immaculate people, with ready smiles and a ready promise to answer my questions.
It took me years to realise – and it took so long because first my innate belief in the basic decency of human beings had to be destroyed – that what these people were saying was: “Come let us lead you up the garden path, and, guess what?, we are going to make you pay for the journey.”
Because what these people were doing in fact was stealing.
The project that I was working on, and it was and is by no means an exception, had little, if anything, to do with making the lives of local people better. Behind an apparently legitimate façade, and unbelievable, seemingly needless complexity, it was a basic run-of-the-mill scam to siphon of development money for individual benefit.
Behind their immaculate smiles and glib rhetoric all these nice people I met from the UN really were, to put it very bluntly, but a bunch of crooks.
Not real crooks, that one can secretly admire, if one is so inclined, for their initiative and creativity, preying on the greed of others to take what is not theirs.
What we are dealing with here are bottom-feeders, unscrupulous parasites that prey on the poorest of the poor, the disenfranchised, and the victims of war, famine, drought and floods. In other words those already so burdened with the effort of basic survival that they are unable to defend themselves from further abuse by those who arrive, often unannounced and uninvited, to steal from them in the name of humanitarian and development aid.
I would come across one Erick de Mul, a thirty-odd year veteran of UNDP, and a man in a senior position, that is so convinced that UNDP has the right to plan and finance all manner of things, yet have no need to accept responsibility for the consequences of what they plan and finance, that he puts forth this argument under a UNDP letterhead, signs it and sends it out into the world with all the smug confidence of somebody that considers himself outside of and above the law.
This is a man who dealt with my questions by courageously instructing his minions to lie, deceive and threaten on his behalf. He is by all accounts a much admired and respected official of the UN system.
Almost too late I realised that it is pointless asking the crooks any questions since that would require them to admit that they are crooks and even to tell me why they are such a thing.
I thought it may be a good idea to write a book.
It was also time to inform The Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) of my misgivings.
There were however several lawyers, with whom I was also in contact, who seemed to feel that it is not recommended to place much faith in this organisation. The problem with this office, created somewhat reluctantly by the UN, only in 1994, after considerable pressure from a small number of member states, is that it is not fully independent of the system, as one would expect it to be. This meant that in effect it was subject to all the weaknesses in accountability so common with in the UN, and it appears as though it was pretty quickly co-opted to provide a façade of transparency that did not in fact exist.
As just one of many possible examples, on 02 June 2006, FOX News published an article “Report Slams UN Investigators” raising questions about the UN’s ability to investigate wrongdoing and Secretary General Kofi Annan's willingness to do so. The article details an independent investigation by Washington lawyers Jerome Ackerman and John Vanderstar into charges that that former Under-Secretary General Dileep Nair was promoting favourites in violation of UN rules and possibly doing so in return for money and sex while serving as head of OIOS. The report revealed that Nair violated UN promotion rules exactly as charged. Nevertheless, Kofi Annan ordered the case closed because the investigation apparently found no evidence that Nair received money or sex in exchange for promotions and even wrote Nair a personal letter expressing “personal dismay” for suffering “unnecessary and unmerited public innuendo.” He also ignored details in the report on how personnel at OIOS stonewalled investigators by failing to provide requested computer records and internal documents, The report stated: “To date, neither a response from OIOS to the March 2006 request nor any further OIOS documents have been provided,” and that OIOS “limited interviews of individuals who might have provided relevant information.”
Dileep Nair, refused to make himself available to investigators and dismissed the investigation as a “witch hunt.”
The leader of the investigation expressed surprise at the low level of cooperation given by OIOS, the very office charged with enforcing UN regulations.
"We did not get what we thought we would get," he told FOX News.
Misgivings that OIOS is not to be trusted seemed to bear out when my attempts between 2003 and 2005 solicited not a single response from them, apart from the occasional acknowledgement that they had received material from me.
