Liberia is a U.N. mission’s dream. Or nightmare. Depends who you ask.
Today’s cabinet ministers were World Bank officials, U.N. technocrats, and international business leaders during their years of political exile. Now, back in their home country, they know the drill.
A senior UN official tells me of walking into ministers’ offices with plans and proposals, only to be told how to do her job. “Do you know how many times I’ve sat on the other side of this desk?” one minister is reported to have asked, “Don’t come to me with this proposal. I want something better.” To her credit, the UN official related the story with glee. “This is really helping things get done.”
Even President Ellen Sirleaf was head of UNDP’s Africa bureau for many years, as well as a former World Banker. The heads of the local UNDP office? They used to work for her. One UN official loved it: “We used to joke behind her back: ‘Oh! So she thinks she’s going to be President of her country.’ And now she is!”
5 Responses
Kericam –
to respond to your question as to why Liberia can be more demanding from donors.
I can suggest two characteristics that contribute.
1) They have many donors lining up to help them, so they can be picky. If one agency or dept of an agency is proposing less-helpful-help, then Liberia can relatively easily turn to someone else. And if you are the person in the agency who gets turned away, believe me, it doesn’t look good.
2) They have, as Chris mentions, more technical capacity, and so can distinguish better designed support initiatives.
On this first point, from my development work in various regions of the world, I’ve found that, on average, the staff of donor organizations are the most patronizing and paternalistic in Africa. And I link this to the greater dependency many governments in the region have on assistance. The relations between donors and client governments seem to be to be qualitatively different, and better, in other regions.
So what is the problem that makes UN ineffective? Are UN officials like lazy undergrads who will do the task the night before class and only do decent work if they are prodded? And don’t other countries’ officials see through this? Don’t they ever disagree or demand “a better plan”?
I bet that politicians in other countries also see flaws in UN programs and demand changes but they are not able to get them. Take for instance the stories about countries bullied into IMF and WB programs. Usually recipient countries cannot tell the donor IO’s to do a better job. But Liberians can. “Why” is the real question.
Whether the impact is positive or negative will be interesting to see. In any case it is a fascinating situation …
This raises an interesting question that I can’t quite work out how to test. Will all that experience work for or against good governance in Liberia?
My immediate thought is – it will work against it. “World Bank officials, U.N. technocrats, and international business leaders” are not the first people that spring to my mind when I think about accountability, transparency, and so forth. (Hopefully the business leaders will be effective from a fiscal point of view – but a country is not a company.) I’m not saying that they’re bad people, but their professional experience and (probably) the personal approaches that brought them to those professions are not necessarily an asset.
On the other hand, it’s not as if career politicians have served any better in Liberia.
Chris, very interesting post. There is certainly a risk of a UN/World Bank/Multilateral “echo chamber” building up in this case, where officials on both sides get caught up in the same old ideas which often don’t work. Would love to hear about some UN/World Bank models that have worked well in the past. What does a ‘successful’ UN project in West Africa look like for example?