SWITZERLAND - BIS
A. INTRODUCTION
After my short assignments to Sierra Leone (2 years with the Niger interlude) and Niger, I was assigned back to Geneva in 2013 as Head of Operations, in support of the Deputy Director of the Bureau for Africa responsible for West Africa, Liz Ahua. Like Marjon Kamara, this is a supervisor who would also oversee me three times, this being the second time.
My portfolio included reviewing field submissions and getting them approved by the Sections responsible for technical, financial and human resources support. In the case of West and Central Africa at that time, this included especially preparing emergency appeals as well as keeping the Deputy Director abreast of operational situations and challenges in the field. During my assignment, the most active situations were in Mali (and the wider Mali situation), where a French military deployment was followed by a UN Peace-Keeping Mission, and Central African Republic.
At the Bureau there were also another two heads of operations, one for Southern Africa and one for East and the Horn of Africa. Together with supporting the field operations, I was also in charge of preparing briefs for the review of annual programmes in my area of responsibility. In the performance of my assigned activities, I felt that being congruent with my job description conflicted with the Regional Bureau in Dakar, because I actually challenged twice the annual programme submissions of the Regional Director for West Africa during the scheduled reviews. He was my hierarchical superior, were it not for the fact that I was sitting at headquarters. He was at the level of my Deputy Director. This situation was corrected with the creation of three Directorates in the field in Africa, which of course created other challenges, the most important being a divided and weakened Africa in UNHCR.
B. HEADQUARTERS ISSUES
1. The creation of three Bureaux in Africa
This was being discussed and its implementation was imminent, although it did not occur during my stay. I have no elements, neither do I intend, to assess its merits. Nonetheless It has had the effect of diluting the place of the Africa operations as a Continent, in the UNHCR structure. In fact, as one Bureau and before the Rohingya crisis and despite other refugee crises, 38% of the organization’s operations were in Africa, and so were 46% of the staff. Considering the size of the Bureau in relation to all other Bureaux, compounded by the fact that there was an African Peace-keeping mission in Somalia, and eleven of the fifteen UN Peace-keeping Missions were at that time in Africa, we in the Bureau felt that the Director’s workload and operational and political complexities demanded that he be at the level of Under-Secretary General (the level of AHC). We certainly agitated in that sense but without vigor and without canvassing external support, given other competing priorities and the high politics of it all.
2. New HR policies
While politically active on this front, my activism on HR issues was a sense of deception that I felt with the introduction of two new requirements that most of us felt would disadvantage Africans in the organization or wishing to join it:
Psychometric entry tests: unlike in European and American universities, psychometrics is/was not a subject taught in African institutions of higher learning. That favoured those groups.
The introduction of a requirement of two UN languages as a condition for progressing to senior positions in the organization. This was clearly invented to favour European staff, since four of the six UN languages are European: English, Russian, French, Spanish. Higher chances of career progression were offered on a plate to Europeans in the organization since they were already born with one of these languages. The probability on an African staff mastering two UN languages was minimal at the time.
3. Expanded concept of Diversity among UN staff:
It was a period of important changes. Including an HR expansion of partner rights, in line with the changes. Diversity was an euphemism for entrenching and normalizing LGBTIQ situations in the name of the universality of human values. Of course these persons exist, not only in the UN, but also in my country. Still, that is not my cultural value. In Mozambique they do not tend to expose themselves, neither do we promote them; in fact promoting them would make them poor fellows more fragile. So, our cultural attitude is one of “let sleeping dogs lie”. I felt that this was an aggression on my culture, knowing of course that the UN was not invented in the image of our culture. It is also a matter of fact that some of the LGBTIQ colleagues I have worked with, tended to be more intelligent than I, and more effective in managing their responsibilities. The point is, forcing it on some of us was insensitive and arrogant and represented the override of our identity. But that is the UN and I respected the UN values. I am now more selective on those values as part of a humanity that still believes in the UN, but I have the right to demarcate my culture, particularly because of arrogant and manifested exceptionalisms in this international environment.