On 30 November 2006 I wrote to them once more, more out of habit, than in the expectation of any real results:
“Christopher Burnham, (ex) UN Under-Secretary-General for Management, invites anybody, at any level, with information about UN corruption to come forward and that they will be protected. I am nevertheless unable to find out how to come forward, and exactly how people are protected except through OIOS, an institute which I do not trust and have been told not to trust. On several occasions have I informed OIOS about this issue, without response, then also informed them about my book on the matter, before and after publication also without response.”
Remarkably, on 15 January 2007, I received a response from one Ellen F. Gardner, Investigator, Investigations Division:“Our office, OIOS, received your email and document regarding a book you have written whereby you state there is corruption and misuse of foreign aid to Africa by Non-Governmental Organizations and the United Nations Agencies in particular UNDP. In order for me to look into this case would you please contact me at your earliest convenience at the telephone number below.”
Although a welcome sign of life, in a sea of indifference over many years, I still had some misgivings. In the first instance I felt that the UN should concern themselves with “corruption and misuse of foreign aid to Africa by Non-Governmental Organizations” only once it had gotten its own house in order. I do write about my own concerns on this issue reasonably extensively. I hardly believe that the United Nations has any moral authority to deal with them.
In the second instance I was afraid that the request for me to phone her would once again be an attempt to lead me up the garden path, once again at my own expense.
Therefore, expressing nevertheless my pleasure at hearing from her, I suggested that she rather call me.
It was also a way of asking, perhaps demanding, but doing so as politely as possible, that maybe the organisation should first establish a relationship of trust with me, before making any demands on me to work with them, phone them or making any commitments to them.
OIOS has since that date once again been prominent only in its silence.
One of the main problems that I have with OIOS reports, is that they tend to make large sweeping statements: “The UN has done a great deal to increase efficiency and overall accountability,” that it is working hard to “promote efficient management and reduce waste, fraud and abuse,” that it had “recommended millions in savings and recoveries for the UN and persuaded UN programme managers to implement hundreds of recommendations for improving management and internal controls,” and that “OIOS investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds.”
In spite of all these claims, none of the reports ever mention any names. They tend to be so weak on specific detail that it is nearly impossible to confirm the truth of their claims one way or the other. On the rare occasions when one does manage to find some detail, it is invariably for misdemeanours. With disturbing regularity, complainants, even highly credible ones, are admonished for “harming the good name of the United Nations.”
Some reports go to such extremes not to offend anybody that it does little more than narrate the issues at hand before politely requesting the interested parties to be a bit more diligent. It seems to act entirely in the best interests, not of truth and justice, but of a corrupt and inept bureaucracy, that is self-perpetuating, self-serving and self-absorbed. OIOS often comes across as a farce, acting primarily in the interests of the multitude of the “petty despots” that abound with the UN system.
It is many of these selfsame “petty despots” that I name and that I feel that need to be investigated. For the sake of completeness these are the individuals that I personally name and believe need to answer to allegations, some of them serious: “Mark Malloch Brown, James Lee, Dimitri Samaras, Bisrat Aklilu, Michele Falavigna, Erick de Mul, Michel Balima, Stanislaus Nkwain, Stephen Kinloch, Francisco de Almeida.”
These are by and large senior UN public servants.
Dimitri Samaras for example, is an individual who as Deputy Director of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) had received in excess of $160 000.00 to provide Administrative and Overhead Support (AOS) to our project in Huambo. With that money he may have visited the project once, although there is no confirmation of this, and had written, or instructed somebody to write, not a single report regarding the support that they were supposedly providing, nor did he ever bother to respond to concerns raised over a number of years.
When those concerns culminated in a request for an audit, he became highly indignant, claiming that a project that he clearly knew absolutely nothing about was a fantastic success, and writing: “So to question it today, as it was done by UNDP new Leadership was indeed not a plus in terms of projecting a positive image but rather was felt as some kind of “retaliation” for which UNOPS is not part of.”
If this Dimitri Samaras considers something as routine as an audit - and surely for the expenditure of more than one and a half million Dollars, an audit should be routine – as “some kind of “retaliation,” is there perhaps not some chance that he may not also consider an OIOS investigation as “some kind of “ retaliation?”
