More on Johannesburg

I am on my way back after a long week in Johannesburg, writing this post from the business lounge in Nairobi airport, killing time on a 5-hour transit. The course on Public Financial Management was pretty good, with an entertaining and highly iconoclastic (anti World Bank) trainer. Quite difficult subject matter. I don't understand how colleagues can work on budgetary aid and institutional capacity building without specialized knowledge of PFM. We keep repeating the mantra of 'good governance' to our partner countries, but few of us know exactly what we're talking about. It's not only about democracy and anti-corruption.

A. did indeed arrive safely in Holland, but had her driver's license stolen on Schiphol airport, which meant no rental car. Her brother, as so often, helped us out by lending her his own car for two weeks. She told me she feels much better now that she's out of the oppressive heat of our host country.

Even though Jo'burg is said by some to be the most unpleasant place in South Africa, I was still quite impressed by it. Clearly there are massive social problems (unemployment, AIDS), resulting in horrendous crime and crime rates. But they have come a long way since apartheid. I enjoyed talking to black South Africans (taxi drivers for instance) who often are amazingly multilingual, as South Africa now has 11 official languages. Soweto was surprisingly middle class in some parts, apart from the misery of the squatter camps of course. Other parts, such as Sandton and others, are simply filthy rich and very beautiful. Definitely a country to come back to.

I just finished reading a book by an Australian woman Susan MacDonald, Holy Cow, about her adventures in the spiritual supermarket that is India. I liked it a lot. Bought some other books in Sandton as well, one of them Coetzee's 'Disgrace' & a history of South Africa. In the meantime we have started shipping books back to Holland. We don't want them to end up in looters' hands, something that happened to the belongings of several expats during troubles in 2002 and 2003.

Jo'burg for friends

I left yesterday morning on an eleven-day trip to South Africa for a training course on Public Financial Management. I had been looking forward to it, even though I played it cool with colleagues, saying that a course in Brussels would really have suited me better… In the meantime I was having visions of fine dining, South African wines, safari day trips…. I landed safely with both feet on the ground the day before my departure when I received an e-mail with a massive package of ‘light reading’ for the weekend, to be discussed on day 1 of the course. So I have spent several hours now slogging my way through a curiously passionate article about the pros and cons of traditional line-item budgeting… This, by the way, is the stuff I will spent four full months on in the course of the MSc degree studies that will start end of May.

I arrived in Johannesburg (Jo’burg for friends) this morning, after the usual torture of a sleepless night flight. It’s been quite a trip from our host country’s capital. First a short flight to Douala, Cameroon, spent a day in a hotel, then night flight to Nairobi. Kenyatta Airport struck me as quite sophisticated, but then again, I am easily pleased. I marvelled at the phonetics of the Swahili that I heard spoken on the airport intercom, until I realised it was a Kenyan lady doing her utmost on some flight announce;ents in French. But I ded hear real Swahili too, and thought it sounds quite beautiful. It was great to see it written everywhere, also in the plane: choo - lavatory; inatumika – occupied; kutoka – exit; kwa usalama wako – for your safety.

In fact I am always relieved to see any place in Africa that seems more dynamic, organised and self-confident than our host country. Douala fits that bill, and so does Nairobi. But South Africa seems in a different league altogether, something I knew of course, but the contrast is particularly stark when coming straight from one of the least developed countries in the world. I will write down some more impressions in the days to come.

