Nathaniel
Still curious about Cameroon’s PR initiative in last week’s Washington Post (see our previous post, “Cameroon’s War on Corruption: Reality or Good PR?"), we decided to do some additional digging into the ad. Thanks to the pre-World War II-era Foreign Agents Registration Act, all foreign governments lobbying the U.S. government or seeking to influence U.S. public opinion are required to file extensive paperwork and regular reports about such activities with the U.S. Department of Justice. Far more rigorous than U.S. domestic lobbying disclosures and finally available online after years of having to camp out in an awful office on New York Avenue to access the files, here’s what we found.
Among other blue chip lobbyists and PR firms retained over the years by the government of Cameroon (Burson-Marsteller and Patton Boggs among them), we found a recent contract between the Government of Cameroon and GoodWorks International (GWI), an Atlanta-based consulting firm which provides “comprehensive range of public affairs and communications services designed to strengthen [the] presence [of developing nations] in Washington.”
Although headquartered outside of Washington, GWI is an otherwise classic “revolving door” lobbying shop: a slew of former ambassadors, executive branch officials, and even a former Prime Minister of Jamaica are among its top officials.
The GWI contract with the Cameroonian Minister of Economy and Finance, signed in July 2007, details a “strategy for securing a Compact under the Millennium Challenge Account […] in as little as 12-18 months [by raising] some of the negative indicators that now make the country ineligible.” The contract also stipulates that “GWI will assist the Cameroonian authorities to devise a communications strategy to show-case Cameroon’s reform efforts.” Now, two weeks before the contract is due to expire, with a Compact yet to be achieved, the ad appeared in last week’s Post.
A number of interesting questions come to mind. First, how common is this sort of perverse “MCC effect” among developing countries seeking big MCC dollars? Instead of comitting to genuine governance reforms, as the MCC process is intended to operate, the government of Cameroon seems more interested in influencing elite opinion in Washington as a way of moving the needle on MCC’s indicators.
A second, slightly scarier question: is Cameroon so wrong in that approach? The indicator used by the MCC to measure a country’s progress on anti-corruption has come under increasing fire in recent years as “unactionable” -- in layman’s terms, there is sometimes little that a government can do to affect the scores given that the indicator is built on a messy aggregation of disparate opinion polls, expert assessments (full disclosure: including Global Integrity data), and household and firm surveys. With so much fuzzy data floating around, is it any wonder governments are turning to a far more tried and true inside-the-Beltway technique to secure MCC funding?
At a cost of “only” $350,000 a year – the price of Cameroon’s annual retainer with GWI – perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when hundreds of millions of MCC dollars are at stake.
View the GWI contract here.
-- By Julia Burke and Nathaniel Heller
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Cameroon’s War on Corruption: Probably Good PR
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Will the Real Yemen Please Stand Up?
An email from one of Global Integrity's contributors -- apparently censored by government email servers -- prompts us to reexamine the "progress" in Yemen's movement towards open political discourse. Message 1: Message 2:
Yemen is a fascinating country when it comes to governance and corruption issues. A 2006 Global Integrity assessment for the country (published in January 2007) rated Yemen overall as "very weak" with a score of just 49, a disturbingly low total for any country. Serious weaknesses were cited in Yemen's media climate, judicial accountability, rule of law, and procurement practices.
Prior to our 2006 assessment, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) had suspended Yemen's participation in its Threshold program -- small grants designed to stimulate targeted reforms that then qualify the country for the really big MCC grants (MCC "compacts," in the company's parlance). The relatively negative 2006 Global Integrity assessment seemed to support that decision, taken in late-2005.
In February 2007, MCC reinstated Yemen to Threshold status, citing major reforms undertaken in the wake of the 2005 suspension -- a freer media, judicial reforms, and improved procurement practices were all specifically highlighted by MCC as areas where progress had been made.
I mention this because I received the following email message from one of our Yemeni colleagues this week who worked on the 2006 assessment. He had been trying to email me to congratulate Global Integrity on the release of the Global Integrity Report: 2007, which among other Key Findings warned against confusing cosmetic governance reforms for the real thing. His message, which he agreed I could publish, is below. Will the real Yemen please stand up?Dear Nathaniel:
Here is further proof of your conclusions on "Democratically Elected Governments." This is how Yemen views freedom of speech and the press: I have sent you the following two mesages and both bounced back (the regime is tightening up on all efforts to communicate any opposing contents by literally closing out any flow of news content or
opinion or any organizations or outsourced news item (they even closed out the Yemenportal.net. site)):
Dear Nathaniel Heller:
Thanks for the latest output from Global Integrity. Look forward to participating
in your continuous efforts to instill political sanity in this world.
Best regards,
[omitted for safety]
Dear Nathaniel
I just looked into your web site and found the GI website and found your GI report on Yemen for 2006. Would you mind if we delve into the Report on Yemen in a detailed article for the Yemen Times sometime later this week?
Thanks,
[omitted for safety]
I have just learned that they have in fact blocked all my outgoing messages via my mail.yemen.net.ye account, which is a government owned server. I am not sure if it is just me or everyone else, but this has been going on for the last three days. It is unlikely to be a technical error.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Millennium Challenge Corp. cuts Philippines aid
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an American government aid agency, has restricted aid flowing to the Philippines due to concerns about corruption. The MCC is setting aside a prior decision to promote the country from "Threshold" to "Compact" aid status, which would have secured significant funding for development projects. The decision appears largely based on the World Bank Institute's aggregation of corruption perception surveys, which report a worsening public perception of corruption problems.
The Global Integrity data on the Philippines (2007, 2006, 2004), which examines the anti-corruption framework rather than public perceptions of corruption, show consistent -- though not very good -- performance in recent years. As we note on the cover of our 2007 report, an overall score change from 2006 to 2007 is not a trend, but reflects the inclusion of a new investigation of state-owned enterprises, an area where the Philippines performs poorly.
From ABS-CBN: The head of America’s chief global poverty-fighting arm said indications of worsening corruption in the Philippines is blocking the way to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional help. John Danilovich, Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), said they have “serious concerns” with corruption indicators for the Philippines. “The drop in performance was in fact very dramatic,” he told reporters during a briefing at the Foreign Press Center here on Wednesday, January 30.