Is he likely to co-operate with this investigation?
Is OIOS capable of taking him to task?
I need some sort of assurance on these sorts of issues, and not having heard anything from OIOS in almost a month I wrote to them on 14 February 2007:
“I am following up on the e-mail that I had received from you in order to establish if you are indeed following up on this case, and if so, what progress you had made to date.
Notwithstanding the fact that I had refused to phone you (it is a matter of principle), I am nevertheless pleased that finally there seem to be at least the possibility of some meaningful progress regarding my concerns.
I am sure that not many people go through the trouble of reading all OIOS reports, but I do, and based on this as well as my previous experience of being dragged into all sorts of UN “investigations” (read cover-ups), invariably at my own expense in terms of time and money, I am reluctant to become the recipient of the apparently standard OIOS procedure that invariably finds a few token irregularities (usually in procurement), mildly admonishes the wrongdoer(s) for this, then concludes by castigating the complainant(s) for “harming the good name of the United Nations.” I would be far more co-operative once I have some confidence in the process.
I would also be very interested in finding out exactly what it is that you are investigating (or intend to investigate). Although my concerns are often framed within the context of my own experiences, they do in fact go a lot deeper than that, in the manner that funds are managed by the UN (specifically UNDP) in general. It is encouraging to read that the Secretary General has now ordered an investigation into all UN Programmes and Funds, yet it still remains to be seen to what extent it will be able to penetrate the quagmire of abuse and fraud that it is bound to encounter.
From the literature you may pick up on the fact that for a long time there had been some concern about the manner in which UNDP had decided to micro-manage the UNDP Trust Fund in Angola (worth some $100 million) and how most project proposals were not authorised even years after they had been submitted.
Locally it had been felt, and there is probably some truth in this, that the reason for this state of affairs was that all project proposals were subjected to a single requirement, and if it did not meet this requirement, then it was simply ignored by the staff at UNDP.
This requirement was “What is in it for me?”
That is probably the reason why the RUTEC project was implemented, in spite of being totally inappropriate, in spite of local objections, in spite of not following the required procedures for authorisation, why it always bounced out of the way of any audit and why such a large succession of UNDP officials went to such lengths to cover it up.
It remains nevertheless only the tip of the iceberg, maybe of importance only because one person had the courage (or stupidity) to keep on asking questions. I hope that it would contribute in its own way to having far larger concerns and questions raised and finally answered. I had perhaps to date been singularly unsuccessful in having even basic questions answered, that may be disturbing in itself, and indicative of how much may in fact be wrong within the UN system, but I am convinced that by asking questions for long enough, eventually the lack of any response will become its own answer.
Finally I would like to request your assistance in two other issues that I am following up upon.
Regarding the claim that “OIOS investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds” that has made an appearance on the OIOS website and several reports over the years; I attempted to track down some such convictions.
Although my efforts have resulted in a number of interesting responses from various authorities, I have not been able to track down any specific cases. I am most interested in finding out if any staff at UN development agencies had ever been prosecuted, specifically in Africa or as a result of programmes implemented in Africa. Specific, but not necessarily comprehensive, information that can both quantify and qualify this OIOS claim would be particularly useful to me.
I am also interested in following up on the statement made by a number of Secretary General documents published in 2005 and 2006, that UN staff responsible for waste and abuse of funds would be required to reimburse the organisation for those losses.
Has this ever happened?
I hope that you would either be able to get this information for me, or alternatively put me in touch with somebody that can do so.”
It is not only important that justice is done. It is not even good enough to be told that apparently justice is being done. It has to be seen to be done. It may be highly embarrassing to the individuals involved, but claims that “investigations also led to successful convictions of UN staff and others for fraud and stealing UN funds” is virtually meaningless unless one can also follow up on who was convicted, for what, through which system of justice and what was the sentence that was passed down.
Without that the “fight against corruption” becomes but a façade; and that façade is in itself but a form of corruption.
Monday, 27 November 2006
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.
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.
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