A. and the children will leave tonight for Holland. I hope she’ll be all right.

Update on kids

M. and T. received their Easter school reports. Progress for both, but nothing spectacular. T. is happy, social, not particularly concentrated or paying attention. Well, she’s only four after all. I am happy with her progress socially, it is indeed remarkable how much she has changed over the past year, from slightly obstinate and very bossy to much more attentive, also to her brothers, especially R. (she will of course duly tease, harass, pinch, and hit her elder brother..). I had expected much worse for M. given his recent obstinacy, but he is doing fine, apart from his atrocious handwriting and occasional lack of interest. Strange: he doesn’t copy words or sentences correctly, even when they are straight in front of him, but continues phonetic spelling. I don’t think he’s dyslectic or anything, as he is quite consistent in his phonetic spelling. I rather think it is a consequence of being confronted with several languages at a young age. Or, quite simply, he just couldn’t care less. I feel reassured by his lively interest in various subjects though and his creativity in thinking up ideas. Recently he created his own scuba diving equipment – a plastic bottle with a hose in it and a rope to attach it onto his back. Of course, like any father when thinking of his children, I would love to believe that he is a budding genius waiting to be discovered. But perhaps we should more realistically face the distinct possibility that he is just lazy, full stop. Time will tell. Right now we want him first and foremost to be bien dans sa peau, and apart from his very mixed feelings about school he is a healthy and balanced kid, with a bit of a temper. Last anecdote in this kids’ catalogue: A. got angry with M. and T. recently and gave them an earful. T. was in tears. R. walked up to A., gave her a very angry look (he still doesn’t really talk) and a big slap on the knee, then walked to his sister to hug and comfort her. I was so proud of him when A. told me!

Crisis management the French way

As the office’s security coordinator, I went to a security meeting at the French Embassy yesterday. A right mess, chaotic, no agenda, long anecdotes from expats who have lived here for a longer time about earlier evacuations. N’importe quoi. In spite of his wise words on the occasion of his departure last week, the Ambassador was his old unpleasant self on one of his last working days, interrupting his Embassy colleagues, telling us all not to count on the army for evacuating our families, concluding after a long monologue that “there really is no solution” and that those around the table (evacuation group heads) should really ‘start reflecting’ about solutions themselves. When somebody asked the ambassador the perfectly reasonable question how, as a group head, he was supposed to call about 60 people if trouble occurred and the mobile phone network was almost sure to be either down or saturated, he told him curtly not to ‘polemicise’.

I have nothing against self-reliance, and in fact feel more comfortable in this situation not to depend on others’ lousy planning. Nevertheless I was dumbfounded by the whole thing. The Ambassador’s attitude was almost cynical, and with plentiful military, military police and police staff around the table, I found the conclusion to leave it all to non-professional civilians, almost obscene. The actual evacuation scheme dates back to 2002, and I am sure it needs updating. One of the longer standing expats I referred to, a lady restaurant owner, started waving her 2002 papers in my face to show me that instructions did exist, so if I didn’t have them I could only blame myself for it. Silly cow, I won’t dine at her place again.

So whether I like it or not (I am beginning to like it a bit, actually), my security tasks are becoming ever more serious. I made an inventory of our radio needs: we’re 90% undersupplied, with an overburdened colleague at HQ single-handedly dealing with demands from more than a hundred representations all over the world. The situation between Chad and Sudan does buy us some credibility at HQ though, and I am shamelessly exploiting this fact while cajoling them into sending us the bloody radios for which we have been asking for more than a year.

Very embarrassing: our security measures only apply to expats, not to local colleagues, apart from the rape kit I talked about in an earlier post. I actually think we should change this and provide at least for some security measures (e.g. right to seek refuge within the walled premises of the office), but the boss seems adamant on this point. I’ll raise it again in the near future.

Speaking about local colleagues: A. and I invited three of them to dinner last weekend. It was one of the most pleasant dinner parties we have had recently. My three colleagues said this was the first time they had ever been invited on an individual basis at home at a senior expatriate colleague’s home, and they were very appreciative about it. There is something unhealthy about the invisible divide between locals and expats in our office, even though on the surface relations are normal. But scratch a little further and there’s considerable mistrust. Not always because of the expats though, some local personnel are very quick indeed in claiming infringements, real or perceived, on their rights or dignity. On the other hand I’ve always found my Italian colleague overly suspicious of many local staff.

My tailor-made manual to our budgetary aid has taken weeks to trickle through to the government. Then, yesterday, the boss was invited by the Prime Minister, and I myself by the Vice Minister of Finance (the Minister is on mission of course, though apparently for better reasons that I thought). We both had to explain the letter from beginning to end, and I was certain that the Deputy Minister hadn’t even seriously read it…. We’re talking about a 12 million euros gift, for heaven’s sake!

