Aid, Cricket and Accountability…

 

-- Nanthikesan

 

Sachin Tendulkar is not a development wala. If anything, I am told he is a good cricketer.  Trust me, the only cricket I know flies around and buzzes busily.  Anyhow, apparently he got a very, I mean very, expensive Ferrari as a gift from Fiat car company in Italy (when he broke Don Bradman’s record of 29 test centuries in 2003).  As some of you would have come to know, it was a small step of 11 million-rupee duty for Sachin, but a giant step for Indian civil society.  

 

In a nutshell, Sachin requested, and Sachin being son of India Shining and all that, was granted by the Government of India (GOI) an exemption from the import duty on the car worth 11.3 million Indian rupees. Now I have nothing against Sachin. I am sure he is a better man than Gamini Dissanayake who, thanks to the Mahaweli project, had reputedly owned racecourses in Australia.  Not that it matters to the issue at hand, but Sachin ain’t exactly a poor man either.  Fiat sponsors him reputedly, to the tune of Rs. 200 million a year to be the Indian ‘ambassador’ to their car. This 11.3 million rupee Indian development assistance to Sachin enterprises would have gone the same way as zillions of other such creative leveraging-connections exercises.  Indeed it has surfaced that the GOI generosity has many precedents and beneficiaries included cricket celebrities such as Kapil Dev.

 

However, some ‘nasty busy bodies’ in India thought it was rather inappropriate for Sachin – his batting prowess not withstanding - to be gifted a further Rs. 11 million by the Indian people. So these busy bodies filed a public litigation case challenging the duty waiver, with Sachin as respondent.  The ensuing publicity resulted in Fiat agreeing to pay the duty to the GOI.  Interestingly, this did not prevent others from filing a case (let’s christen this the Sachin’s case) challenging the government and the basis for its decision to waive the duty.

 

It is quite inspiring to find that, in the first place, the civil society was vigilant enough to identify the preposterous transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. And, secondly, it was energized to act promptly to challenge this transfer. If only this vigilance could be extended to all government policies/decisions with similar vigor! We can all sing “roll-over-IMF. And tell the World Bank the news…” and begin converting the $500 million World Bank head quarters into a cricket stadium!!

 

Unfortunately and obviously, we are not even close to Nirvana when it comes to aid and accountability.  SL experience tells us that aid and public accountability are, to put it mildly, not in speaking terms.

 

The first blow to democratic accountability comes from a position aid agencies across the board take.  The claim is that development need not and should not be mixed with politics. Taking the blue print from the success of Marshall plan, development is strictly viewed as an management/technical issue which also involves resource gaps that need to be filled…This notion of de-politicized development shapes the dialogue between donors and recipients and has consequences…

 

Looking at politics, development and aid, we know that politics is about people’s struggles for resources and meanings (not just elections and parliaments); sensible people agree that development is about expanding people’s substantive choices; and everyone agrees that aid is for enabling development defined as such. If we agree with these three propositions, then where does that lead us? 

 

Two consequences come to mind: (a) It allows development to be reduced to a technical/managerial problem which then paves way for donors et. al. to come and manage development/impose their ideological baggage on recipient countries; b) It allows the Government in power to exclude people from critical decision making processes.  On both counts, democratic accountability suffers: Point (a) is externally imposed, and point (b) is a homegrown malady. Breton Wood Institutions imposed conditionalities on their borrowers - including imposing economic policies such as trade liberalization etc.  Consequently, decisions on matters that are central to the day-to-day lives of people were taken out of their hands and left to the international and national bureaucracy.

 

Conditionalities linked to aid are not the only enemy of accountability.  Even without conditionality, aid tends to overwhelm the systems of public accountability. The pot of money (e.g. the $4.5 billion promised now) which has no local tax base (even when it is a loan) gives opportunities for the governments to exclude people from decision-making.  Existing accountability structures usually prove inadequate to the scale of the new task.

 

Take the Mahaweli development project for instance.  The project would not have been possible if loans were to be obtained at market rates or resources were to be mobilized locally – the JR government made no effort to solicit public opinion about embarking on a nearly $2 billion (1985 value) spending spree. This accounted for about a third of the entire public expenditure till 1985.  It made ‘economic sense’ for JR’s regime to jump-start the stagnant economy.  Needless to say, the investment was not accountable to its constituents in general or to its beneficiaries in particular. The irrigation project cost nearly $20,000 (1985 value) per family to settle. The overall outcomes were, at best, questionable and certainly not worth the investment. Such an enormously expensive investment did have costs in terms of the opportunities missed and accumulated debt burden.

 

Another example of the damage resulting from aid (without conditionalities) which had dire consequences for the Tamil Nationalist struggle.  The donor in this case was Tamil Nadu (and Government of India, but that came with conditionalities). Abundant military equipment, training, safe haven and cash etc ensured that militant movements underwent growth on steroids. Not having to depend on the local population for their growth and survival [i] was probably one of the reasons why they became indifferent to the enormity of the suffering of the population they claimed to fight for.  We could fill encyclopedic volumes with the examples of LTTE’s lack of public accountability – to name a few: its decimation of other militant movements, genocide of Muslims, expulsion of the entire Jaffna Peninsula, launching attacks from crowded places like markets to provoke retaliatory attacks from the armed forces, and currently, extortion (they call it taxation), child recruitment etc.,).

