Zimbabwe withdraws UNDP election cash appeal

Click for this story in full @: http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-10845-Zim+withdraws+UNDP+election+cash+appeal/news.aspx


THE government has withdrawn a request to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for help to finance elections due later this year and will now source the money locally, a cabinet minister said Tuesday.

Zimbabwe had appealed to the UN agency for help to raise about US$132 million needed for the key elections which will choose a successor to the fractious coalition administration.

UNDP Scandal in Zimbabwe goes viral, while Helen Clark promotes Agostinho Zacarias ...again !

HELEN CLARK's DEALS

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS IN FULL : http://www.theindependent.co.zw/2013/04/12/zim-un-officials-under-spotlight/

AS Zimbabwe approaches crucial general elections after holding a relatively peaceful recent referendum albeit under a shadow of resurging political repression and violence, the United Nations (UN) — whose focal point for electoral assistance mission is soon expected in the country to assess the political and security situation to see if it could help fund the polls — will be under close scrutiny following revelations its Harare office in 2008 ignored internal cholera warnings months before its outbreak exploded into a full-blown epidemic.


The Atlantic/Staff Writer

A recent UN tribunal 104-page ruling reveals how former United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) chief in Harare, Agostinho Zacarias, who had close links with President Robert Mugabe’s previous Zanu PF regime, was unable or unwilling to take measures to combat cholera — which eventually affected about 100 000 and killed at least 4 000 people.

Zimbabwe, a potential economic powerhouse which critics say has been ruined under Mugabe’s rule, is heading for a potential turning point.

A mostly peaceful, popular referendum on March 16 approved a relatively progressive constitution that includes a theoretically strong bill of rights, and general elections are likely be held later in the year.

But the past couple of months have also seen another, less noted development that adds an additional layer of ambiguity to the country’s future.

On February 26, a UN tribunal in Johannesburg determined that Georges Tadonki, the head of the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in Zimbabwe in 2008, had been wrongfully fired from the UN after he attempted to warn UN headquarters of an oncoming cholera epidemic, whose severity was compounded by the on-going political violence.

He was fired after Zacarias, then the UN’s country chief in Harare and currently the UNDP resident co-ordinator in South Africa, decided that his own closeness to Zanu PF overrode his responsibilities to the UN’s missions and values.

Yet Zacarias was actively abetted by officials at the UN headquarters in Turtle Bay, a New York neighbourhood around Manhattan, who gave in to his demands, which included the marginalisation and eventual firing of Tadonki, even as conditions inside Zimbabwe deteriorated.

The case raises the question of just how the UN will perform in Zimbabwe if the events of 2008 repeat themselves — or in the event that the country finally experiences its long sought-after democratic transition.

Tadonki filed a wrongful termination claim against the UN after the organisation effectively fired him in early 2009.

The UN’s bulletproof legal immunity necessitates an unusual system for adjudicating such cases. Because the UN cannot be sued, tribunals convened by the UN itself deal with employment claims, pseudo-courts that do not adhere to several important aspects of accepted US and European legal procedure.

Legal immunity

The UN-appointed judges found that Tadonki’s firing was the result of concentric layers of favouritism and bad faith, tendencies that defined not only the country head’s relationship with Mugabe’s government, but Turtle Bay’s apparently backward view of the UN’s entire mission in Zimbabwe.

According to the tribunal, in addition to upholding the egalitarian values of the UN Charter, Zacarias’ job charged him with “speaking out about humanitarian issues and defending humanitarian principles”.

In these respects, he was a clear failure. He had a tight relationship with members of Mugabe’s then Zanu PF ruling party.

According to Robert Amsterdam, who was one of Tadonki’s lawyers, Zacarias’ testimony revealed that he had known various Zanu PF leaders when they were based in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s.

According to the decision, during his posting in Zimbabwe, Zacarias “would spend most of his social time with Nicholas Goche, a Zanu PF politburo member and current Transport minister. This closeness spurred a wilful ignorance of the country’s deteriorating conditions”.

