The Palestinian Authority - The West Bank tires of its government
Extravagance and graft fuel a growing disenchantment
The Economist Oct 2nd 2015 RAMALLAH
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21670484-extravagance-and-graft-fuel-growing-disenchantment-west-bank-tires-its-government?fsrc=gp_en

IT SEEMS that the ageing politicians who appear on the official Palestine
television station are in “urgent need” of a makeover. So, at least, said
one of the channel’s directors in a letter to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
president. He proposed hiring a make-up artist, a prestigious one who has
“already worked with several international stations.” Her fee, though, was
$12,000 per month—roughly what the average Palestinian will earn in four
years. Many such average people are distinctly unimpressed by that kind of
extravagance. The document, published last month on a local website, is the
latest scandal to roil Palestinian politics. In August it was a letter from
an Abbas adviser, begging the foreign minister of Bahrain for $4 million to
build an exclusive housing complex for Palestinian officials. Education
officials, meanwhile, have been accused of selling off a batch of 1,000
medical scholarships offered by the Venezuelan government.

The Palestinian Authority (PA), the limited self-governing body in the
occupied territories, has been plagued by waste, graft and accusations of
both since its inception in 1994 following the Oslo accords. When auditors
looked at the books three years later, they concluded that nearly 40% of the
budget had been frittered away. By 2006, according to the PA’s own
attorney-general, officials had embezzled some $700m.

Aman, a local watchdog group, claims that the bloated public-sector payroll
includes an unknown number of “ghost employees” whose salaries line the
pockets of managers and ministers. There are ghost businesses, too, like a
$6m joint Palestinian-Italian venture to build a pipe factory that existed
only on paper.

Western donors, who give the PA about a sixth of its annual budget, have
periodically threatened to withhold aid. Their concerns were alleviated by
the appointment in 2007 Salam Fayyad as prime minister. A respected
economist and a longtime IMF official, he took solid steps to combat graft,
and millions of dollars were recovered during his tenure.

Mr Fayyad resigned in 2013, however, and Mr Abbas quickly turned the
anti-corruption effort into a cudgel to use against his enemies. Last year
he ordered an investigation into the legal status and finances of some 2,800
NGOs in the Palestinian territories. The goal, he said, was to make them
“transparent and accountable.” Critics, though, saw it as an attempt to
muzzle civil society. Mr Fayyad himself was caught up in the sweep: his
development institute’s bank accounts were frozen in June on vague charges
of money laundering.

The most prominent target is Mohammad Dahlan, once a prominent member of Mr
Abbas’s Fatah party and now thought to be planning a run for the presidency
from his exile in Abu Dhabi. He is acused of having siphoned millions of
shekels from Gaza’s tax authority in the 1990s. A PA court dismissed
corruption charges against him in April, however, ruling that he still
enjoyed parliamentary immunity.

Asked to name the “most serious problem” in their society, 24% of
Palestinians say it is corruption—only slightly below the 28% who point to
the Israeli occupation. Four-fifths believe their leaders are corrupt. A new
poll found that, for the first time, more than half of them want to dissolve
the authority altogether. “A majority believes that it has become a burden,”
said Khalil Shikaki, who carried out the poll. Perhaps not even a $12,000
makeover can help.