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September 26, 2005
A job nobody wants
Whenever a government nominates a “czar” to take on a problem, it’s pretty safe to assume that problem won’t be solved.
Whether Reagan’s drug czar, Nixon’s energy czar, or Clinton’s AIDS czar (and probably Bush’s intelligence czar), the experience has been quite similar. Faced with calls to do something about a problem, a president nominates someone who, working from the president’s office, is charged with coordinating the slow-moving, often competing bureaucracies that have roles in fighting the problem. The “czar,” however, is not given authority over those agencies’ budgets, nor is he or she empowered to hire and fire key officials outside of his or her (usually small and underfunded) office. As the problem festers, the “czar” is reduced to being a figure who gives speeches and testimony, while his office publishes an endless stream of seldom-read reports and policy statements claiming progress.
A classic example is the Uribe government’s “corruption czar”. The last czar (czarina?), María Margarita Zuleta, resigned her position more than two weeks ago after just over a year and a half on the job, and now nobody seems to want to replace her. President Uribe has offered the post to both former Auditor-General Clara López Obregón and former Bogotá mayor’s office chief of staff Soraya Montoya, and both have turned him down.
Both claimed that they were too busy working on upcoming political campaigns to take the job. For her part, Zuleta resigned claiming that she had achieved the main thing she had set out to do: to draft a proposed government-wide anticorruption policy. However, after resigning in late 2003, Zuleta’s predecessor, Germán Cardona, offered a more compelling reason why nobody wants the job: the “czar,” he said, lacks “teeth” and should be abolished. ‘
The Presidential Program for the Fight Against Corruption is a small entity in the vice-president’s office. It has no power over key agencies with anti-corruption responsibilities, like the attorney-general’s office, the inspector-general’s office, or the Comptroller (none of which are part of the executive branch in Colombia). It has a budget of less than US$1 million per year. Its role and functions are poorly defined. As a result, said Cardona, the program is a place “where many speeches are made but few goals are scored.”
This is unfortunate because a truly empowered corruption czar would be one of the busiest officials in the entire Colombian government. Rampant, unpunished corruption is one of the greatest challenges Colombia faces. The government’s Comptroller (Contraloría) estimates that corrupt activity drains 14 trillion pesos per year from Colombia’s economy (over US$6 billion, or more than 5 percent of GDP). The last report of Transparencia por Colombia, the local chapter of Transparency International, found a sharp drop in its “Index of Integrity of Public Institutions” between 2003 and 2004, indicating that public perceptions of corruption are worsening.
Challenges like that require more than just a “czar” to give the impression that the government is serious about the problem. Corruption will continue to be a severe drain on Colombia’s government and economy as long as the corrupt continue to enjoy impunity. An investigative and prosecutorial effort that sends some of these thieves to jail would do much more to reduce corruption than another reshuffling of the bureaucracy or another declaration of anti-corruption policy. And we mean jail, not suspension from duty or administrative punishment. And we mean powerful thieves – people in positions of legislative, executive, military or economic power – not just “small fish.”
The corruption czars who have left after short tenures, and the would-be candidates who don’t want the job, have left or turned down a position that would be unnecessary if the Colombian government were showing the political will necessary to fight corruption. Instead, the figure of a “czar” has ended up being a substitute for that political will.
Posted by isacson at September 26, 2005 08:01 AM
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