Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

Barely had we entered the apartment and Emily completed the introductions to Joanna and Philip, when Maurice excused himself.

I’m afraid I cannot stay. The French ambassador, he has called me away and … well … you know. But I wanted to make you a small gesture.

He handed over the bottle.

There was the expression of regrets all round, and he took his leave. When he shook my hand, he made no eye contact.

The room was large enough for two beds, a small sofa, two chairs, and a table to one side, covered in files and papers. A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and a large Afghani rug lay in the center. There isn’t anything remotely interesting to say about Joanna and Philip. I’m sure they are nice enough people, but I found myself in no mood to chat, no mood for conversation, either honest or polite. Philip was an earnest man in his late forties with the squat physique of a wrestler. He was thinning on top, and on his face lay a moist sheen that didn’t quite coalesce into sweat. He tried his civil best to get the conversation going, but I’m afraid to say I didn’t help. Technically, it was a dinner party, for there was dinner.

I asked them both what their work involved and how they’d got into the development business, and if I don’t go into that now, it’s because it bored me then to hear it. Joanna and Philip didn’t ask me what had brought me to Kabul. Had they detected my lack of interest? Or did they not ask because Emily had given them an explanation — did she represent me as her ex-boyfriend or her boyfriend? — or was it because she’d told them that she’d asked me to come — were they that close to her? — or was it because she’d told them that the UN rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan had asked me to come — but how would she know that? — or was it because there were already numberless new arrivals in Kabul, would-be development wonks, skulking about the city waiting for a Western development agency to throw some meat their way, and they, like all hyenas, needed no explanation when the smell was in the air? In those days, where else could anyone want to be?

Joanna wanted to know more about what I was doing in Bangladesh. That I was living there, Emily must have told her. I said that I was working on reforming the Bureau of NGO Affairs.

That can’t win you any friends, said Joanna.

Luckily, I’m rather antisocial, I replied.

I probably should have been more gracious. Probably I should have smiled.

What does the Bureau of NGO Affairs do? asked Philip.

NGOs have to be registered with the bureau, and foreign donors can only send money to NGOs in Bangladesh with the bureau’s blessing. So bureau officials hold up the process and demand bribes. There are activists in Bangladesh trying to push through reforms that would change the processes and eliminate some of the opportunities for corruption.

Who are you talking to?

Quite a lot of people in government and in Parliament want to see change, but they can’t speak out easily — they’d be fired of course, and then they’d have no influence whatsoever. The Bangladeshi constitution actually entitles a party leader to expel her own MPs from Parliament without cause, something you don’t see in most parliamentary democracies.

Is that true?

I don’t know. It’s what I’ve been told over and over and what I’ve read in the constitution. There’s a curious provision originally put there at a time when coalition governments were hugely unstable because of the large number of political parties. A single MP could cause havoc simply by threatening to switch to another party. The point of the constitutional provision was to stop self-serving, wayward MPs before they destabilized government and forced elections every ten days. When the provision was adopted, I don’t imagine anyone had given thought to perverse consequences down the road.

Why don’t they change it now?

It’s a constitutional provision, which means it’s hard to change, and for obvious reasons party leaders love it.

But you say some of these people will talk to you?

Yes. Some civil servants and politicians, braver than most, though not in public yet.

And what kind of changes are you talking about?

Nothing that hasn’t been thought of before.

Such as?

I’m sure this can’t be all that interesting to you.

No, it is. Go on, said Joanna.

Emily said nothing but just stared at me. She always fixed her stare on me if I was party to the conversation. I used to feel rather flattered by it, at the beginning taking it for admiration, as a man might do, but I soon began to wonder if she stared at me out of a curiosity, even a variety of perverse delight. Emily never said a controversial thing in her life, always the voice of moderation and good temper, politic and circumspect to perfection, and it occurred to me that her staring was evidence of some lascivious pleasure in the ever-present threat, whenever I was talking, that I’d drive a bulldozer over social norms.

If a donor wants to send a hundred thousand dollars to a Bangladeshi NGO, they have to submit paperwork to the bureau before they can do so. The bureau then goes through a rather mechanical process to make sure everything’s in order, ostensibly, for example, to make sure the money’s not going to fund some terrorist outfit and so on. What happens in practice is that some or other official holds up everything. The donors or NGOs know that a bribe smoothes things out. A simple piece of legislation could make quite a change, a bill introducing a deeming provision in the statute books, to be precise. If the bureau doesn’t inform the donor in, say, three months of any concerns it has, then the relevant paperwork would be deemed by law, the new law, to have been processed and the donor can go ahead and send the money in the safe knowledge that they’re in compliance.

But won’t the corrupt bureau official just say that he informed the donor that there were problems with the application and that the donor and NGO went ahead despite being notified?

That’s where technology comes in. Everything’s online and transparent so that anyone can log on and see what’s happening to a donor application for bureau clearance. If the bureau raises any queries, it would be required to specify those on the Internet file for that application. Again, if no queries are listed there, then the legal provision would deem there to be no queries at all. The key point is that the whole thing would be transparent to everyone and everyone would be involved in policing it. Actually, I think the donors rather than the government might be more uneasy about it.

Why?

Because everyone’s so fixed in a mind-set of secrecy. Even if there’s nothing underhanded going on, secrecy is the culture. I sometimes wonder if secrecy is an end in itself for all these people, donors, NGOs, the UN, the development community at large, if it confers some kind of reward on the human psyche. Perhaps secrets are power not because of their content but because only the select know. The bureau, by the way, could do a lot more positive things. Making the pool of information it gathers transparent and open to all, for instance, could help disseminate lessons learned from NGO projects, save the reinvention of wheels, and ultimately coordinate efforts for maximum impact.

It would need funding.

Possibly, but not necessarily a lot, and it would probably save many times its cost. Small but key changes in a system can have a huge impact. On the other hand, it might not work.

Too many obstacles?

No, it might not work even if we did get there. My reasoning could be wrong and my estimates of numbers might be wide of the mark. More than that, it’s the unknown unknowns that bother me even if I have no clue what they are — because I have no clue what they are.