U.N. wastes world taxpayers’ money

Press, 13 December 1982, Page 24

U.N. wastes world taxpayers’ money

From ‘The Economist,’ London

Rarely does the United Nations Secretary-General find the American. Soviet and British representatives coming to his office as a team to make a joint appeal for his help. Last month they did so; and then their delegations sang the same tune in a committee of the General Assembly. Is there joy among the 157 member governments at this show of harmony among major Powers? There is not. For the three ambassadors are begging the United Nations to spend less of their countries’ money. You might think that the idea of curbing the organisation's ever-growing expenditure would be particularly appealing to its poorer members. Far from it. As a rule, the poorest governments are the keenest to see international organisations running up bigger bills, so long as somebody else is doing the paying. And in the United Nations these countries are in just that happy situation. It is right and proper that the richer members of such a body should pay larger shares of its costs than the poorer ones. But it is not healthy when this principle is carried as far as it has been at the United Nations. Between them. 82 of its members, a majority, pay less than 1 per cent of its basic

budget: and 108 of them, a twothirds majority, produce a total of only 2*2 per cent. Against that. 70 per cent is contributed by only seven members — the United States. Russia. Japan. West Germany. France. Britain and Canada, ranked in that order. The disproportion is even greater when total United Nations spending, much of it based on voluntary contributions. is taken into account. . Even so. the big contributors would have little reason to complain if the basic budget, now running at $750 million a year, was seen to be spent wisely. By now, however, it is widely known that only a minority of the officials whom that budget supports are hardworking people whose services to peace, and to other good causes, are too valuable to be dispensed with. The rest serve no good cause or good purpose. If they vanished overnight the world would notice no difference — except that it would no longer have to pay them salaries ranging up to $75,000 a year. Most of these drones get their sinecures through the system of national quotas which the member governments have imposed on the United Nations secretariat. When Mr Perez de Cuellar took office in January, he said he would try to demolish this system, but it is defying him as it defied each previous secretary-general.

Many a secretariat post is virtually tn the gift of a government: patronage, nepotism and lifetime tenure for incompetents were less flagrant in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester. Once in. the placemen virtually seek to enlarge their empires (Parkinson's laws apply here as in all bureaucraciesi; and they are abetted by the governments that demand more and more paperwork and. above all. more unnecessary conferences, with all the happy opportunities these provide for junketing around the world. Airline tickets alone are costing $37 million a year for the United Nations and its family of agencies (excluding the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which spend another $4B million on them). This bustle may all look very busy, but much of it is quite futile, and many of those involved know it. If this sort of thing happened in a club or society of the normal kind, its poorer members would be quick to demand a drastic pruning of the budget. Why. at the United Nations, is it left to the richer members to protest? Can it really be because so many of the poorer ones are getting a good return on their contributions in the shape of “jobs for the boys" — meaning the relatives and friends of their ministers and senior officials 0