Alemayehu G. Mariam
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Time Magazine on its cover page asked two weighty questions about recurrent famines in Ethiopia: “Why are Ethiopians starving again? What should the world do and not do” to help them? In my commentary last week, I gave ten reasons in response to the first question; here I offer ten more for the second.
For the past one-half century, the “Western world” has been the principal source of charity and handouts in Ethiopia. For the last two decades, the West has been feeding the regime of dictator Meles Zenawi with billions of dollars of development and humanitarian aid while filling the stomachs of starving Ethiopians with empty words and emptier promises. Now that another famine is spreading like wildfire in that country, the question remains: “What should the Western world do and not do to help Ethiopians permanently escape the endless cycles of famine described in the sugarcoated language of the self-serving international aid agencies as “acute food insecurity, extreme malnutrition, green drought and food crisis”.
Ten Things the World Should Do and Not Do to Help Starving Ethiopians
Take the moral hazard out of Western aid in Ethiopia.
Western taxpayers have been footing the bill to provide a fail-safe insurance policy for the dictatorship of Meles Zenawi on the theory that he is too servile to fail (not unlike the notion of corporations that are too big to fail). Zenawi has proven to be a reliable proxy warfighter for the West in the Horn. He has received hearty congratulations for a “fantastic Somalia job” even though his invasion created the worst humanitarian crises in Africa in the last decade. Tony Blair appointed him to his Commission for Africa. He has been the West’s man in Africa on climate change. In return, the West has provided Zenawi billions of dollars in “safety net” aid, multilateral loans and a perpetual supply of relief handouts to insulate his regime from the natural consequences of a mismanaged economy, debilitating corruption and proliferating poverty and famine. The West should now stand back and let Zenawi face the consequences of chronic budget deficits, galloping inflation, corruption and empty grain silos. Turning a blind eye to gross human rights violations and Western complicity in the regime’s denial of democratic rights to Ethiopians presents not only a moral hazard but also irrefutable evidence of moral bankruptcy.
Put humanity and human rights back in Western humanitarian aid in Ethiopia.
The West should treat the starving people of Ethiopia as human beings, not as pawns in a strategic regional chess game or as pitiful objects of charity and handouts. The root cause of the food famine in Ethiopia is an underlying political famine of democracy, rule of law, lack of accountability and transparency and flagrant human rights abuses. More democracy and greater respect for human rights necessarily means less famine and starvation because a government that is not able, willing and ready to feed its people will be swept out of office by a hungry and angry electorate. The West should tie its aid to specific and measurable improvements in human rights observances and properly functioning democratic institutions. If Western aid and loans are decoupled from human rights and good governance, they become powerful tools of oppression, persecution and subjugation in the hands of dictators.
Promote and support a stable and healthy Ethiopian society through aid, not entrench an iron-fisted and malignant dictatorship.
Western donors believe that they can buy “stability” in the Horn of Africa region by spending billions of aid dollars to support the Zenawi dictatorship. But they remain willfully ignorant of the lessons of history. Supporting a dictator is as risky as carrying an open powder keg at a fireworks festival. As we have recently seen, the West for decades supported dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubark in Egypt and Gadahafi in Libya. For a time, these dictators staged the illusion of stability, control and permanence for the West. But they all went up in smoke when young Mohammed Bouazizi torched himself to end a life of oppression and indignity. In the long run, the West knows no amount of foreign aid or loans could possibly buffer Zenawi’s dictatorship from a tsunami of popular upheaval. Shouldn’t they stand on the right side of history as President Obama often exhorts?
Never bankroll bad actions by dictators with good Western taxpayer money.
The West has a bad habit of rewarding the bad acts of African dictators with more and larger amounts of Western taxpayer-supported aid and loans. After Zenawi stole the 2005 elections in broad daylight, jailed nearly all of the opposition leaders, human rights advocates, civic society leaders in the country and mowed down nearly two hundred unarmed demonstrators and wounded nearly eight hundred, the West gave him billions in aid and loans. In 2008 alone, Zenawi received $3 billion, the largest amount of aid in Africa. Zenawi must indubitably believe that there is a linear cause and effect relationship between his human rights abuses and increased foreign aid and loans. It seems to be a simple case of operant conditioning in which behavior and actions follow a system of rewards and disincentives. If human rights violations are always reinforced by the positive reinforcement of increasing amounts of aid, there will be more and more outrageous abuses committed to obtain that outcome.
Make partnership with the Ethiopian people, not the Zenawi dictatorship.
There is documentary evidence from Wikileaks cablegrams to show that the West basically wants a “guy they can do business with” in Ethiopia. The core business of the West in Ethiopia and the Horn is counterterrorism. Zenawi invaded Somalia in 2006 and neraly three years later packed up and left. Today Al Shabab and the other warlords still operate in Somalia with impunity. A partnership with a dictator on a single issue is not only short-sighted but also counterproductive to the long-term strategic interests of the West in Ethiopia and the Horn. That is why the West should nurture a long-term partnership with the Ethiopian people based on a demonstrable commitment to good governance, the rule of law, accountability, anti-corruption practices, private sector development, basic education and health services and so on. The easiest way to sever a relationship with the people is to give a fat welfare check (free money) to a depraved dictatorship year after year.
Hold the local paymasters of aid accountable.
