Former head of the Zimbabwe branch of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) claims his warnings of a catastrophic cholera outbreak were stifled by a UN bureaucracy intent on keeping good relations with Zimbabwe’s dictator, Robert Mugabe.

The UN official, Georges Tadonki, was fired at the height of the cholera crisis in early January 2009 — in part, he says, because of the warnings he raised. He has appealed his termination, and his case opened before a UN dispute tribunal in Nairobi, Kenya, on 23 February 2010.

Some UN officials contested Tadonki’s allegations, including a former UN agency head who told Foreign Policy that “the actual size of the cholera outbreak was larger than anyone (including Tadonki) had forecasted.” Although some facts are in dispute, Tadonki’s story highlights the perils of UN engagement in authoritarian states such as Zimbabwe.

Commenting on the Tadonki case, Wall Street Journal columnist Marian L. Tupy reminds us that “the crisis started when the Mugabe government nationalized Zimbabwe’s water supply in 2005 but soon ran out of money to maintain the infrastructure and treat the water”.

Source: Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy, 22 Feb 2010; Matthew Russell Lee, Inner City Press, 25 Feb 2010; Marian L. Tupy, Wall Street Journal, 22 Feb 2010