United Nations: Former official say unnecessary bureaucracy is causing the organization to fail

A former United Nations official has criticized the world body for mismanagement, saying unnecessary bureaucracy is causing the organization to fail in reaching its objectives. “In terms of its overall mission, thanks to colossal mismanagement, the United Nations is failing,” said Anthony Banbury, former head of the UN mission to combat the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, in an op-ed column on the New York Times website published on Friday. The official, who has decades of experience in senior UN positions including the supervision of the establishment of the body’s mission to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons program, said the world body has hardly tried to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy in its organizational hierarchy. 

Banbury added that it would take more than a year to hire a new talent in the UN under a new recruitment system, saying the “Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic” dominating the UN bureaucratic system makes it hard to speed things up. “Too often, the only way to speed things up is to break the rules,” he said, adding that he was once forced to pay a huge sum of money to hire an anthropologist in order to understand unsafe burial practices that caused half the Ebola cases in West Africa. Banbury also expressed regret over the “minimal accountability” at the UN, saying the body lacks the courage to expel incompetent officials. “In the past six years, I am not aware of a single international field staff member's being fired, or even sanctioned, for poor performance,” he said, citing as an example the “manifestly incompetent” chief-of-staff of a large peacekeeping mission. “Many have tried to get rid of him, but short of a serious crime, it is virtually impossible to fire someone in the United Nations,” Banbury said, presumably hinting at the chief of the UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.

The former UN official also cited cases of alleged sexual abuses by international peacekeepers in Central African Republic as a major example of UN's failures in its missions. A spokesman of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon responded to Banbury's allegations, saying Ban was committed to improving the organization's efficiency. “Reforming an organization ... whose rules were designed really for a talk shop in 1945 and transforming them into a much more field-oriented, service-oriented, action-oriented organization is a complicated process,” Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.