On the other hand the Deputy Minister did have a good reason for the late arrival of the payment file for the 4 million euro disbursement we are preparing. Tthe man normally in charge of it at the Treasury had just been put in prison for embezzlement of state money in 2004. This was his third time, by the way. In the past he had someway managed to get his job at the Ministry back at least once after similar crimes. Employers here are a lot more forgiving when you’re a relative of the Head of State…

Corruption

I am thinking hard these days about why this country, and more in general, this continent, can't seem to manage to get its act together. There are many explanations. Poor governance and corruption are part of it, but they can't be the only reason. Moreover I can't say I find this country more ccorrupt than others that I have seen in Central Asia for instance. There are countries in South East Asia with equally weak governance, but strong economic growth. I read something interesting in Jeffrey Sachs' The end of Poverty yesterday: it's not poor governance that creates poverty, but poverty that creates poor governance. I am not sot sure if one excludes the other, it may of course work both ways, but it's certainly thought provoking. Good governance, including strong institutions, civil society involvement and media in a watchdog role, costs money and a situation where basic needs are met.

I condemn corruption (small scale corruption, that is, the big scale greed of some leaders is another matter) as an economic problem, but am I, with the very secure material conditions I enjoy, in a position to morally judge a customs officer with nine months of salary arrears and 5 children - the average family size here, not counting the AIDS orphans and other children (from poorer family members for instance) often at the charge of whoever is lucky enough to have a job - at home when he accepts a bribe?(*) I honestly don't know. I would like to develop some clearer ideas on it (and how to remediate the problem) before I leave here.

Having said this, it seems that we are getting closer to some big fish through our technical assistance. Our two customs experts received mysterious phone calls and were pursued by a car without number plates two days ago after a little sting operation to purchase illegal diamonds had gone wrong (somebody from within the Customs services apparently informed the selling party).

While Chad and Sudan exchange niceties these days, our host country has closed its borders with Sudan in an act of solidarity with Chad. First of all good luck to them finding these borders, as they are unmarked. Secondly I don't think they stand much of a chance with no more than fifty unpaid and utterly demotivated soldiers supposed to keep an eye on hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of border and to keep out very bloodthirsty Chadian rebels, armed to the teeth and with a Janjaweed mindset.

(*) This is a dramatized picture of course, and Customs is actually not a very good example: as in many countries, these jobs are for sale and require a quick return on investment before the job is passed on to somebody else. I was told today about a local customs officer running 20 taxis and owning several houses. Apparently it's a girl's dream here to marry a customs officer...

African protocol

African protocol is all about waiting. About making YOU wait, more precisely. I will show you what an important guy I am by shamelesssly claiming your time and make you sit and wait until such time as I choose to show up and get on with whatever it was I called on you for.

I guess we were lucky yesterday. It took the President and his wife, accompanied by the French Ambassador and his spouse, an hour and fifteen minutes to arrive, which wasn' so bad after all. My boss was once made to wait four and a half hours on a similar occasion: he sneaked out, had lunch at home, and came back again.

I had arrived in a slightly rebellious mood (as may have been clear from my closing lines in yesterday's post) 10 minutes late at the ceremony for the French Ambassador's departure, and was ushered into a 'waiting room' at the presidential palace. This turned out to be a large cinema-like space, and here I found some 150 people, diplomats, business people, government ministers, the lot, rather sheepishly waiting in long rows of theatre seats for what would come next. We were kept waiting for another 40 minutes (...), then herded to the place where the banquet would take place (they hadn't been able to set the thing up on time).

I was seated between the capital's mayor, and a parliamentary deputy. The latter started bitching right away about the smallish sum of money (4 million euros) we were going to disburse at the end of the month, saying it would only pay a month of salaries. I've been a good boy, explaining politely that what we are trying to do is provide sustainable aid, for instance make the country earn its own money for a change (he seemed to sort of agree that thjat was not wholly unreasonable), while doing doing the occasional financial dépannage to help to keep the country stable.

To the host government's credit I must say they hadn't turn the occasion into some lavish extravaganza. Good plain food (homecooked in the presidential kitchens), soft drinks, a few bottles of wine, a petit glass of champagne for the toast, but nothing excessive (I noted that the President toasted with a glass of Fanta; his predecessor was a notorious drunk). Even better were the speeches, something I didn't really expect. It was one of the rare occasions that I have enjoyed official speeches, and they made up for the boredom of the first two hours of the event. People in this country, in Africa in general I guess (a consequence of oral culture?), are often very, very eloquent, and wise things on the country's present and recent past were said by the Foreign Minister and the Ambassador. The events in Chad and the painful memories of the country's own recent violent past added charge and drama to the occasion.

