How the least good foreign advisers ended up working in Timor-Leste?

*Cosme da Costa Araujo

 

When Timor-Leste rose up from the ruins left by the destruction of 1999’s crisis, it faced an acute shortage of qualified human resources. Twelve years went by, dozens of reports, mostly prepared by technical assistants funded by donors, reported that the very same problem still exists. To resolve the capacity gap, one of the solutions is to employ foreign advisers. The task of these highly caliber experts are to help their local counterparts in their day-to-day work until such time they can stand on their own feet. Broadly speaking, foreign advisers are contracted to perform one or all of the following functions – to provide technical/policy advice, capacity building and to undertake in-line-job, if no local Timorese cannot stand up to the task.  

A string of unfortunate events unfolded over the year in Timor-Leste has caught us all by surprise. The shocking surprises come from the fact that foreign advisers, not all, had ill intentions and committed fraudulent acts of enriching themselves by stealing from the poor country they suppose to help. A number of highly publicized cases including the arrest of Bobby Boye, a Nigerian born US citizen, and a World Bank employee of Portuguese citizen, and a revelation of Roger Maguire as an Australian mole for oil companies, and the sudden termination of contracts of all international advisers working in the judicial system make us all wonder of what actually went wrong.

In this article I tried to raise and provide answers to the following question – how the least good foreign advisers ended up working in Timor-Leste. I defined “the least good advisers” as those foreign advisers who are proven to be intellectually incompetent, had limited skills and experience, and had past bad records to be deservedly called advisers. I had to be clear from the start that not all advisers who had worked or are still working in Timor-Leste are bad. I have known and had a privilege to work with many of the best ones in my short-span of working life.

I identified five factors, that are in my opinion, are partially or wholly responsible the least good foreign advisers ended up working in Timor-Leste.

Recruitment process – an adverse selection

I blamed the recruitment process for its fault in not detecting and even letting what I called “inferior qualities” of the supposedly foreign advisers to slip through and get the job. In an inexperienced country like Timor-Leste, and compounded by the recent economic crisis that forced lot of people out work, a job opening in Timor-Leste would be swarmed by the least good candidates. With the pools of least good candidates applied, our recruitment process eventually ended up with recruiting “melons”. As amo Martinho said "todas as porcarias estao aqui". The end products of their work were ended up being criticized. The good example is media law, which attracted lot of criticisms including “the unconstitutionality in some of its articles” and the remark made by Mari Alkatiri that “the adviser who wrote it treated Timorese as children”.  In my opinion the least good advisers do not know what they do and advise on; therefore, every decision made, based on their advice, is controversial.  One good example is the ruling on taxation dispute between Timor-Leste’s governments versus Conoco Philips. For my simple mind in order for a judge to preside over such a hearing, he/she, at least, needs to have knowledge, and experience in commercial law, accounting, taxation – a mere mundane general law is not sufficient.  With melons, I am not surprised to see most of the rulings are in favor of oil companies.

Moral hazard – when more is less
Despite foreign advisers been paid ten and thousands of dollars, a zillion times higher than their local counterparts, not to mention better facilities they enjoy, they still want to have more. For them more is less. The more they have, greedier they become. They took advantage of their local counterparts to fulfill their greediness. Moral hazard occurred when with superior information, knowledge, skills and experience, compared to their local counterparts, enabled them to have intentions or to take actions to behave inappropriately.  With moral hazards, the interest of the agents and the principles are not aligned. Agent acts to maximize his/her interest, in detriment to his/her principal. Bobby Boye, a Nigerian born, US citizen, was a vivid example of moral hazards – principle and agent problem.  With his skills, he managed to scam $3.5 million dollar from Timor-Leste, while working as tax adviser in the Ministry of Finance, knowing fully that the systems and people at his department will not be able to detect his trail. In addition, the recent resolution issued by National Parliament to suspend the contracts of all foreign advisers working in judicial system was another good example to cite. The resolution read that “instead of providing capacity building to the technical staff”, these international judges and advisers, “taking advantage of local staff lacking of capacity to achieve their personal gains”.

Job phobia – fearing of job insecurity
An adviser is recruited for a definitive period to accomplish an established mission. Once he/she accomplished his/her mission, he/she is no longer needed. He/she is not here for permanent placement. What happened in Timor-Leste is what I call “job phobia”. Most foreign advisers, those I have seen and known of, want to stick to their jobs as long as they could. Because of fearing job insecurity, many advisers took ages to finish their jobs. Some are reluctant to transfers their knowledge and skills to their counterparts. Some once they know that the locals are starting to do the job, they remove them to other departments. How can a 12 year of capacity building have not yet enable Timorese judges to stand on their own feet. The simple answer is that either there was no real capacity building took place or Timorese are too dumb to learn.

Malae syndrome – appearance does matter
I used to hear this famous saying “don’t judge a book by its cover”. In the context of Timor-Leste, I could paraphrase it and say “you cannot underestimate the capacity of someone because he/she is a black Timorese”. But in Timor-Leste, people do judge others by looking at the cover – who you are. In years of dealing with fellow Timorese, they had what I called “malae syndrome”. The Timorese trust more “malae” than their fellow Timorese. For the Timorese, everything that is regurgitated by a malae adviser is blindly believed to be true and most likely to be implemented. The problem of “malae syndrome” is that foreign advisers owe loyalty to no one but him/herself. With the recent incidents, hopefully, had taught us all an important lesson learned that is don’t indeed judge a book by its cover.

We don’t know what we really want
Linking back to “malae syndrome”, the ubiquitous of foreign advisers in Timor-Leste simply show that we don’t know what we really want. I am not malae phobic, but evidence show that in some ministries, the ratio between adviser and staff is literally 2:1. I saw in some ministries malae taking minutes of meeting, setting up meetings, collecting timesheets, processing payments, acting as secretaries, drafting emails, itineraries, timing speech, and maybe even carrying begs of ministers, and DGs. In some ministries foreign advisers took over simple tasks that are ably done by local Timorese. Do we really foreign advisers to do all the things I have just mentioned about. Of course not.

My simple solutions
Having identified the five factors that, in my view, are responsible for having least good advisers working in Timor-Leste, the following are my simple suggested solution to address the issue - (1) identifying priorities areas that do need really foreign advisers support, (2) scaling back on foreign advisers through Timorisation process, and (3) reintroducing Capacity Development Coordination Unit to coordinate and monitor adviser’s effectiveness.