You would send your children to school, you would move to the local market to do trade. The market would have more money because people are buying, and you would be more likely to send your children to the local clinic.
UNDP Head of office, Joe Feeney
UNDP Head of Office JOE FEENEY talks to BADRU MULUMBA about state-building and a proposal the agency hopes to sell to the Government of Southern Sudan to encourage it to give monthly payments to families:-
BADRU: Compared to other crisis areas, how would you rate the pace of reconstruction in South Sudan?
JOE: It is fashionable to talk of reconstruction. There was nothing to rebuild. We are coming from nothing. It is hard to describe how bad the situation was — the marginalization, the sense of desperation. There were only 20 kilometers of paved road. This was the worst place for a woman to live. South Sudan is larger than Uganda, Kenya, combined. From 2005, the Government of Southern Sudan has been trying. I remember it was Dr. Luka Biong who said we have to stop talking of rebuilding because we are coming from scratch. We are not re-building anything.
Q. What do you see as the worst challenge?
The biggest challenge is to build institutions of the state.
Q. Can we compare south Sudan’s progress to Ethiopia’s, for example?
You are not comparing like and like because in Southern Sudan you had nothing. In Ethiopia, you didn’t start from scratch. You had a command and control system, but it worked.
Q. some say that South Sudan needs, perhaps a strongman, a benevolent dictator, for a while in order for a foundation for a firm nation to emerge.
Some people say if the change is too fast it could create an environment of instability. We in the international community have no experience in building a country from scratch. We shouldn’t approach this issue as if there is some blueprint somewhere that we can use here: there isn’t. Well, I have huge respect for Meles Zenawi. If you say, South Sudan can learn from Ethiopia in terms of infrastructure, yes, in terms of peace and security, yes. Ethiopia had famine in the 70s and 80s. That has stopped.
Q. what is your view of what the country has achieved, if any?
So many kids are going to school. Health services are getting better. People have access to clean water. But I know that President Salva Kiir would be one of the first to say that it’s not enough.
Q. What has been your contribution?
This year UNDP budget for southern Sudan is $170 million up from $120. We are supporting police training, roads, security, and the Global Fund is supporting access to drugs. We have over 120 staff, internationals working at state level, seconded here to pass on skills. We did a study. We looked at number of doctors per 100,000 people. South Sudan would need 1200 doctors yesterday to catch up with Kenya. You sometimes have to get staff from outside because you can’t find them here. If you are looking for a civil engineer, a surgeon, the truth is that civil engineering takes up to five years in training.
Q. There is grumbling that UN agencies take all good staff because you pay higher than the government and private sector.
We have a policy at UNDP: We don’t employ people who have worked in government, but a good number of our staff has gone into government. You can’t actually say you are building government when you are taking staff out of it when it’s weakest. If you take the media here, for instance, it can say anything, but GOSS lacks the capacity to take on the media at every turn. It may create a situation of government being overly defensive. In other countries, the minister can sit you guys down and react to any issue in real time because they have good staff to do research in real time.
Q. Some urge a tough stance to avoid the country being born defective.
We have great challenges here and I think it is important that there is a sense of solidarity among people of southern Sudan, that there is a sense of cohesion and a shared vision. We have to hold government accountable when it makes mistakes. But we have to understand that this is a state-building agenda, and we don’t try to judge the government based on standards in countries that have had an open and democratic environment for the last two hundred years. That makes your job more difficult and makes the job of civil society more difficult and it makes the job of those who are in the non-government sector more difficult. But it is part of the state-building agenda.
Q. Was the decision to not recruit from among government staff a state-building agenda?
Maybe we are seen to have better salaries here. Why then do we pull people out of government if we say we want to strengthen government; it doesn’t make sense. When we advertise for a post, we may get 200 applicants, one hundred of those from southern Sudan. If we want a master’s degree 30 of those who apply from southern Sudan will have none. If you want to experience it, the number from South Sudan could reduce by four. That frankly is too small a pool from which to choose a senior national officer. You can make comparisons with Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia or Tanzania where you could have 300 or 400 applicants with Masters’s Degrees.
