DT e-Paper 06 April 2017

14
THURSDAY, APRIL 6, 2017
DT
Opinion
The aid system isn’t working
Humanitarian aid should not bail out those who caused the famine in the first place
• Azeem Ibrahim
After much encouraging
news coming out of
Africa in the last decade
on the development
front, the continent is back in the
spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
Stephen O’Brien, the UN undersecretary-general
for humanitarian
affairs, has warned that as many as
20 million face famine in Africa, in
South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, as
well as nearby Yemen -- the worst
humanitarian crisis the UN has
faced since its foundation in 1945.
To be clear, famine is not the
same thing as starvation. Famine
is a technical term employed by
the UN.
It is declared when 20% of
a population have no access to
food or don’t know where they
will get their next meal from,
when 30% of children under five
in that population are severely
malnourished, and when you have
mortality rates of over two per
10,000 per day, as a consequence.
Put another way, to say that 20
million face famine is to say that
we already have 4,000 people
dying of hunger every day. And
the total amount of aid required to
“avert a catastrophe” would run to
$4.4 billion by July.
What makes the situation
particularly galling is that
this situation is primarily a
consequence of war.
But in Africa itself, the conflicts
which fuel the situations in South
Sudan, Somalia, and Nigeria are
internal, and the result of decades
of poor management and neglect,
and an entrenched culture of
corruption.
Nevertheless, we in the
international community are left
to pick up the tab. And of course
we will. We must. We cannot allow
so many people, usually the most
innocent and vulnerable in those
countries, to suffer for the follies
of their overlords, or of foreign
powers.
But, it is also unreasonable
that these countries and their
leaders expect us to step in and
bail them out, while many of the
very same leaders continue to
reign over organised systems of
corruption, happily plunder the
wealth of their countries, and fight
any civil society efforts to improve
governance, and hold them
accountable for their actions.
Make no mistake. What we
have here are some of the richest
countries in the world in terms of
natural resources, which are being
wrecked because of corruption
and incompetence.
On the verge of catastrophe?
Feeding those in need is the immediate, short-term priority. But making
sure that those who caused the situation are held accountable for it is
equally important as a longer-term priority
Immediate priority
That is why we must make sure
that the humanitarian aid we
provide is a bail-out for those
suffering from starvation, but not
also a bail-out for those who have
caused these problems in the first
place.
Feeding those in need is the
immediate, short-term priority.
But making sure that those
who caused the situation are
held accountable for it is equally
important as a longer-term
priority if we are going to reduce
the recurrence of these problems
in the future. The first and most
obvious thing to do is for the
international community to
focus their aid budgets more on
promoting good governance and
tackling corruption. Tony Blair’s
Africa Governance Initiative is a
good model on how to approach
this issue.
But we can and should go
much further than that. Take,
for example, the money spirited
away in secretive bank accounts
in the West by these leaders. We
already have national and global
anti-corruption and anti-moneylaundering
powers to investigate
accounts linked to criminal
activity.
There is no reason why we
could not expand those powers
to recoup, form the accounts of
the relevant leaders, the cost of
feeding the starving. It makes
moral, financial, and political
sense to invoice and forcefully
debit the accounts of past and
present corrupt Nigerian leaders to
feed Nigerians.
Just as it makes sense to invoice
South Sudanese accounts linked
to the state to feed the opposition
they are fighting. What is broken
about the current model of
international aid is the lack of
accountability.
The poor and vulnerable suffer,
Western people and governments
bear the financial costs for
alleviating that suffering, and the
perpetrators get to laugh all the
way to the bank. The way to make
international aid work is to make
the perpetrators accountable.
First of all, target the systems
which allow them to plunder their
countries as they so often do, and
secondly, in all events serve them
directly, as individuals, the bill for
the consequences of their choices
and actions. •
Azeem Ibrahim is Senior Fellow at
the Centre for Global Policy and Adj
Research Professor at the Strategic
Studies Institute, US Army War College.
He tweets @AzeemIbrahim. This article
previously appeared in Al-Arabiya News.
REUTERS