A Pyrrhic victory

The combination of being in charge of the office and having my normal operational duties produced some insanely busy days, which culminated in high tension yesterday and utter exhaustion afterwards. Never a dull moment indeed. Just to give you an idea of the daily nitty-gritty of my work here, I’ll give you a description of the past few days:

On Thursday, apart from signing off at 50-centimeter pile of payment orders and assigning another half meter of incoming correspondence, I
- received our two ‘field customs officers’ who are at the end of their mission and who in four months have been able to identify a veritable Augias' stable of mismanagement, incompetence and blatant corruption in the country’s customs services. It will take more than one Hercules to clean it up….
- negotiated in a long intense phone call support from HQ in our standoff with the Minister who was still blocking the cooperation management unit, and who had tried to bypass us by directly calling our political desk in Brussels. I was to have a meeting with him the next day on the issue, following the tough letter I wrote to him earlier this week. A good thing that our desk has finally woken up, but how sad that it took the Minister’s call, rather than our own earlier urgent messages on the matter, which basically met with a ‘sort it out yourselves’on his part;
- finished slogging through the 57 CVs sent by HQ to choose from for the recruitment of an extra staff member for my section. The first 50 candidates had been ‘shortlisted’ through panel interviews by Brussels colleagues, which had produced some curious results – one of the examples being a Czech candidate with 6 years experience as a tourist guide for foreigners in Prague, who had qualified this activity as experience as ‘external aid management’, and who had gotten away with it at his panel interview! Only 4 had actually indicated to be willing to work in our host country, and only 16 out of 50 had any sub-Saharan countries at all on their list. Using these examples in an e-mail to HQ helped secure us another seven CVs, among which the one we had hoped for, the perfect candidate, in fact the person who had worked on the job before. But I’ve lost a lot of time on this. I think my employer has a recruitment issue (oops, it recruited me as well…. Somehow Groucho Marx comes to mind, or was it Woody Allen: ‘I would never join a club that would have me as a member’).
- had to call to order a local staff member who had thought it was OK to declare through internal e-mail his comprehension for Hitler’s crimes against the Jews after having seen photos on the Internet of what Israeli bombardments have done these days to the Lebanese population on the ground. (I watched the pictures myself on the website in question and they are indeed horrifying. On the other hand I am sure Israelis will be able to show you similar pictures of the effects of Hezbollah’s Katyusha rockets or Hamas suicide bombers on their citizens.) The man, whom I value quite highly, had clearly not quite understood the extent of the Holocaust taboo in the Western world. I guess it figures a lot less prominently in African school curriculums, the continent having its own fair share of genocides large and small. After a very harsh going-over he apologized profusely to all by e-mail and I believe he was sincerely sorry for what he had written.
- tried, rather unsuccessfully, to calm my Italian colleague, who said he was personally aggrieved by the incident claiming he was half Jewish (there was a bit of auto-victimisation in that, I you ask me), and went to throw a wobbly in the local colleague’s office, said he would denounce him to HQs if it happened again, etc.

- discovered with the contracts and finance section that a project’s bank account requiring the double signatures of the government and the head of our office, had been emptied into the National Treasury account and closed, without us knowing , let alone approving it! Technically an act of embezzlement pur et dur. We formulated a letter that would serve as ‘small change’ for my talks with the Minister the next day.
- organised an informal welcome lunch – Dutch treat - in a restaurant for a newly arriving colleague on Saturday; had to fend off attempts by our local trade unionist, who confirmed his well-deserved reputation of a ‘bouffeur’, a free-loader, to get this financed on the office’s ‘representation costs’ rather than make people pay themselves (even though I had told them drinks would be on me, and I had chosen the cheapest sanitarily viable restaurant in town so that local personnel could afford it too). I then had to intervene in the internal e-mail row that ensued when the fiery French lady from my section seized the chance to lash out at the trade unionist, whom she despises and is ever happy to pick a fight with, which caused the trade unionist to come to me to complain about her. I laughed it all off, telling them how I loved the broadness of my job description, which ranges from doing high politics and tracking down suspected fraud, to managing a kindergarten all on the same day!
- Managed to get home before 1900, called A. and the children, procrastinated, procrastinated some more, managed to do an hour and a half of half-hearted studying. Read some more in Romeo Dallaire’s book on the Rwanda genocide, went to sleep at midnight, very tense about the upcoming meeting.

On Friday
- got up utterly spent. Couldn’t get out of the driveway as a rickety old removal truck had chosen to break down and block the road right there. The people repairing it seemed in no hurry whatsoever. A driver came to pick me up to go to work,
- the usual signing off and assigning correspondence. Prepared my meeting with the Minister,

- talked with our Head of Administration who, in his one-but-last week before his departure and clearly inebriated (with a happy smile on his face) at 0830 in the morning, came to inform me that his army friends had seen not hundreds but thousand of rebels in the North,
- went to the Minister at ten o’clock with my Italian colleague, to find the Minister with the new French Embassador: my secretary hadn’t passed the message…
- went back at 11 alone (Italian had another meeting, and didn’t feel like going to battle anyway, I suspect). And lo and behold, two hours later I came out of the meeting and basically had made him swallow almost everything we wanted! It took a lot of cajoling, to-and-froing, complaints from the Minister, but the atmosphere remained mostly friendly and polite, though tense. The cooperation management unit can go ahead along the lines we insisted on. A Pyrrhic victory, as it took us 11 months to make him give in, thus delaying the project by almost a year and cause serious trouble for our cooperation during the next year. Also, I am sure the Minister will try to come back on his word in the subsequent formulation phases of the project. But so far I am rather pleased to have pulled it off, and about the fact that it was my hardline advice to draw the line here that had paid off.

By the way, the suspected fraud turned out to be more innocent than it looked, or so we hope. Upon the orders of the IMF to unify all government funds into a single Treasury account, the Minister had made some phone calls to the local banks and told them to make a blanket transfer of all accounts. Lots of double signature accounts had thus been emptied and closed. WE've given them until next Friday to clean up the mess.
The rest of the day I paid the price for all the tension of the last couple of days. I barely managed to write a short report on the meeting and debrief the boss by phone. I was told that I looked like a living corpse, and I certainly felt like one. Perhaps that explains the successful meeting: I must have looked to him like somebody with nothing left to lose ... :-) Went home at 1530 and crashed, like the Friday before. Slept until 2000 got up to go and have a bite with Jean (my bush buddy) in a restaurant together with other friends, went back home at 2230, read some more Dallaire, fell asleep around midnight and woke up at 1140 this morning, still feeling very tired. The new colleague, whom I had organised the lunch for, missed his plane, so I’ve got the day to myself.
My second CeFiMS assignment, due Tuesday, is staring me in the face. Right now I do not feel quite capable of producing an intelligently argumented and well-referenced 8-page piece on ‘policy transfer on building organisation capacity to the leadership of a country just having gone through a relatively bloodless coup’. I hope last-minute adrenalin will help me through it this time.
Tired, but gratified. One more week and I’ll be with the family again.