Navigating the Un-United Nations
“Be careful. You’ll be entering a cesspit of vipers.” That was the advice Dileep Nair got from a former senior UN diplomat before he took the job. He took it anyway.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Chapter 44 is written by Dileep Nair, a Singaporean who became the Under-Secretary-General for Internal Oversight at the United Nations. His job was basically to be the UN’s watchdog. What followed was five years of fighting bureaucracy, dodging political attacks, and trying to hold the world’s biggest international organization accountable. This is one of the most candid chapters in the whole book.
The Watchdog Nobody Wanted
Nair arrived at the UN in April 2000 to lead the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS). The department was supposed to be the UN’s internal auditor and investigator. But it had a reputation problem.
The Americans and Europeans, who had pushed for OIOS to be created in the first place, thought it was toothless. Madeleine Albright, the US Representative to the UN, once called Nair’s predecessor Karl Paschke a “junkyard puppy rather than a watchdog.”
On the other side, the G77 bloc (led by countries like Cuba and India) accused OIOS of being a tool of the Western countries. Especially the US.
So Nair walked into a department that one side thought was too weak and the other side thought was too biased. His job was to somehow make both sides trust him.
Cleaning House First
Nair’s first move was to fix his own team. Many of the OIOS staff were solid professionals. But there were also people who clearly did not belong. The Auditing and Evaluation Divisions had been used as “dumping grounds” for underperformers from other UN departments.
Coming from Singapore’s public service, Nair found this hard to accept. He started cutting the contracts of people who were not meeting standards. Simple enough, right?
Not at the UN.
The Staff Union fought back hard. Nair discovered that many of the underperformers were the same people who held positions in the Staff Union or had strong ties to union officials. When he stopped renewing their contracts, there were loud protests.
This was a culture shock. In Singapore, management and unions worked together. At the UN, the Staff Union was militant in a way Nair had never encountered. He pushed through anyway because he believed it was the right thing for the organization.
In the early years, Secretary-General Kofi Annan backed him up. Annan dismissed the complaints against Nair. But toward the end of Nair’s term, the Staff Union turned on Annan too. Under pressure, Annan allowed an investigation of Nair based on an anonymous complaint, even though Nair had already been cleared once before. He was cleared again. Annan later sent an apology for putting him through it.
The Oil-for-Food Problem
This is where the story gets really interesting.
Nair did a risk assessment of everything OIOS was supposed to oversee. The Iraq Oil-for-Food Programme jumped out as a huge red flag. Iraq was under Security Council sanctions at the time. The programme was meant to make sure that Iraqi oil revenue was being spent strictly on food, medicine, and humanitarian supplies.
When Nair looked at the controls in place, he was alarmed. They were weak. Compliance was not working.
He wrote to the Secretary-General. He said he wanted to increase oversight of the programme and submit his findings directly to the Security Council, since the programme had been created under Security Council resolutions.
The response was immediate and hostile. The programme manager, Benon Sevan, called Nair’s Audit Director and told her it was none of OIOS’s business to report to the Security Council. Then the Deputy Secretary-General, Louise Frechette, called Nair directly and said it was not within OIOS’s authority to report to the Council.
Nair backed down. He says now that he should have pushed harder. If the OIOS audit reports had reached the Security Council, the massive Oil-for-Food scandal that later rocked the UN might have been caught early and contained.
But the rules said all reports from the Secretariat to the Security Council had to go through the Secretary-General. Without his support, Nair had no path forward.
Water Politics
The risk assessment also flagged water management and conservation as an area where the UN needed evaluation. This was especially important for arid parts of the world like the Middle East and North Africa.
But when Nair’s team proposed a cross-cutting assessment of UN water programmes, the pushback was fierce. Several Member States called him to say he should drop it. The Egyptian Permanent Representative came to his office in person and told him flatly that Egypt would “strongly oppose” any such evaluation.
Why? Some countries were afraid the evaluation might expose efforts to interfere with water management across national borders. Water is deeply political in that region.
Building Alliances to Survive
Nair quickly learned that surviving at the UN required allies. He worked multiple angles.
He turned to Singapore for support. But Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani warned him not to make it too obvious that Singapore was backing him because of his nationality. That could backfire.
He built a strong relationship with the US Permanent Representative. The Americans supported tough oversight. When the Staff Union publicly attacked Nair near the end of his term, it was US Representative John Negroponte who wrote a strong letter to the Secretary-General defending OIOS under Nair’s leadership.
He worked to get support from countries that usually opposed the US. Cuba, in particular, had a long history of blocking OIOS initiatives just because the US had backed them. Nair’s predecessor could not even get his final OIOS report accepted by the General Assembly because Cuba and the G77 bloc opposed it.
Nair took a different approach. He made a conscious effort to engage the Cuban delegation. He convinced them he was independent and doing what was right for the UN, not for any particular country. He built a real friendship with Cuba’s representative on the budget committee, Norma Estenoz. He even took his family on holiday to Cuba and visited her home.
He also kept close ties with Conrad Mselle, the long-serving Chairman of the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions. Mselle had been in that chair for over 20 years and was a powerful figure. Keeping him informed about OIOS initiatives helped Nair get the resources he needed.
Was It Worth It?
When Nair left the UN, the General Assembly passed a resolution praising what OIOS had accomplished during his tenure. But people still ask him whether he would have taken the job if he had known what was coming. The anonymous accusations. The lack of support from the top when it mattered most.
His answer is philosophical. Few organizations can match the breadth and importance of what the UN deals with. Yes, many parts of it are dysfunctional. Yes, it gets a lot of bad press. But the UN is still the only truly global organization with universal membership. It has moral authority that nothing else can match.
Nair says he is proud to have served it. And proud to have flown the Singapore flag while doing it.
What stands out about his story is the honesty. He does not pretend things went smoothly. He names the people who blocked him. He admits the moment he backed down on Oil-for-Food. He describes the culture shock of going from Singapore’s efficient public service to an organization where underperformers could hide behind union protection for years.
His chapter is a reminder that trying to fix a broken system from the inside is one of the hardest jobs there is. You make enemies. You get investigated on anonymous complaints. You watch problems you flagged early blow up years later because nobody wanted to hear about them.
But somebody has to try.
About the Author
Dileep Nair has over 40 years of senior management experience across the United Nations, banking, diplomacy, and the Singapore government. He served as Under-Secretary-General for Internal Oversight Services at the UN from 2000 to 2005. Before that, he was a Managing Director at DBS Bank and CEO of POSBank. He spent 20 years in Singapore’s Administrative Service, working at the Ministries of Defence, Trade and Industry, and Finance. He attended Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program and holds a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University.
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