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GF: Is it corruption or donor politics?
Monitor, September 1, 2005
Monitor, September 1, 2005
Before jumping at Maj. Gen. Jim Muhwezi and Capt. Mike Mukula, the new unlikely foot soldiers against corruption in the Ministry of Health after the Global Aids Fund debacle, there is need for caution.
This is one event in the programmed donor disengagement from Uganda.
One must also appreciate the fact that Jim and Mike would never win a rhetorical argument on corruption.
Jim is a graduate of Censure Academy. His appointees including appointment of the programme manager in Uganda was over a more qualified candidate.
His deputy Mike, had a checkered career in business before switching to politics. Uganda is the front post for a controversial anti-Aids campaign, the one that focuses on abstinence and behavioral change.
HEALTH MINISTER: Jim Muhwezi
It has just come to light that only 25 percent of the Aids campaign funds goes to actual drugs. It is amazing that an economy that is paying nurses and primary school teachers peanuts can absorb more than $150 million in "seminars and educational programmes" yet primary school teachers are striking for their wages to be raised to an acceptable $115 a month.
Part of the fund gimmicks include daily advertisements in newspapers and radios reporting on disease prevalence in the country while patients collapse due to lack of drugs in hospitals.
Global movements and global campaigns in a complex and fast moving world struggle to retain public attention. But solutions to complex problems are difficult to ordain on a global scale.
For instance the persistence of policy makers for religious and ideological reasons to ordain one strand of Aids prevention over another has induced a whole new vehicle of corruption through ill-advised over priced seminars to induce behavioral change.
At the same time, HIV-Aids prevalence rates after a dip to as low as 5-6percent are now back on the rise. It is ironical that in the era of behavioral change, their targets. The masses, are dealing with phenomena like ekimansulo; or open prostitution; and now call girls.
One of the by-products of policies like IDPs in the north and night commuters who have to travel several miles a day from camps to homes, school, are incidents of rape and assault rising.
It is similarly ironical that Aids prevention focus which is taking the lion share of health sector funds globally , would ignore the mundane fact that Aids sufferers are more susceptible to common infections that can no longer be handled by crumbling hospitals.
While grants are an improvement on loans, conditionalities to design systems to spend funds end up sucking up a very high managerial cost.
I was once told by a donor coordinator at the Ministry of Finance, a 31 year old graduate of Computer Science that his operational focus had shifted to creative bugs that would detect opportunities for pilferage.
A lot of the fraud may even be beyond the mental abilities of the Ministers in charge at the Ministry.
God, Guns, and Salvation
Last week, US televangelist Pat Robertson, a Christian conservative minister and former candidate for the US presidency in 1988 touched off a huge storm by comments on his television show to the effect that the US government had to "put out" Victor Chavez, the belligerent Venezuela president who has defied all efforts by the US government to undermine him.
Chavez, a former Venezuelan field grade officer overthrew a civilian government to come to power, before "winning" several elections and defeating a US backed opposition campaign to unseat him.
Chavez is no ordinary mortal. Fully 20 percent of US oil imports come from Venezuela (Africa supplies about 15 percent of which 7percent comes from Angola). In the era of $60-70 per barrel of oil, this windfall has made him rich and economically independent of the US.
The Bush administration has paid a heavy price for seeking to oust him earlier in the Bush presidency because of his close association with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
And since the days of the Monroe doctrine that sought to curb foreign influences in the Western hemisphere, the US has treated Latin America like its extended courtyard with one single nuisance, the Communist Fidel Castro.
Pat Robertson apologised and fell off the radar in news speak. Pat Robertson honestly believes that this is good policy even though it is officially banned by US statute, and from his Africa profile, we see a lot more.
The Rev. Robertson has been active in bloody African conflicts including the Liberian conflict. Entities linked to him have been associated with bloody episodes in the DRC.
One wonders why investigations into genocide in the DRC stalled at investigation without formal indictments.
It is not too much of a stretch that the west is wary of all sorts of defenses African leaders and their soldiers would give that may embarrass their foreign policy.
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