At an interaction last week organised by this
paper, Maoist foreign minister-in-waiting C P
Gajurel, like many past politicians in Nepal,
turned to donors present for help in rebuilding
the country.
He said his party would make sure aid goes
directly to the people and without leakage and
corruption along the way. There was a strong
sense of déjà vu hearing all this. It was
reminiscent of the euphoria after 1990. Leaders
then, as now, promised corruption-free good
governance.
It didn’t take long for the hope to evaporate.
Given the role of money in competitive politics,
most politicos were soon up to their necks in the
quagmire of corruption.
Gajurel was asked how his party would meet the
aspirations of thousands of his cadre. He said
there had to be massive job creation for Maoist
youth, and he asked for donor help. It left many
wondering whether the Maoists would now use
ministries as recruitment centres as the UML and
NC did post-1990.
Gajurel’s reliance on donors also shows that the
Maoists may fall into the same old dependency
trap. Nepal has been receiving ODA for more than
50 years and part of the goal has been poverty
alleviation through job creation. Despite this,
unemployment (13 percent) and under employment
(47 percent) are at all-time highs. In fact, this
was a factor that enabled Maoist recruitment.
In order to do things differently and
effectively, the Maoists must realise that
employment creation as well as other development
undertakings have never been a function of money
alone, but building people’s institutions. Only
then can local development also generate
employment opportunities in the process.
Unfortunately, while the donors are good at
doling out money, their record is tardy at best
in building institutions resulting usually in the
wastage of scarce resources. Take the Ministry of
Local Development (with its interesting acronym,
MOLD) which has spent a budgeted sum of Rs 38
billion in its nearly 30 years of existence. This
does not include the vast sums spent by donors
directly to micro-manage projects that they fund.
Despite all this, the rural landscape is
characterised by grinding poverty, decreasing
production, widespread hunger and malnutrition,
unemployment and an exploding population. All of
this fuelled the combustion of the insurgency
during the last decade.
An example of good institution-building is
Nepal’s community forestry success. At the heart
of the achievement was the government’s decision
to introduce forest user groups in 1988, an
innovation deriving from the Panchayat-era
Decentralisation Act of 1982. It had taken us 30
years from 1957, the year when forest was
nationalised, to steadily destroy it and only 10
years to resurrect it.Our forests now not only
meet needs for fodder, fuel and timber, they also
generate money for local development including
employment opportunities. Besides, the hinterland
is also dotted today with user-owned coops and
saving and credit groups that are also doing
marvellous work in self-help economic and social
development.
Unfortunately, the so-called Local Self
Governance Act of 1999 written with generous
financial and technical help from the UNDP and
DANIDA (which fiercely competed against each
other to dominate the exercise and together lured
government professionals into abdication)
practically removed the user group concept. This
set the stage, however inadvertently, for the
colossal wastage of resources.
Nepal’s new bosses, the Maoists, must recognise
that donors are good only as donors, the basic
decision-making must be by national professionals
and predicated on the dispassionate assessment of
our successes and failures. The elections may
have been for an assembly to write the new
constitution, but the two years that it is
estimated to take is far too long given the
urgency of the cause of the poor and hungry in
the villages.
The new government must follow a twin-track
approach: even as the constitution is written it
must set up and strengthen a nationwide network
of autonomous user-owned institutions through
which all development projects must be
implemented on a countrywide and priority basis.