Re:Stop Aiding Africa - The Daily Beast
by vidarh on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:43AM
(#648800)
Actually, the UN does have a program for "exporting" competent and honest civil servants and politicians, or rather of paying to repatriating well qualified expats that could otherwise not afford to move back.
A recent example was one of Nigeria's previous ministers of finance who was paid by the UN to move back from the US. Nigerian ministers were at the time paid only ca $6000/year - no wonder corruption is high in many of these countries when these same people often could make hundreds of thousands, or millions, in the private sector.
In her case it didn't go down to well with the other ministers, and that's likely a problem. A solution might be to set up a fund to provide better salaries in return for the government agreeing to regular independent audits of ministers finances and publishing the findings (... we saw how much fun that could be even in a country like the UK).
Of course many governments would decline, but some at least seem to want to clean house. It's a lot easier to clean house if the financial situation doesn't provide ridiculous levels of temptation on a daily basis.
A recent example was one of Nigeria's previous ministers of finance who was paid by the UN to move back from the US. Nigerian ministers were at the time paid only ca $6000/year - no wonder corruption is high in many of these countries when these same people often could make hundreds of thousands, or millions, in the private sector.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngozi_Okonjo-Iweala
In her case it didn't go down to well with the other ministers, and that's likely a problem. A solution might be to set up a fund to provide better salaries in return for the government agreeing to regular independent audits of ministers finances and publishing the findings (... we saw how much fun that could be even in a country like the UK).
Of course many governments would decline, but some at least seem to want to clean house. It's a lot easier to clean house if the financial situation doesn't provide ridiculous levels of temptation on a daily basis.