In the run-up to the bloody 2008 elections, “Zacarias seemed to not take cognisance of the fact that there was likely to be widespread and unprecedented violence”, despite the mobilisation of pro-Zanu PF paramilitary forces.

Even as pro-Mugabe militants savaged the opposition MDC and its supporters, Zacarias did his best to shield himself from the ruling party’s scrutiny, even if it meant discarding commonly-held humanitarian protocol.

“The bottom line,” the tribunal concludes, “is that the political agenda that Zacarias was engaged in with the government of Zimbabwe far outweighed any humanitarian concerns that Ocha (Tadonki’s office) may have had.”

In the report’s most scathing section, the judges explain that Zacarias’ closeness to Zanu PF made it impossible for Tadonki to carry out his duties as the head of Ocha — a stance which had deep consequences for Zimbabweans counting on the UN’s assistance in the midst of a cholera epidemic and political emergency.

“There was a humanitarian drama unfolding and people were dying. Part of the population had been abandoned and subjected to repression. The issue between Tadonki and Zacarias was to what extent these humanitarian concerns should be exposed and addressed and the risk that there was of infuriating the Mugabe government,” reads part of the report.

Zanu PF links

“Matters started to sour when Tadonki started doing his job. Zacarias preferred that he remain quiet. But if he remained quiet, Ocha at (the UN) headquarters would say he was not doing his job. Therefore, while silence would bring him trouble from Ocha, noise would infuriate Zacarias.
“When the applicant started organising a forum made up of the NGOs, the United Nations and the donors to discuss the situation in Zimbabwe with the approval of Zacarias and to achieve a common understanding of the humanitarian situation, Zacarias became angry.”

Tadonki did not stay silent however; he “had the courage to inform the Ocha headquarters in New York that Zimbabwe was on the brink of a humanitarian crisis while Zacarias was pretending to the contrary”.

Zacarias had undermined Tadonki at other points during the Ocha head’s brief yet eventful stint in Zimbabwe, most notably by convincing the Zimbabwean government not to approve residency accreditation for Tadonki’s wife and children, who were living in South Africa during his period of employment.

But Tadonki paid an additional and even deeper price for his willingness to warn Turtle Bay about Zimbabwe’s humanitarian plight — he was fired in January 2009, after he had warned of the potential ravages of the looming cholera outbreak. Tadonki was investigated by a UN bureaucrat at Zacarias’ behest, even when there was no proof of professional malfeasance.

“Part of the reason nobody could take on Zacarias was that his role was unassailable,” explains Amsterdam. UN headquarters was convinced that in terms of their Zimbabwe operations, “Zacarias was the absolutely critical pivot, and everything could be sacrificed to him.”

Tadonki’s two predecessors were also fired after brief and tumultuous postings to Harare, and Amsterdam believes that the UN knowingly sent his client into an extremely hostile work environment.

“That they could have put anybody into the situation after Zacarias had savaged the prior two occupants of that post was just inhumane. It was like they were setting him up for exactly what transpired,” said Amsterdam.

Still, the UN has stated that it is appealing its own tribunal’s decision.

For Amsterdam, the decision to appeal reveals just how little the UN has learned from the Tadonki affair.

“If you had a normal organisation, heads would roll,” he says. “Structures would change. But clearly this is not a normal organisation. This is an organisation that’s pathological in its respect for its employees.”

The events in the Tadonki case mostly happened in 2008, but they are less distant than they seem — and not just because of the UN’s plans to appeal.

In a plausible worst-case scenario, this year might bear a similarity to the crisis of 2008. With elections planned for an as-yet-unannounced date later in the year, the country could be heading towards another inflection point, or even another explosion — situations in which international organisations must take on heavy humanitarian and moral responsibilities.

New elections

“The UN was being asked, and will be asked in the future, to play a key role in the transition in Zimbabwe, and they have been completely contaminated by their behaviour,” says Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, and an official in the US State Department’s African Affairs office during the 2008 election crisis.

“It comes down to trust. Who is the UN supposed to be working for?

