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Saturday, 25 May 2013 12:09 pm
High 14 oC - Low 7 oC
Sesame Street
Kids, today’s number was 6.7 million
There’s a lot of money in poverty, says Arundhati Roy, the gadfly of the global neo-liberal project.
For those who claim to be, essentially, a set of do-gooders, the NGO sector surely is viewed by a measure of suspicion the world over. There are many reasons for this; a pedantic approach for development that doesn’t take into account the indigenous socio-economic ecosystem in which they operate being one of them. But the lion’s share of the brunt is borne because of the lion’s share itself.
The high-flying life and gargantuan remunerations of NGO operatives notwithstanding, the ever-recurring instances of corruption in the sector is the basis of the resentment.
A news item that appeared in this very newspaper regarding the alleged corruption in the making of the USAID-funded Pakistani version of Sesame Street quickly went viral on the internet. The heady cocktail of the idea of wrongdoing and the cute antics of Elmo and his gang piqued many people’s interest. Though the State Department officials have confirmed the cancellation of the project, the Rafi Peer group (who were the contractors for the said project) have filed a libel suit of one billion rupees. All in a day’s work in the press business.
But this story is only the tip of the iceberg. Many others have to be uncovered. The development rackets are too vast. Compare the total possible embezzlement opportunities in puppets with the same in health, education and microfinance projects.
The corruption isn’t limited to local contractors or employees. Featuring more prominently in the list are foreign viceregal officers who are empowered to make spending and hiring decisions. Regardless of how many protocols of accounting and control that the donor agencies devise, there is always a way to get around them.
And these are the projects where they spend themselves. In many others, the international agencies send the government a fat bill at the end.
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