Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and Dwarfperiphery of the country are almost certainly not the top transportation priorities for thegovernments of Uganda and Kenya. 138On the other hand, can financial aid help with the fourth trap, the trap of bad governance?Yes, and in a couple of different ways. The first is by conditioning aid to the fulfilmentof a few basic criteria of good governance. This is called conditionality and we have experiencedit ourselves: strict legal and technical standards condition aid from European fundsin Slovakia. However, just like here in Slovakia, the recipients in developing countries havefound plenty of ways to meet criteria on paper in order to ensure that the cash continuesto flow into the pockets where the politicians want it: to the sponsors of the political parties,their relatives, companies owned by party members and those who provide the largestkickbacks and bribes in order to win contracts. The only difference is the level of sophisticationused to embezzle public funds. Cheaper bidders have to be excluded from public ordersby having the selection commission uncover some sort of superfluous technical detail, 139rigging the tender itself so that the winning bidder guarantees its own success by securingmore expensive competing bids is another option. As well as the politically selected winnerchosen in advance by the submission of an artificially low bid allowing it to formally winthe tender. Addendums are then added to the contract or outside of public tenders, whichmeans that the final price is sometimes a number of times greater than the winning bid. 140Achieving the same results in an Africa country requires, in general, less effort and a fewmore promises that things will get better. One example is the government of Kenya, which,during a single 15-year period promised the World Bank the same reforms five times inorder to receive financial aid. The money itself didn’t stop flowing, even for a minute. Why?The reason is brutally simple: World Bank workers are involved in professional careers, justlike workers in commercial banks, and simply they were promoted based on the volumeof loans they provided. Workers that drew a hard line on the fulfilment of loan conditionsand stop the flow of money found themselves stagnated, both in terms of salary growthand professionally. This made it more attractive to “verify” promises that were repeatedly138 After all, when it comes to constructing motorways in Slovakia, the world ends near Košice, whichmeans that Uzhgorod or the Western Ukraine are subject to minimal and perhaps even no focus forthe politicians in Bratislava. The real priorities are the areas in the western third of Slovakia where mostinvestment into infrastructure has flowed for the past two decades.139 The selection of a national toll operator was a celebrated case of this in Slovakia where all of the lowestbids were excluded from the tender for a motorway toll system operator and the most expensive bid for€852 million won the tender; the cheapest bid was €630 million. The National Highway Company useda rather minor technical detail to exclude all of the cheaper bids. More about this interesting scandalwhich cost Slovaks nearly SKK 6 billion, can be found in an article titled “Máme zrušiť už skončenýmýtny tender” (“We have to cancel the closed toll tender”) published in the SME newspaper on 2 October2010. http://ekonomika.sme.sk/c/5574767/mame-zrusit-uz-skonceny-mytny-tender.html.140 The same principles were applied during the construction of the first motorway tunnel in Slovakia,Branisko, but coming as no surprise, no one was ever convicted and we can only guess at how manyfamilies are financially secure for generations thanks to the billion Slovak Koruna that were lost. It isnecessary to add that this list of tricks for embezzling public funds is by no means exhaustive.154