Trouble next door

Three days ago on a road only 200 km away from the capital two doctors, local aid workers on a child vaccination mission in the provinces, and their driver were stopped, pulled out of their car, ordered to lie down and shot dead in cold blood by a group of armed, arabic speaking elements, believed to be from the neigbouring country Chad. The bodies of two peuhls (local nomads) also shot dead were found nearby. We are no longer talking about 'ordinary' highways bandits ("coupeurs de route") who usually only rob, sometimes roughen up, but only rarely actually kill people, but who they really are is not clear.

Rebels have attacked the Chadian capital N'Djamena, where fighting broke out between them and government troops this morning. Right now the situation seems to have calmed down. These rebels came from Sudan (Darfur) but passed (about 200 men in 21 pickups) through the northern part of our host country to enter Chad. In fact they must have passed through the nature reserve where we went recently: there are no other passable roads in that area.

Yesterday and today we have been following the situation in Chad very closely. In fact, our host country's President came to power in 2003 with the help of Idriss Deby, and the latter's fall would have immediate consequences for stability here. As the news about the doctors makes clear, that stability is in ever greater jeopardy anyway.

Because of the fighting in N'Djamena the boss, who is on a mission to Cameroon with another colleague from the office, didn't have a return plane this morning as he was flying with a Chadian company. I have just arranged for a private plane to go and pick him up this afternoon.

As always, I wonder where we are heading. The situation in the country is tricky enough as it is, and external developments like in Chad and Darfur can tilt the balance suddenly.

I have been quite pessimistic these days about our chances to get anything done with government services. Here we have a country in dire need of among much else public finance reform, and instead of whipping up his people to work on these reforms, the Minister of Finance spends most of his time abroad on long missions the purpose of which nobody can explain to me, apart from the apparently fat per diems... We're hoping to disburse long awaited budgetary aid soon. All we need is for the government to prepare a certain disbursement file, and we have send them a reminder the 22 of March. I called the Vice Minister last week, the boss brought it up with the Minister last friday, and in the end it was one of our experts who put the services concerned to work on it yesterday... Incompetence and lethargy know no limits here. Right now we have three customs experts on the ground with a total of more than a century of experience between them, and they are stunned by the mess they are discovering.

So I would like to do a lot more with the population itself. We have a big microproject programme coming on steam, and guess what: it looks like it will be hard to actually do things if security on the ground continues to deteriorate like this and even doctors are not safe anymore.

As the boss is stuck in Cameroon, I will have to take his place at an official state dinner for the corps diplomatique this afternoon offered by the President to the departing Ambassador of France. Sounds glamorous, but I can assure you that I am in for a few hours of utter boredom. Just for fun I could pick a fight with the Deputy Minister of Finance, tell him that his services are as useless as I told him recently....

Moral support

Yesterday morning I was in a meeting at the office when A. called: she had just heard five shots being fired. We thought it was a student demonstration, and that police had fired in the air. The office meeting wasn't even interrupted. But this morning it turned out that they were high school students, and that about a dozen of them had been wounded by live ammunition. A small miracle nobody got killed, yet. It was about money, as usual: almost two years arrears in scholarships and teacher bonuses. Yet another piece of evidence for the link between good financial governance and political stability, if further evidence was ever needed (auto-peptalk: I just paid the first outrageously high fees for my distance learning course).

At work things are getting slightly more relaxed. We'll be able to get the report out before the end of the week, and I will have time tonight to go for a beer and a meal with a friend whose wife has just gone home to the Philippines. Among theclose community of expats here there is a rather nice habit of taking care of anybody whose partner has left on vacation etc. 'On va s'occuper de toi', which often means dragging the guy (sometimes the woman), now called a 'célibataire géographique' from one night club to the other (and back, as there are only two here worthy of the name), or in the more moderate version inviting him or her to dinner all the time. Friends already noticed my upcoming status as a 'geographical bachelor' for most of the second half of the year and have announced solid moral support...

Haiku

My blog now has the colour of sand.

