Professional Documents
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Bureaucrats For Hire Dic2004 JLR
Bureaucrats For Hire Dic2004 JLR
Bureaucrats For Hire Dic2004 JLR
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Our country deserves an in-depth reflection on the growing development consultancy industry. The following effort is based on my observation, from both outside and inside, of the abundant fauna of consultants in todays Nicaragua, though it probably wouldnt be accepted as part of a consultancy study...
he consultancy industry in Nicaragua is worth millions a year. The money spent on salaries and other remunerations for the studies and technical advice emanating from these passing posts represented a sizable percentage of the annual budget of many state institutions in 2003: 45% in the Municipal Development Institute, 38% in the Environment and Natural Resources Ministry and 27% in the Supreme Electoral Council. The situation is similar among the NGOs, universities, media and churches that are plugged into international aid in this era of transfusion. So many of us are living in the foreign aid bubble. So many of us have some direct or indirect link into the long consultancy market chain. The fieldwork of NGOs or ministries must be evaluated by an adviserbest if he/she is Swedish, Dutch or Danishwho will clean up the ideas expressed by interviewed natives, add data provided by surveyors and statisticians and, with other support from a sociologist, present some notes to an analyst to whip into shape in some illegible report whose cracks will be plastered over by an
14 envo
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editor before being presented by a good communicator in Power Point. Its the same old story day after day all over Nicaragua.
SPEAKING OUT
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Whereas the 1972 earthquake represented a revolution of opportunities for Somoza, todays ongoing crisis has turned Nicaragua into a land of opportunities for bankers to profit from the high interest rates on state bonds and private security companies to profit from the lack of police response in a context of poverty and anomy that encourages crime. Other beneficiaries include the judges who reap great dividends for their lack of morals and the powerful Pellas family, which only has to place a call to halt any audit threatening to reveal a tax evasion case by one of the companies in its economic group. At the end of the line are the consultants, continually offered an infinite and never obsolete range of subjects on which to advise and charge. Many suffer the current crisis, but some fat cats feed off it.
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In a country like Nicaragua, this bureaucrat-for-hire system is like an equation with three variables: Tom, a first world government or cooperation agency, hires Dick, that confident Jackof-all-trades consultant willing to try his hand at any issue, to work for the benefit of Harry, almost always a state institution or an NGO
the current bureaucrat-for-hire model, these are all dispersed and theres often minimal contact among them. Theres no office where the scribes are concentrated, or linkage between them and their files. There are as many offices and archives as the number of consultants contracted by a given institution. The consultants temporary link with the institution is measured in the commitment to a block of days into which the task must fit rather than to a task that takes as many days as required. Each contracted assignment needs to be adjusted to standards and objectives, which are set out in terse terms of reference. In addition, consultants must follow certain tacit rules for managing their image in society and others on which their future in that market relies. But they are not rules of loyalty to an institution in return for a secure existence. The consultant sacrifices the future security that a stable job offers to the attraction of greater income today. Modern civil service had separated the office from the officials private home, with bureaucracy generally considering official activity to be independent of private life. In postmodernity, however, bureaucrats often work out of their home, with work life and private life sharing the same physical space. The consultants personal funds and equipment are always at the disposition of their labor obligations. Private and public assets, correspondence and even friendships are tightly interwoven. And just as private belongings and spaces fuse with those of business service and public utility, so the consultants public time and private time tend to become an indiscernible amalgam. All this means that consultants have opted for a way of life much more than an occupation.
15 january 2005
NICARAGUA
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esque details. Another difference is that the former consultants tended to have more mundane professions: biologist, engineer, lawyer. Some of the new batch try to create specializations that verge on the ridiculous. After Hurricane Mitch, the United Nations Development Program contracted a consultant whose card announced that she was a disasterologist. We can only hope that rather than predicting disasters, she did at least know how to mitigate them. And though it may seem worthy of Garca Mrquez, Nicaragua has even played host to an angelogist and a master in divinity. How long before local universities start producing corruptologists and Orteg-ologists?