4. Cash-based Interventions:
This approach to humanitarian assistance was introduced in UNHCR, and was an agenda point also promoted by humanitarian partner organizations such as WFP. That was an innovation that we spent considerable time learning and understanding. It was part of a wider humanitarian approach generally accepted as a better way of assisting forcibly displaced populations, giving them choices, over the standard in-kind assistance we were used to. I felt that while that was a good approach, and logistically cheaper, cash-based interventions as a charity still did not attack the real reasons of poverty and social exclusion of the displaced, refugees in particular. Marginalization is a much larger issue. And why is it important? Because some of the innovations in the way we do business are also based on considerations of expediency. Social cash: cash solutions are designed to make poverty bearable, not to lift anyone out of poverty. In that sense, I do not share the notion that cash distribution, refugee or no refugee is empowerment. It is like debt restructuring. It just postpones for another day the reality that one remains poor. A good approach; but empowering? That is a mouthful.
5. Fund-raising
The organization had adopted long ago the notion that all staff are responsible for fund-raising. However, the initial policy mechanisms related to fund-raising remained bogged down in the organizational culture. Fund-raising was subjected to a contrived regulation where monies raised in the field were supposed to feed the authorized budgetary allocation, instead of adding to it. That was due to our centralized funding processes and a huge headquarters-based Fund-Raising Unit, acting like an exclusive club and making us in the field suffer with the technicalities. At headquarters, I was inspired by my two field experiences and felt that we never learned from other agencies. This issue would revisit me and I would take them personally in Chad and Nigeria: UNHCR benefitting the least from the humanitarian pooled funds managed by OCHA.
6. The Statelessness Campaign
During my stay in Geneva, UNHCR launched a major campaign to end statelessness in 10 years. I took cue from Director George Okoth-Obbo, who was/is a Protection authority himself, on the position that Statelessness would not be ended in 10 years, not with a campaign, but with a sustained long-term strategy. The campaign was certainly a very positive effort at developing what I considered the atrophied branch of the mandate of the High Commissioner. Nevertheless, there are so many silent situations of risk of statelessness, or actual statelessness situations that do not say their name in Africa, that approaching this issue through a campaign was either hugely underestimating and being ignorant of the extent of the problem, or hugely overestimating the brilliance of UNHCR in dealing with it and affect solutions. For a retiree like me, this is water under the bridge (in fact most of the issues are), but the organization could learn very good lessons from the experiences of the government of Kenya that granted nationality to the Makonde, who had been in legal limbo for decades since the independence of the country. Other groups may soon follow, particularly those that were brought to Kenya by the British colonial enterprise. A learning opportunity for UNHCR still. On this issue I talk of Africa, where my knowledge is slightly better than for other continents.
7. Risk-Based Management
On this theme, I will unashamedly beat my own drum. I introduced Risk Management as a Senior Programme Officer in Zambia 2000-2003, where I first initiated a preventive audit with procedures and assurance measures, I created a risk matrix (in MS word!) and assigned staff to the different risks. That was part of a bigger personal project: adapting Chapter IV of the UNHCR Manual to the lived field experiences, including a revamped planning model. So, when the organization introduced Risk-Based Management, all that the organization was doing as far as I was concerned, was to reveal to me the adopted management philosophy of UNHCR, clarifying the concept a little more than I had conceived it, and introducing a professionally designed semi-automated spreadsheet.
This time, although the SAL had shifted from 4 to 5 years, I left Geneva after only 2 years of service to my next station, Ndjamena, Chad. 2004
C. LESSONS
One always learns new things and new ways of doing business wherever one goes. However, passing through Geneva this time, was for me more of a temporizing step to another destination. So, sorry this time I have no “mawaiza”. Meet me in Chad, Nigeria, Tanzania, my last three Representational positions.
Jose, 25 July 2023
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