Consider this: He (drivers are overwhelmingly male for some obscure reason) is driving UNICEF staff about their business, sometimes over long distances. What is being discussed in the car is heard by him; the latest scandal is often first heard of by the UNICEF driver; and when the driver is being used to take a staff member to a tryst. . . . . All these events are naturally discussed between drivers so that if you ever need information on staff, don’t consult Personnel/HRD, just take a trusted driver on one side and ask. What a pity they don’t have any input to the PERs of professional staff.
As for any other category of staff, the drivers are sometimes the victims of poor management decisions. One office where I was rotated had 6 drivers for 15 cars for 30 staff. Naturally, the drivers were effectively unsupervised and while two or three of them were reliable, the others sought alternative avenues to employ their skills. One of the six was known to be an opium user (and trafficker - using a UNICEF vehicle - as I later discovered), with the high likelihood of an accident when under the influence. It further transpired that this driver had been treated for his addiction by a UN appointed physician who failed to share the intelligence with UNICEF. What use the Hippocratic Oath if medical confidentiality and non-maleficence clash ?
In another posting, I had to be driven very long distances over high quality straight roads where there was a risk of becoming drowsy from the monotony. As I used the same driver for these long trips as his family situation didn’t require him to be home every night, we talked about this problem. Both of us felt very strongly that the UNICEF rules about drivers – if applied blindly – would put us both at risk, so, on agreement between us, he said he would announce when he felt tired and would park under the next tree for a rest. As we were, at that time, very pressed for time, I suggested that I would take over the driving until he felt rested and hand back over to him when he was ready again. Naturally, we kept this arrangement confidential between us, but it served both us and UNICEF very well.
In yet another posting, which happened before I arrived on scene, it had been decided that the official UNICEF Toyota Crown vehicle had to be used for a local event at the country’s second city, but there was insufficient time to drive it there, so it was sent by air, courtesy of the local air-force. The driver of the vehicle insisted on travelling with the vehicle as it was known that there was a lively black market trade in spares for this model of motorcar and the air-force staff were poorly paid. He stood guard over the car the whole flight. One can only wonder at the need for flying any UNICEF car anywhere, at any time.
The Food-for-Oil programme put a slightly different complexion on ‘the driver’. For those of us working in the Kurdish north of Iraq, whenever we moved out of Erbil, we were required to be accompanied by unarmed UN Peace-Keepers, in convoy, and we were also required to keep in constant radio touch, using walkie-talkies. There was the trip I was asked to make to Dohuk on the northern border when we got a walkie-talkie message from one of the Nepali Peace-Keepers that the lead vehicle required a ‘pissing break’ (or that’s what it sounded like). Thinking that the brake line in that vehicle might have broken, we sought to catch up to help. When we were close enough to see them, we realised exactly what they meant. They, together with the driver, were standing in a row facing towards a hedge, relieving themselves. . . . .
Sometimes, just sometimes, UNICEF did the right thing for a driver. In Bangladesh in the early 1980s, national staff were miserably paid – with drivers being some of the worst off. It was a big office at that time with over 300 staff, so that one driver who had been with UNICEF through the worst of times – the war with Pakistan; the catastrophic floods and the famine – was kept on the books even though he was probably too old for the work. At this time, I had in my section, a young woman who was about to give birth and we discussed how she wished to arrange breast-feeding of the baby when she returned to work because the section simply didn’t have a place for a creche. She wished for the baby to be kept at home and for her to be driven home on demand; and so it was arranged. The transport manager, Gerry Medina, was very happy with this arrangement as he had an old VW Beetle which was kept against occasional duties, and it gave him the excuse to keep this particular driver on the books. When discussing the new arrangement, Gerry noted that he had had many roles in logistics in his UNICEF career, but this was the first time that he had had to arrange the milk-run. He was sure that Jim Grant would have approved.
Who amongst our number of XUNICEF staff has not had experience of UNICEF drivers ?
*****
Ken Gibbs can be contacted via kengibbs1941@gmail.com
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