The instrumentalizing of human relations is a vice into which many consultants slip, apparently unaware of how much hypocrisy reduces the quality of life
16 envo
SPEAKING OUT
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of the make an appearance syndrome, hawking themselves at every opportunity. My best friend gave anthropology classes every Saturday and one of her students was a big fish in the consultancy world, as he felt the need to demonstrate in a footnote at the end of every exam. His work was a constant excuse for his absences. As youth gang members wisely put it, he wanted to pass the course on pure impression. But the most impressive thing of all was his absolute inability to write a single line without massacring the rules of grammar and running roughshod over spelling. Evidently, gestures and language are more important than grammar and spelling, even more important than clothing. Those who devote themselves to the consultancy industry have to become polyglots fluent in ECLA language, FAO jargon, politicking slang and dozens of NGO dialects, including the lavish use of the @ sign to replace the masculine o or feminine a at the end of gender-specific words in Spanish to suggest a trendy gender-neutral ending) They have to know how to troll for fish in all waters, seduce with language, employ hallowed concepts and show off their mastery of the key terms, knowing which are valid in certain areas but not in others. My work as a researcher, which I now do more as a consultant, has forced me to take note of the conventions and keep my literary urges under control. I generally come up against clients who want everything repeated a thousand times. I have to write in the most dry and inoffensive way possible, moderating and desiccating phrases, shriveling and crumpling them up. The text has to be meticulously gone over to extirpate rash adjectives and names that should remain anonymous and to employ a vocabulary restricted to about a hundred words that, like a Lego set, constitute the only bricks in the verbal architecture of consultancy reports. In the effort to castrate the texts, it becomes almost essential to use an abundance of the kind of impersonal reflexive verbs that we liberally employ in Nicaragua when we want to avoid mentioning the guilty party, particularly if its us. So just as in everyday colloquial speech we say it fell instead of I dropped it or it broke rather than I broke it, consultancy reports use it is intended rather than here we intend... This is perhaps Nicaraguan colonial languages most notable contribution to the professional development cooperation idiom. A consultancy report should be dry and turgid to give the impression of being serious. All the better if it is situated at the opposite extreme to the pleasure of text described and analyzed by Roland Barthes. This particular sphere employs a stiflingly leaden and reiterative prose. Four concepts are endlessly repeated in a limitless succession of combinations and permeations, because in the happy uni-
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Those who devote themselves to the consultancy industry have to become polyglots fluent in ECLA language, FAO jargon, politicking slang and dozens of NGO dialects, to seduce with language, employ hallowed concepts and show off their mastery of the key terms, knowing which are valid in certain areas but not in others
verse of the consultants, as in Huxleys Brave New World, a phrase repeated again and again finally becomes truth. The basic work mechanism is cut and paste. Repeating the same topics in the same tone with identical concepts somehow makes consultants look more competent.
NICARAGUA
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We have become a new aristocracy feeding off the misery we research, quantify, diagnose, analyze and dissect, with a prosperity that is in some cases directly proportional to the poverty of our fellow citizens
top officials from the Sandinista government, including certain revolutionary comandantes, both male and female. First they were radicals who wanted to turn the world on its head. Then they became platonic Marxists, if that, and soon flushing down the toilet all the Konstantinov they had lapped up in the seventies or eighties, either directly or through Martha Harnecker. They went from Marxist fundamentalism to technocratic fundamentalism, crossing over from revolution to a happy adaptation to the given conditions, sometimes vacillating, emotionally ambivalent toward the FSLN, but always with resigned pragmatism or underhanded opportunism.
ber of organizations. But despite their enviable social capital, they were at each others throats in less than a year. Consultants prefer to go freelance and seek temporary alliances. At the end of the day, other consultants are rivals after the same funds rather than colleagues with whom to share ideas, exchange information and plot a better Nicaragua. Their main rival, however, is necessarily their main ally. The historical confrontation between the interests of professionals and those of workers and peasants has occupied the attention of generations of sociologists, but has never before reached such colossal levels of cynicism. Never before have professionals so parasitically lived off the poor. We have become a new aristocracy feeding off the misery we research, quantify, diagnose, analyze and dissect, with a prosperity that is in some cases directly proportional to the poverty of our fellow citizens.
SPEAKING OUT
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reaucrats-for-hire, no need to bring on board the right people for a given issue. Its more profitable to create and cultivate a network of social relations adequately distributed in key positions. Specialization tends to be improvised, as in the case of an economist friend of mine who soon became an expert on masculinity and was contracted by a national NGO for US$2,500. One of his colleagues and fellow graduates is still looking for work after stubbornly insisting on being an economist.
The brief period consultants are contracted for doesnt allow them to delve deep, and they end up with no possibility of following up at the end of the consultancy; both the post and the function disappear when the contract expires
19 january 2005
NICARAGUA
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If there are many defects, there are also many possible remedies. In Nicaragua, a country with such weak institutionalityimprovement of which is supposedly a goal of international cooperationits outrageous that funds earmarked for consultancies arent used to strengthen the institutions themselves
ible with the aspirations of workers who want to be well remunerated for their extra efforts. That weakness multiplies their susceptibility to outside offers and damages the labor culture. Its preferable to reach an agreement to guarantee quality.
tractors. Thus monks and nuns, intellectuals, businesspeople and state officials stop doing their work to become financial managers because they believe that this position in the pyramid is closer to the pinnacle and shines with dazzling intensity. If there are many defects, there are also many possible remedies. Foreign cooperation understands that the problem is not limited to the fraud, chicanery, crookedness and other undesirable animals lurking among the consultancy fauna. The system is intrinsically perverse and its perversion is consubstantial. As none of the consultants know when the next consultancy will come along or how much it will pay, they have to accept anything that comes their way, working flat out and subcontracting professionals with limited experience to the detriment of the final products quality. If they get a juicy offer, it seems silly to let it go. They face a lot of pressure in the circles they travel in to maximize their income, whether to match their employers consumption level, send their kids to the best school, buy the latest computer, organize parties to cultivate milkable relations, or simply, and more wisely, sock something away for the lean times. Such are the daily weaknesses that pave the way to big-time corruption. The fact that consultants are disconnected from institutional time and spaces makes it difficult to guarantee their full working capacity. Some are linked to institutions where they have a fixed job and a regular salary, but they obtain their greatest income from consultancies, which often eat into the time they should be dedicating to their institution. The main problem is that many institutions have no policy for handling consultancies, or if they do its hardly compat20 envo
Jos Luis Rocha, as well as being a consultant, is a researcher for Nitlapn-UCA and a member of envos editorial committee.