Very appropriate,

because

there is a lot of sand in Africa.

Poaching, poker and press

Yesterday we had our Swedish friends from the wild reserve who were on a foraging trip to the capital over for lunch.

We had a good laugh as they told us about a priest in one provincial town who had managed to build a beautiful church. He had raised the money by …. playing poker in the capital, something which he apparently did with great skill. I am not sure how this fits into Vatican orthodoxy, but this country does not seem one to make priests - nor anybody else for that matter - stick to orthodoxy anyway.

Much less funny was their account of how they see wildlife vanishing under their very eyes. Sudanese poachers have recently (after our departure a couple of weeks ago) ventured into the park itself, and of the two elephants we saw close to the base camp, one has already been killed, leaving the other very restless and aggressive, traumatised I guess. Elephants are apparently not only social, but quite emotional animals. High up in the air from their ultra light airplane they had seen camels carrying large amounts of freshly (red) smoked meat of poached game. I don’t see how this country will be able to preserve its wildlife. Pressures are enormous, and the way things are now, the country doesn’t have sufficient appeal for tourists to generate the kind of income you need to finance permanent anti-poaching brigades. Donors do not seem particularly interested in the issue. This country is so invisible internationally...

Last Friday the boss went to sign a financing agreement with our favourite Minister for a budgetary aid of 4 million euros, to be disbursed very soon after a long long wait (procedures, procedures ....). He was interviewed afterwards by, get this, a hostile press, who asked him why we gave so little, and why we bothered the country with all sorts of conditionality for our budgetary aid, etc. Not very much unlike government ministers sometimes by the way, I refer to that recent meeting that triggered my finest diplomatic instincts. It often bothers me how it’s all just taken for granted and as an entitlement.

Kids' stuff

A. and I went to the only doctor here with the material to make echoes. It was as beautiful as ever: for the first time we saw and heard the baby’s tiny little heart beating!

Nevertheless the pregnancy hormones are wreaking havoc on A.’s wellbeing right now. She’s feeling sick, more emotional, more impatient with our staff (I have managed so far to escape her wrath), very annoyed with M. incessant troublemaking when it comes to doing his homework, and longing to go to Holland soon and see family and friends. We hope (and I expect) that she will feel better once the first three months have passed (one more month to go).

My idea to make M.'s homework a little more attractive seems to have worked brilliantly for ... exactly one day. He quickly found out that doing his school home work took less time than doing creative writing on 'interesting' topics. So, while we still don't like the idea of young children spending so much time on homework, we're now getting tougher with him. He'll be grounded for as long as he hasn't done his homework, and that seems to sort of, uhm, well, work, I guess. It must be amusing to watch this struggle from afar, it's trial and error really. He's smart enough, but had no qualms telling his teacher, rather frequently it seems, that 'he hates work', thus boosting our family's reputation even further...

Garp's way (for B.)

I arrived back home this morning after an exhausting trip: spent 4 hours enjoying the delights of the waiting room of N'djamena Airport. No foie gras de canard on the way back Paris-Ndjamena, just champagne, things are rapidly going downhill at Air France....

Lovely to see A. and the children again, I should seriously worry about the second half of the year.

Yesterday I had a very nice lunch with some further ex-colleagues (translators) that I have remained good friends with after I left that service. One of them will also be a father soon. His story of the conception bore a near perfect resemblance to the story of Garp in the book by John Irving (you can look that one up, B.!).

Origins, fundaments, root causes

When A. and I bought our first property, a flat in Leiden, I started by completely fixing up … the cellar, our storage space, before even touching the living quarters. I liked Classics as the root for Western culture. I was interested in pre-Socratic philosophy as it provided the basic materials for so much that came afterward. I thought it was essential to comprehend the hellishly complicated and t the same time quite boring history of doxography which transmitted the few bits and pieces of pre-Socratic philosophy we still possess. I liked the Whorf-Sapir thesis (linguistic structure determines thought structure; I tried to show that philosophical thinking was also determined by linguistic structures, but didn’t really manage. Nevertheless it made me deeply suspicious of the universalistic claims of what I think are completely language-based thought systems, such as Heidegger’s). I was thrilled to discover Indo-European linguistics, then Nostratics (supposedly the roots of Indo-European, Ural-Altaic and Finno-Ugric language groups). I enjoy the mother of sciences, mathematics, and its history (without being a star at it I hasten to add). I strongly believe that a 100% legalisation of drugs (hard drugs, soft drugs, glue, nutmeg, you name it…) is the only fundamentally realistic way (apart from the tiny detail of political feasibility) to make the drugs trade chain (including Colombian mafia, terrorist financing, undermining of productive sectors in developing countries, etc.) collapse, which would make prices collapse, and give drug users a perspective to have a fair chance at a more or less normal life (this is the fast explanation, no time for subtleties here).

