Consider the situation: money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountablity; an [appointment] for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly suprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly.
The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford
You know, I’ve worked for an outfit for which these words could have been written. Government funded, arbitrary amounts of money allocated for ill-defined projects, poor monitoring and scandalous lack of accountability, nepotism in appointments and empire-building by managers utterly uninterested in the purported aims of the organisation.
Publicly-funded bodies seem more prone to byzantine reporting and monitoring processes that appear calculated to make petty corruption easier to indulge in and harder to root out.
The passage above is specifically about the Cameroon but applies, sadly, all around the world where self-interested and ambitious people are in positions of power
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