The signals were pretty clear that parts of the UN office in Harare were working very closely with Zanu PF,” he said.

The successful constitutional referendum raises the possibility of elections that are at least procedurally sound.

In addition, Zimbabwe and Zambia are co-hosting the UN World Tourism Organisation’s general assembly in August, raising hopes that some within Zanu PF genuinely want to re-integrate the country with the rest of the region and the international community more generally. A clean vote would be an ideal place to start.

But Moss sees little reason to believe that the party’s brutal electoral calculus has changed.
“There’s no prospect of an opposition victory as long as Mugabe is alive,” he says.

There is evidence that Zanu PF is already going after opposition and civil society organisations in the run-up to elections.

Police have of late targeted civil society groups and activists, including human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa, while the MDC parties are complaining of resurgent violence.

“There’s an impressive level of political direction and assertiveness by ordinary citizens, human rights defenders, and civil society,” says Jeff Smith, an advocacy officer for the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights. “What’s worrying is that the Zanu PF regime has really been able to keep these social forces in check.”

This year’s vote could be no more legitimate than 2008’s. The question however is still whether Mugabe will allow the opposition to win — and whether it is possible to have any kind of democratic process in a country where the government is so determined to hold onto power.

UNDP throws more $$CASH$$ into voter registration in Yemen - if anything goes wrong - please don't blame UNDP (as usual)

Click here to read this in full @ Reliefweb: http://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/united-nations-development-programme-reconfirms-its-strong-commitment-and-support

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) reconfirms its strong commitment and support to the transitional process through its continued support to Yemen’s update to the Voter Registry, Constitutional Referendum and post-Referendum elections by the signing of an agreement in the amount of 27 million SEK (approximately US $4 million) with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) for the implementation of the Support to the Elections during the Transitional Period (SETP) project in Yemen. The agreements were exchanged on Monday, December 17, 2012 by the Ambassador of Sweden, Senior Country Director of UNDP, the Vice-Chairman of the Supreme Committee for Elections and Referenda (SCER), and the Minister of Planning and International Cooperation at the latter’s office.

The SETP project aims to support the planning and administration of voter registration, the constitutional referendum, and remaining elections of the transitional period; to support inclusive electoral legal framework reform and to increase participation of civil society, political parties, women, youth and persons with disabilities in electoral processes.

“Sweden is now the first contributor for the preparation of voter registration efforts and the coming referendum" said Gustavo Gonzalez, UNDP Yemen Senior Country Director, who led the UNDP delegation. Stressing on the importance of the electoral reforms for fair and impartial elections, “If the National Dialogue is at the heart of the transitional process, elections are what sustains its beat. Elections bring political legitimacy and inclusiveness. Sustainable development in Yemen is unthinkable without a strong democracy. This is why UNDP is strongly investing in elections.”

Helen clark out of touch on Nigeria's election - calls it "free & fair"

HelenClarkUNDP Helen Clark

Visited Nigeria's Independent National Elections Commission this morning. INEC presided over elections judged to be free & fair this year.

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@undpwatchundpwatch

@HelenClarkUNDP #Nigeria2011General #Election remain the worst & most fraudulent Election ever, full of deception considering it cost

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@undpwatchundpwatch

@HelenClarkUNDP 2 call #nigerianelections "free &fair" means u r so out of touch from realityblogs.cfr.org/campbell/2011/…were bloodiest in history

CLICK HERE FOR STORY ON NIGERIAN ELECTIONS THAT UNCLE HELEN CALLS IT FREE

Nigeria’s 2011 Elections: A Last Word?

Key nations to meet on Myanmar election

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited key nations to a meeting Thursday to discuss the new electoral laws for Myanmar’s upcoming election that bar detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said that Ban believes it is an appropriate time for another meeting of the Group of Friends of Myanmar focusing on the election.

The group includes about 15 countries -- Myanmar’s neighbours, interested Asian and European nations, and the five permanent UN Security Council members, the US, Russia, China, Britain and France.

