Tucked away in the back of the Sunday Star-Times yesterday was a recruitment ad for a new deputy secretary development in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  This position heads up New Zealand’s half billion dollar a year taxpayer-funded overseas aid programme – the agency ‘formerly known as NZAID’. What caught my eye was the lack of NZAID branding in the ad; the latest indication that Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully is slowly and steadily dismantling NZAID’s identity as a specialist development agency. The new head of NZAID is now just another dep-sec in the MFAT structure. His or her job is to “lead the 200 person business unit within the Ministry which manages” the aid programme.

If you follow these issues you’ll remember that McCully ignored the pleas of Treasury, development experts, the NGO community, and the Oppposition in the early months of 2009 and dissolved NZAID’s semi-autonomous status.  The public debate wasn’t just about structure. NZAID’s independence was established specifically to allow it to develop specialist expertise in development, and protect the aid programme from being used as a diplomatic slush fund as an in-depth review in 2001 found that it had been. McCully on the other hand  wanted the programme brought back within his political reach, and its mandate shifted from poverty elimination to economic development.

The new regime is still in its infancy. The transition was slowed by the recruitment and settling in of the new MFAT Secretary John Allen. I don’t imagine that McCully, having bulldozed decisions through in the face of advice from officials and public opinion, will rest until he gets the changes he wants. He is hostile to the very notion of aid and development, and from what I hear he abuses and bullies his senior officials in their regular meetings.  NZAID staff are rightly proud of the innovative work the agency has done since its inception in 2002 but spend much of their time these days trying to protect it from a vindictive and nit-picking Minister who described them in a speech last year as “faceless, unelected, unaccountable, aid bureaucrats”.

The NGOs, for having had the temerity to criticise McCully’s changes to NZAID, have also received a bit of a slap from the Minister. Their umbrella group the Council for International Development has had its funding cut by 40%, and its budget discussions drawn out month after month as McCully questioned the worth of funding them. He has already signalled a zero-based negotiation for the next financial year. Woe betide the officials and sector groups that cross a Minister who has spent his career as a backroom political in-fighter.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Foreign Affairs, overseas aid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.