All this, of which the common denominator is origins, fundaments, root causes, came to mind when I thought today about my relatively recent interest in economics, governance, especially financial governance, and public finance management. I have become convinced (I guess it is obvious anyway to the real experts in the field, but I won’t believe it until I see it) that these are among the root issues for understanding and mending development problems, most certainly in our host country. OK, so much for pointing out the obvious….

I had quite a productive day today: in the peace and quiet of my hotel room I managed to draft a tailor made manual to our budgetary aid for our government. If we manage to disburse, against all odds, the 14 million euros reserved for budgetary aid, I will have reason to consider my four-year stint in Africa a success.

This evening I went to see one of my few colleagues who is also a friend to meet his family and some friends of his. They live in a beautiful house in a beautiful part of Brussels, Uccle. Nice family dinner atmosphere.

One more meeting tomorrow morning, then back to Africa in the evening. Not looking forward to the tons of reporting to be done the next couple of weeks.

Grey

Exactly five years ago my career took a turn for the better when I started my first job in the foreign relations field, and I haven’t looked back since. Today I paid a visit to my boss at the time, to whom I am still grateful for having recruited me. My third day in Brussels. We had an intensive and sometimes tense five-hour meeting with the World Bank and other donors to our host country yesterday, and it is beginning to look as if we might pull the arrears clearance scheme off if all the details work out. I have started to work on a budgetary aid project proposal for 14 million euros which would be the basis for the rest of the multidonor scheme. I will work on it this weekend in this comfortable hotel room of mine. Workwise it is good to be away from the office for a few days to concentrate on this particular issue of budgetary aid. It is also good to see colleagues I am usually only in e-mail contact with, things work out a lot better when you talk in person. Over the years I have found out that especially in tense situations e-mail is a lousy means of communication, and my Dutch bluntness doesn’t necessarily help when communicating with all those sensitive French and Italian souls.. I haven’t been feeling all that great these days. The grey skies of Brussels are having their way with my serotonin levels, or is it being away from A. and the children? I am not very good at the latter, in fact ever less so, and it has made me think of the second half of the year, when the family will stay in Lith. We knew that, planned that and accepted being separated as an acceptable price to pay for yet another baby. Having said all this though it won’t be easy on any of us. I am particularly worried about M. and T., who are very attached to me. Another thing that’s weighing down upon me is that I found out here that the boss has tried to revise my staff report downwards. I was informed of it by his boss, a Dutch director. The surprising thing is that my position in Brussels is apparently strong enough that the latter wouldn’t accept it. What bothers me the most is that the boss hadn’t even discussed this downward revision with me. I wonder if I should talk it over with him once I am back, or just let it rest. It is good to see that there are still some ex-colleagues I remain friends with, that I am happy to see after a long absence, and who, they too, seem genuinely pleased to catch up with me. I have seen and had drinks or lunch/dinner with several of them. Nevertheless on the whole this big organisation I work for is not the right place to look for personal happiness (professional gratification is another thing). The stakes, also personal, are too big. I may be looking for the wrong things of course. I would probably be bored stiff within a month without the thrill and adrenalin rushes my present line of work gives me, but a slight sense of estrangement is always just around the corner. Walking through Brussels there is something depressing about all those worked-up self-important suits (of which I am one of course). I consider myself privileged that I can do what I do, but a nagging Weltschmerz remains and strikes especially when I am away from my loved ones. After meetings yesterday and drinks with an old colleague, I spent some time in Brussels’ biggest store for books, music and computers, the FNAC, then went to see a movie on Truman Capote and his writing of In Cold Blood. Not bad at all, and inspiring in a way (as far as writing is concerned….).