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Sweden Sweden Roland Axelsson SIDA-Regional coordinator of Swedish humanitarian assistance to Southern Africa Private consultant (Stockholm, 31 October 1996) Tor Sellstr6nr When did you start working for SIDA? Roland Axelsson: I started to work for NIB (Swedish Agency for International Assistance) in 1962. I had then graduated with a masters in business administration from the Gothenburg School of Economics and I had worked for two years at the Swedish National Audit Bureau (RRV). TS: You went to Africa very early. When and where did you get involved with Swedish humanitarian assistance to the Southern African liberation movements? RA: I first spent six years in Ethiopia and there I had very little contact with any liberation movement. But in 1972, I came to Tanzania as an administrator at the Swedish embassy and I almost immediately came in contact with FRELIMO, ANC and SWAPO. I was not a programme officer at that time. It was people such as Anders Mollander who dealt with the liberation movements, but as I paid all the money to them I got to know them quite well. Those I especially remember from that time are Hifikepunye Pohamba, who was the Chief Representative of SWAPO, Thomas Nkobi, who was the Treasurer General of ANC- at that time living in Morogoro--and my old friend Kay Moonsamy. So, it is now over twenty years since we met. In FRELIMO it was Janet Mondlane, who was the head of the Mozambique Institute. With ZANU, ZAPU and MPLA I had very little contact. TS: That means that you were involved with Swedish support to ANC from the very beginning. The first allocation was given in 1973. RA: Yes. In the beginning the amounts were very small. I bought some office furniture and a lot of vegetables for the ANC office in Morogoro and the South African refugees there. TS: From then on you worked very closely with all the Southern African liberation movements. These movements waged an armed struggle and received military support from the Soviet Union or China. How did you experience this in your day to day relations? Did you feel that the movements were striving for a Communist cause or that they were nationalist in outlook? RA: Let me talk about ANC and SWAPO only, as they were of a greater concern to me. I did not speak Portuguese, so I had very little contact with FRELIMO in that respect. I understood quite well that weapons were necessary in the liberation struggle and also that Sweden could not supply those weapons. The Soviet Union could and did. That was fully acceptable. I strongly believed that the Soviet Union could never influence the thousands of students who were granted scholarships for studies in Moscow and other places. On the contrary, many of the students there became in fact anti-Communist. Some individuals within ANC and SWAPO were, of course, Communists-at least they said sobut they were hardly Stalinists. The majority of the people I got to know worked hard for the liberation of their countries, to get rid of colonialism and introduce democracy. I would say that they have also managed now, to a great extent at least TS: You mentioned Kay Moonsamy. He is today the Treasurer General of the South African Communist Party. RA: Yes, he was a Communist, but he was shocked when he leamt about the real situation in Moscow. If he had known what was going on during the Stalinist era, I do not think that he would have been a Communist. My friend Thomas Nkobi also used to read the monthly magazine issued by the South African Communist Party, so I once asked him: 'Are you a Communist?' And he said: ' No, I am not. I could never be'. TS: From the point of view of accounting, financial openness and transparency, how would you describe SIDA's relationship-and your relationship-with SWAPO and ANC? Did you get access to the necessary information and documentation? RA: Well, financial openness and transparency were, of course, delicate questions. SIDA wanted to know as much as possible about how the donor funds were used, but ANC and Liberation in Southern Africa -Regional and Swedish Voices SWAPO could not accept external audit. We had to stick to internal audit and what I could get out of various documents. I was very much trusted and allowed to study the respective systems of financial management. Neither ANC nor SWAPO accepted at that time that any other SIDA official should look through their books, so I was privileged. I am talking about the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. TS: In general terms, is it then your view that the payment and accounting procedures were satisfactory? RA: Yes, absolutely. We had an agreed system, whereby the movements got advance payments and then submitted their settlements of accounts with vouchers. Everything had to be shown in one or another way. If they had spent the money correctly, we stamped the documents. We had a rubber stamp 'Financed by SIDA'. Every single little receipt was stamped, not only by me in Lusaka, but also by my colleagues in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and the other countries. It applied to all funds, except the home front allocations. TS: All receipts were stamped so that they could not be used twice? RA: Exactly. Because they also had to submit receipts to the Norwegian embassy and Nor way did not request that they should be stamped. I was afraid that they would bring the same receipts to the Norwegians. TS: Some people have alleged that SIDA's humanitarian assistance either was misappropriated by the leaders of the movements or used for military purposes. How would you comment upon these allegations? Were the financial control mechanisms comparable to those governing Swedish development assistance to independent countries or were they less strict? RA: There were, as everywhere in life, small pockets of misuse and mismanagement. It happened, for instance, in Lesotho. A person called Kanalelo got a small amount of funds which he was to distribute among the ANC families in the country. But he stole the money, left the country and established a small enterprise in Zimbabwe instead. But he was not an ANC leader. He was an outsider who used the liberation movement. The leaders who I got to know were honest, to the best of my knowledge. No funds were used for military purposes. It happened, however, that funds were used to feed military people. They had to live too. Except for the home front allocation, the financial control was in my opinion better and stricter than the control exercised concerning aid to independent countries. In those countries-like Zambia or Tanzania-it was the national audit bureau which audited everything. At that time, they had not yet started to get help from the Swedish national audit bureau and the audit was not very good. TS: But in the case of international NGOswhere SIDA did not have the direct responsibility-we know of at least one case where there was mismanagement of funds and even political infiltration, namely the IUEF. In your view, how could this happen? Why did SIDA and the other donors not monitor IUEF more closely? RA: Well, that is difficult to know exactly, but probably because Sweden placed an administratively incompetent person as director of IUEF. As auditor at SIDA, I tried in 1976-77 to make an audit of IUEF, but I was stopped by our government. Stig Abelin and I wanted to do that but we were not allowed to. TS: In 1984, you moved to Lusaka, Zambia, and served there until 1991 as SIDA's regional coordinator of humanitarian assistance to SWAPO and ANC in Southern Africa and Uganda, Ethiopia and Madagascar. During these years, the South African regime constantly attacked the liberation movements in the Frontline States and Lesotho and Swaziland. Offices were bombed and representatives were killed. Yet, you managed all the time to get the humanitarian assistance through. How did you work? RA: Funds were disbursed to ANC and SWAPO by the Swedish embassies in most countries, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and Botswana. The money was normally paid by cheque, but in Botswana it was in cash. In Lesotho, Swaziland, Uganda and Madagascar, various methods had to be used. In Swaziland and Lesotho, I created fake organizations and managed to open local bank accounts in the name of those organizations. 'SIDA Housing Project' in Swaziland, for example. In Swaziland, we also used Ephesus House. It was a branch office of the defunct IUEF which lived on after the dissolution of IUEF. I used that Sweden office as a cover until it was bombed by the South African security forces. ANC and SWAPO supported me. Thomas Nkobi, Hifikepunye Pohamba and all their coworkers supported me one hundred per cent. They trusted me, but it was, of course, in their interest that their people were fed and that the money was correctly spent. TS: In some countries I understand that you also administered Norwegian humanitarian assistance. Was there an agreement on this cooperation between Norway and Sweden? RA: No, I never administered Norwegian funds. Being a SIDA coordinator, I however, cooperated very closely with the Norwegian embassies and consulates, especially in Lusaka, Harare and Gaborone. As I travelled much more in the region than my Norwegian colleagues, I sometimes acted on their behalf. I did so especially in Mozambique, but also in other countries, Botswana, for instance. But there was no written agreement between Sweden and Norway. It was a verbal agreement between me and the Norwegians.