In the so-called developed world this works. In my country every family, every mother gets money for each child under 18. It doesn’t matter whether you are a prime minister’s wife or the wife of a street cleaner: everybody gets the same amount of money. It is universal
Q. Given all that you have spent, what stands out as a great achievement?
It is not only by money; it’s how we change ideas. How can we change the life of a woman, a family in Jonglei, or Northern Bahr el Ghazel? You know south Sudan is going to have particular challenges because after Independence, and once we get the figures out, South Sudan will be known as a middle-income country, while, for example, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda are low-income countries. This is determined by its per capita income, and because of the oil, South Sudan will have more per capita than those countries. The budget in Ethiopia this year for 85 million is 6.9 billion dollars. The budget for South Sudan in 2012 will probably be between 3.5 and 4 billion, half the budget of Ethiopia of 85 million people. We have to be clear: South Sudan is not going to be dependent on aid. Many people will think it will but the main providers of the funds are going to be south Sudanese themselves because of the oil.
Q. …depending on how it is managed
This is all about managing it. How are you going to change the lives of people? For example, there is a proposal, and one of the things we have seen in Ghana, for example, you know Ghana has just discovered oil. They are engaged in providing cash directly to each family. This is because it is recognized, that you need to give money to farmers directly in order to address poverty. The evidence is there worldwide — in Ghana, South Africa, Lesotho, which has no natural resources – a tiny country but they give $15 dollars to every person over 65 years. So what we would say to the Government of South Sudan is why not give cash transfers to every family? Maybe it is only $10 a month. But if you are living in the middle of Jonglei, or Northern Bahr el Ghazel, and you know you are getting this and you will continuously get it may be based on the number of children you have, you would send your children to school, you would move to the local market to do trade. The market would have more money because people are buying, and you would be more likely to send your children to the local clinic. That has been proven in Mexico where they give this money. In Lesotho, in S. Africa, and even in Bangladesh they give very tiny amounts. But they can see changes in the lives of people at the household level. So, we will be saying to the government within the UN that think of innovative ways that enable you to address the position of the most vulnerable. People will say how can we distribute this money across South Sudan. When we had the Referendum, we had 2600 polling stations and we were able to get people to those polling stations. You could have those stations for distributing cash, maybe once every three months. Even if it started off at $10 or $20 a month it’s something that would be a commitment by the government to the people in the aftermath of independence to say that, everybody has a stake in this state, and it immediately brings the government into the lives of the people because they are putting money into the people’s pockets. Even if we are spending $170 this year, it is this much of the government budget. So let us be clear: it’s not what we do as the international community but what government does.
Q. How do you anticipate government to react to such a proposal?
We have a brilliant guy, Joe Hanlon, who was a world leader on this. He has written a book – he is coming this weekend (a week ago): Just Give Money to the Poor. In the so-called developed world this works. In my country every family, every mother gets money for each child under 18. It doesn’t matter whether you are a prime minister’s wife or the wife of a street cleaner: everybody gets the same amount of money. It is universal. It is given to the mother not to the father because wherever you go the mother takes responsibility for the children. When we have spoken, for instance to the VP, to ministers – a number of ministers, the Minister for Gender, Minister Ann Itto, they have been very positive. I think it is about looking at the mechanisms for putting this in place, basically proper costing. Obviously, when accountants and economists get their hands on this kind of proposal, they will look at the figures and say, we can t afford it. But if you look at it from the perspective of what your objective is, to address poverty in the new nation, then ways can be found to address it. It would probably take a year to find a mechanism that will work and then a way that can be accountable so that there would be no way that that money can be taken from the family at the village level. It is something you can’t rush into. But we know that this mechanism has been used in Namibia, which is as big as south Sudan or even larger and has 1.7 million people.
Q. Who decides that south Sudan will not be a low-income country?
This is World Bank figures. South Sudan will become a member of the World Bank and IMF, probably in 2012. UNDP has a Human Development Index, which doesn’t look at money because UNDP recognizes it is not about per capita income, it is about what we call the Human Development approach. Things like access to health, access to education. It looks at the role of women; it looks at the rule of law. It looks at participation in society. UNDP has developed an index around those issues, which gives you a sense of what it is for ordinary citizens to live in a country. I mention this about South Sudan being a middle-income country because it is important to know that the resources are there. Donors have an important role to play, but the reality is the big bucks are with the government.
