This Weekend’s Unanswered Questions (TWUQs for 062505)

Another installment in a nearly-regular series of mysteries and pseudo-mysteries this inquiring mind would like to have answers for (some links included may require free registration):

• When will the world learn that aid money given to foreign countries has to be controlled?Item 1: The London Daily Telegraph reports that “Nigeria’s past rulers stole or misused 220 billion British pounds (400 billion US$) between 1960 and 1997:
  

  Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has spoken of a new Marshall Plan for Africa. But Nigeria’s rulers have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. After that mass theft, two thirds of the country’s 130 million people - one in seven of the total African population - live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate and 40 per cent have no safe water supply.

  With more people and more natural resources than any other African country, Nigeria is the key to the continent’s success.

  Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, set up three years ago, said that £220 billion was “squandered” between independence from Britain in 1960 and the return of civilian rule in 1999.

  “We cannot be accurate down to the last figure but that is our projection,” Osita Nwajah, a commission spokesman, said in the capital, Abuja.

  Item 2: The incomparable Mark Steyn notes the scope of tsunami relief corruption:

  A couple of days later I read that Oxfam had paid the best part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the Boxing Day tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Aside from the ‘tax’, they were charged £2,750 ‘demurrage’ for every day the vehicles sat in port.

  This was merely the latest installment in what’s becoming a vast ongoing Tsunami Tshakedown Of The Day retrospective — you can usually find it at the foot of page 37 in your daily paper, if at all. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated. Eight 20ft containers of Diageo drinking water shipped via the Red Cross arrived at the Indonesian port of Medan in January and are still there, because the Indonesian Red Cross lost the paperwork. Five hundred containers, representing one quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on 26 December, are still sitting in port in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed. At Medan 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

  Item 3: In a relatively tiny example of absurd waste in the midst of an unconscionable and totally preventable humanitarian disaster:

  HARARE - Zimbabwean police have ordered US$3.5 million worth of high-tech gear from a South African company as the country battles to raise money for food and fuel imports, ZimOnline has established.

  Donor nations and individual donors must insist that aid not simply be handed over to corrupt governments. Aid workers on the ground must not give in to corruption and in essence insist on signing the checks to ensure that aid is used as intended. And yes, if it takes the threat of or actual deployment of the military to force their hands, then threaten and deploy away. If the UN is to mean anything, it ought to have a standby force acting on blanket Security Council authorization to intervene when aid is being systematically denied to starving and homeless people by their soulless rulers and bureaucrats.

• How can the Eurotunnel (originally called the “Chunnel,” the tunnel connecting England and France), possibly be going broke?But it is:
  

  Eurotunnel could sink without a trace

  Eurotunnel has admitted that it is on the slippery slope to bankruptcy, unless it can cobble together a deal with its financiers.

  Eurotunnel chairman Jacques Gounon, has admitted that the debt-ridden company has until mid-July to submit its proposals to sort out its financial afairs. If a deal isn’t struck, the company could be forced into administration (bankruptcy).

  Gounon claims that the company can sustain no more than £2.2 billion of its £6.2 billion debt, and is demanding that its financial backers write off the remaining £4.2 billion.

• When will lawmakers tell the growing army of lobbyists to kiss off?Lobbying is big, big business:
  

  To the great growth industries of America such as health care and home building add one more: influence peddling.

  The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy.

  The lobbying boom has been caused by three factors, experts say: rapid growth in government, Republican control of both the White House and Congress, and wide acceptance among corporations that they need to hire professional lobbyists to secure their share of federal benefits.

  “There’s unlimited business out there for us,” said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. “Companies need lobbying help.”

  Lobbying firms can’t hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to “move downtown” from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.

  This is a disgrace, and a total betrayal of the limited-government mindset that is supposed to rule the conservative roost. It is beyond sad to see people like Bob Livingston and others help the government grow out of control after they spent their careers trying to get it under control.

  The only bright side I can think of is that we can stop worrying about where defeated congressional candidate Bob McEwen’s next meal is coming from.