 

Once again, let me reiterate that I am not saying that Tamil Nadu/India is to be blamed for all our problems. Tamil Nadu certainly meant well when they lent their support after the 1983 ethnic riots. Yet consequences affirm that the need for institutions of accountability cannot be an after-thought add-on to assistance.

 

It is common knowledge that aid has problems and that does not mean that we have to throw the baby with the bath water. The difficulty arises in answering the following: What protection, what accountability structures are possible and how do we ensure accountability? Elections are no doubt an important mechanism of accountability.  However, elections are by no means adequate, particularly in Sri Lanka - Thanks partly to JR and his legacy of institutionalized rigging.  Rigging aside, elections are about an aggregated accountability of the government - Accountability on issues ranging from social policies to economic woes, to entitlements etc. -  i.e., elections are not, and cannot be only about, how government invested aid money. Moreover, elections allow us to change the government - not the State.  Therefore, other mechanisms are necessary to ensure overall accountability.  One such mechanism, as the World Bank and Sachin have discovered, is the civil society. [ii]  

 

Everyone agrees that civil society could be a powerful force to bring about some level of accountability (e.g. the response of the US government to reports on torture in Iraqi prisons, Narmada dam, land mine ban etc). Concretely, do we have a functioning civil society in Sri Lanka that is powerful enough to check the GOSL? Mobilized sections of civil society - in the form of trade unions and NGOs - exist mainly in Colombo (with the exception of plantation sector).  Independent and vocal civil societies have not emerged as broad-based movements at the national scale – and if they emerge they are either decimated (Sarvodaya) or assimilated into the party system (LSSP in the fifties, JVP in the nineties).

 

A strong state is one of the key factors that contribute to the challenges of a mobilized civil society in the South.  Keenan and Nesiah have pointed to the role of state terror in the South in inflicting severe damage at the grass roots level for collective action [iii] . This is certainly the case in the North and East – the State-like-entity LTTE, has near total control over all civic spaces – from the academia to the unions to the churches...

 

Another manifestation of the ‘excessive’ strength of the State in the South is the stranglehold of political parties (and electoral mode of politics) in the many layers of society.  Party-based politicization has a grassroots base that comes with an extensive patronage based distributive efforts. The combination of this patronage system and the deep penetration of the political party tend to crowd out large-scale mobilization of CSOs – CSOs that are outside party control and capable of holding the government accountable. [iv] This is not to say that JVPs and other new voices cannot emerge. But any emerging mobilization is then appropriated by the party system. [v]   If you want evidence, try to identify a single major trade union that is not controlled by one of the political parties. [vi]

 

In the North the situation is different.  Neither the Sri Lankan state, nor the LTTE was seen as fully legitimate. Civil society was never in a position to challenge either the brutal response of Sri Lankan administrations (in the seventies and eighties) or that of the LTTE now. Indeed, it would have been beyond the scope of any mass-based CSO to be able to challenge the tyranny of the JR government or the LTTE.

 

Accountability woes do not cease with the mobilization of civil society.  Clearly, not just any mobilization would do. Certainly not the type of mobilization that is being encouraged by the Breton Wood Institutions (BWI).  When the BWIs turned their guns against State interventions in the 80’s, they also actively promoted NGOs.  Since then, the NGO industry has enjoyed explosive growth. Mostly, as service delivery mechanisms in lieu of the State or as watchdogs…in many ways Aid agencies have managed to create an NGO industry in their own image [vii] …The key problem with the NGO industry is that it is accountable to none but their funders – the donors. The influx of aid money provides attractive ‘market’ opportunities for intellectuals and activists. They have become the ‘native informants’ to the aid agencies. At the risk of oversimplification, NGOs as an industry have become the engine that (re)produces local needs according to donor scripts  and markets, donor-friendly solutions to the needs thus identified. 

 

Keenan and Nesiah have pointed out that, in doing so, the NGOs transform the way in which we produce and organize knowledge.  For instance, Aid industry appears to shape everything from the topics academics choose to do research (conflict resolution industry to liberalization), to what research methods they employ in their donor funded fast-food version of research.  For instance, the stellar inter-disciplinary study of the Mahaweli Project conducted by the SSA and published in the “Plantation Sector and Peasant Production” in the early eighties may be not possible in Sri Lanka in the current era of donor funded /donor specified drive-thru-consultancies.  Depth of analysis is neither marketable nor necessary to understand the (de-politicized) development results to be produced during a funding cycle of donors (usually three years). 

 

All things considered, the patient (Accountability) clearly needs CPR. Whether Aid is going to act as oxygen or as carbon monoxide to the patient depends on how we mobilize to counter the Aid Imperialism. We can start by learning lessons from the cricketing universe and the Sachin’s Case.