Suu Kyi’s lawyer said earlier yesterday in the capital Yangon that she is against registering her National League for Democracy party for the elections because the ruling junta’s restrictions on the vote are “unjust“.

Suu Kyi’s comments came hours after Myanmar’s highest court refused to accept a lawsuit filed by Suu Kyi’s party seeking to revoke the five election laws, which were enacted earlier this month.

The laws set out rules for the vote, but have been widely criticised as designed to keep Suu Kyi out of the race. One law prohibits anyone convicted of a crime from being a member of a political party and instructs parties to expel convicted members or face de-registration.

Suu Kyi’s house arrest was extended last year after she was convicted on charges of violating the terms of her detention when an American man swam uninvited to her lakeside property. She is serving an additional 18-months of house arrest and many top members of her party and ethnic-based parties are in prison. Under the new laws they would be barred from the vote.

Keeping them accountable: In Pakistan, UNDP Awards No-Bid Contract For Disputed Election

The Pakistan election has been all over media lately. All of us have seen the unconstitutional way Musharraf used and managed to stay on as President. The rampant corruption in the current government has led to a major - throughout the country unrest - requesting Musharraf and his fellow governors to step down.

In all this mess - UNDP wouldn't stay away. How could UNDP ? We are there to "support our client" as Kemal Dervis always say.

Therefore now we will be looking at a fantastic way to dispose money to friends in a messy situation.

Today's Submission is : ACP-RBAP/07/0004
Total Amount: $ 915,636.00
Status: Approved from Akiko Yuge

(FROM INNERCITY PRESS) Even in Pakistan, a country beset by electoral disputes as well as terrorism, the UN Development Program bends its own rules, on issues as important as the provision of technical assistance to elections, as shown by an internal waiver of competition memo obtained by Inner City Press and placed online here.

Earlier this year, after General Pervez Musharraf announced elections, UNDP according to the memo decided it would "engage a recuritment [sic] agency to undertake hiring and provision of training coordinators for organizing training of polling officials workshops under Support to National Election Project (SNEP)." One part of the amorphous mandate claimed by UNDP is to preach transparency including in procurement: the solicitation and weighing of competitive bids before funds are spent. But in this case, on a project involving national elections, UNDP decided internally to waive its procurement rules, and award the $916,000 contract directly to Anjum Asim Shahid Associates (AASA). The scope of the contract, set forth in the memo, filled with typographical errors, includes

- Development of Recruitment [sic] plan and identification of coordinators [sic] through placing advertisement in the newspapers;

• - Short listing of candidates and development of selection cirteria [sic]
• - Conducting interviws [sic] in the field at major towns;
• - Final selection and contract signing (between the firm and the sucessful [sic] candidates).

(Above from Innercity Press)

But why this ? Why spend all this money to train - those who have already broken the rule and unconstitutionally have changed the laws and protected an unconstitutional President ?

Well we think this award has nothing to do with Pakistan. This is a one time payment from UNDP to the Regime of Musharraf to accept back the outgoing Hafiz Pasha. UNDP can no longer continue to keep him around, specially with the latest failures on North Korea, Burma, Indonesia and Nepal.

But in a move that is typical only on hostile take-overs in private sector, the High Priests at UNDP have decided that Pasha should go, and at whatever price. Therefore let's give this money to whomever the Pakistani Government want to. Let the Pakistani's come out with the scheme, and UNDP would disburse on-time so Pasha's departure is secure.

Well yest again the Highest priests have forgotten that the UNDP's money is not their money. Is our money - is public tax-payers money. They have no right to dispose what millions of tax-payers have bestowed on us to invest on the poor - not in dictators.

UNDP money is not a slash fund where the High Priests put their hands whenever they need.

Kemal Dervis your leadership is destroying what is left to UNDP. Your decisions and those who surround you, are destroying our credibility in the world.

Stop it now !!!

p.s.: we would like to thank Innercity Press for their investigatory work on the above. We used portion of thier work. To read more on InnercityPress - please go at (http://innercitypress.com/)