The United Nations presents an extraordinary spectacle on this, its 60th anniversary. At one level, it is surrounded by creativity. There is a palpable determination to streamline the creaking organisation, to make it better able to confront 21st-century challenges of terrorism, state collapse and internal wars, the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and, not least, to restore the UN’s battered credibility as a guardian of human rights. In advance of next month’s special summit in New York, the UN Secretariat has been deluged with serious and mostly well-argued proposals — the bulk of them American in origin.

To judge by all this interest, the UN might be thought to have overcome its greatest handicap, the not undeserved perception that, between the arid rituals of the General Assembly and the self-perpetuating papermill of its bureaucracy, it had ossified into irrelevance. Yet what impels these efforts at reform is not admiration, but the sense of impending crisis.

The UN has suffered two serious setbacks in quick succession. The first was its most significant political failure, the Security Council split over Iraq in 2003. The second is the UN’s worst ever administrative scandal: the mismanagement, complicity and outright malfeasance that, in the $64 billion Oil-for-Food programme for Iraq, enabled Saddam Hussein to siphon off, between 1996 and 2003, more than $20 billion intended for humanitarian relief — partly by smuggling oil, but also by manipulating Oil-for-Food contracts.

This scandal would inspire peculiar disgust even if the UN’s only crime had been lax and opaque vetting procedures. This was a plan aimed at alleviating the suffering of a vulnerable and exploited people. The UN had armies of administrators and inspectors. Some of them were doing their job. The independent Volcker committee of inquiry, which yesterday published its third report into this scandal, has evidence that, no later than 2000, UN headquarters was receiving detailed documents about Saddam’s abuse of the programmes, from a UN database analyst in Baghdad. He finally took what he knew to the head of the UN Office of Internal Oversight. His contract was terminated. No wonder: the Volcker committee yesterday alleged that the UN official head of the programme, Benon Sevan, was himself taking bribes for steering oil contracts to an Egyptian trader.

The scandal laps at the ankles of the Secretary-General himself. It is unclear why he was unduly slow to call in outside investigators; unclear how Iqbal Riza, then his chief of staff, was able to shred critical files spanning three years; and as yet unclear whether Kofi Annan’s memory has failed him with respect to Cotecna, the Swiss company employing his son Kojo which secured a big Oil-for-Food contract. Mr Volcker’s last word on that matter is expected next month.

It is clear that for this scandal to have continued unchecked on Kofi Annan’s watch diminishes his credibility, as does his reluctance fully to acknowledge that wider responsibility. Europe has by and large been unmoved, because it expects little of the UN. In the US, which, to its credit, has never settled for the “Third World playpen” view of the global organisation, Congress is insisting on a thorough cleaning of the stables. These are the voices the UN needs, not the yawns of world-weary cynicism.