Zenawi’s regime today is accountable to no one for the famine that is spreading throughout the country or the aid that it receives from the West. The international aid bureaucrats dare not question Zenawi fearing his legendary torrent of scorn, mockery and insults. They are mere rubberstamps of Zenawi’s regime. Recently, when Ken Ohashi, the World Bank Country Director for Ethiopia said Zenawi’s economic plan (“Growth and Transformation Plan”) is unsustainable, Zenawi derided him as a neocolonial overseer: “The World Bank [country] director is used to having other developing nations simply listen to his orders and is not used to nations refusing implement policy based on their wishes.” Last year Zenawi called the European Union Election Observers’ report “garbage”.
Whenever questions are raised about the misuse and abuse of aid money, the international aid bureaucrats run for cover or get into high gear to deny any improprieties and wrongdoing. For instance, Human Rights Watch and more recently BIJ/BBC have made serious and well-supported allegations of political weaponization of the so-called “safety net” aid. In July 2010, the Development Assistance Group, a coordinating body of 26 foreign donor institutions for Ethiopia, issued a whitewash report which concluded that the administration of the aid programs is the “supported by relatively robust accountability systems.” In the past couple of weeks, USAID Deputy Administrator Gregory Gottlieb spoke to the Voice of America and declared, “There is no famine in Ethiopia.” Yet an audit report by the independent Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of US AID in March 2010 came to the distressing conclusion that USAID has no idea what is happening to its agricultural programs in Ethiopia. By rejecting the data generated by the regime and local USAID officials, the OIG implicitly indicts them for manufacturing data to make things look good. The West must call a spade a spade, insist on the truth and let the chips fall where they may!
Condition aid and loans on the implementation of comprehensive family planning programs in Ethiopia.
Recently, the U.S. Census Bureau had frightening predictions for Ethiopia. By 2050, Ethiopia’s population will more than triple to 278 million, placing that country in the top 10 most populous countries in the world. Ethiopia’s population growth has been spiraling upwards for decades. Since 1995, the average annual rate of population growth has remained at over 3 percent. Comprehensive family planning services are essential to avoiding the predicted doomsday forty years from now. Such services educate, train and prepare couples and families when and how many children to have, provide them contraceptive counseling and help them acquire skills to prevent and manage sexually transmitted diseases, among other things. A decade ago, the World Health Organization and the World Bank estimated that $3.00 per person per year would provide basic family planning, maternal and neonatal health care to women in developing countries, including contraception, prenatal, delivery and post-natal care and postpartum family planning and promotion of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted infections. A decade or two from now when it is too late, providing such services in Ethiopia will be prohibitively expensive.
To help the starving people of Ethiopia, help Ethiopian women.
The distressing status of women in Ethiopian society has been documented over the past decade. The U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (2000) reported: “Violence and societal discrimination against women, and abuse of children remained problems, and female genital mutilation (FGM) is widespread.” The situation remains pretty much the same in 2011. Western aid should seriously focus on improving the status of women and go beyond empty rhetoric. For instance, there is a lot of talk and window-dressing by the USAID about the empowerment and advancement of women in Ethiopia, but the rhetoric falls short of demonstrable outcomes. USAID claims to have helped thousands of rural women obtain microfiance, and through its extension services enabled hundreds of families adopt better technologies to improve their productivity. USAID also claims to have helped remove “road blocks to development” by improving gender integration, expanding educational opportunity, increased awareness of legal rights and so on and by “providing high-impact, results-oriented technical assistance that promotes participation and transparency.” There is little convincing evidence in the public reports of USAID to support any of these claims. In any case, given the chummy and cozy relationship between the local USAID operatives and Zenawi’s regime and the OIG’s audit referenced above, one would have to take USAID’s word not just with a grain but a big sack of salt.
To help the starving people of Ethiopia, help Ethiopia’s youth.
Seventy percent of Ethiopia’s population is said to be under the age of thirty. This past May, USAID announced that it will partner with Pact (an NGO) and UNICEF to implement five-year, $100 million program to benefit over 500,000 Ethiopian orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV and AIDS. The program “will support efforts by the Ethiopian Government and civil society to standardize comprehensive care and support services for vulnerable children and their families.” Reliance on a combination of donor-funded NGOs, regime-managed and –owned civil society organizations and bloated bureaucracies to implement such a program is manifestly unconvincing. The fact of the matter is that Ethiopia’s youth need access to better educational and employment opportunities now. Youth alienation, joblessness, nihilism breed despair and anarchy which the country can ill-afford.
The West should know that aid and loans will not save Ethiopia.
The West should know that neither aid nor loans will save Ethiopia. Only Ethiopians, poor and famished as they are, can save Ethiopia and themselves.
Starve the Beast, Feed the People.
The West should heed the words of Helen Epstein:
The problem with foreign aid in Ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this country not as individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights but as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary education and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness. It is this rigid focus on the ‘backward masses,’ rather than the unique human person, that typically justifies appalling cruelty in the name of social progress.
Stop the cruelty. Starve the beast and feed the people.
Previous commentaries by the author are available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ and http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/
By Alemayehu G. Mariam
Americans fed up with uncontrolled deficit government spending are often heard invoking a familiar battle cry: “Starve the Beast!” In other words, no more taxpayer dollars for wasteful government spending.
I say we stand up to the to Western donors and loaners who continue to support the criminal regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia and declare: “Starve the Beast, Feed the People!” No more aid to a regime that clings to power by digging its fingers into the ribs of starving children. No more aid to torturers and human rights violators. No aid to election thieves. No aid to those who roll out a feast to feed their supporters and watch their opponents starve to death. Let’s shout in a collective voice to the West — America, England, Germany, the European Union, the IMF, World Bank and the rest of them–: “Starve the bloated beast feeding on the Ethiopian body politics, and help feed the starving people.”
The Nature, Care and Feeding of the Beast
For two decades, the West has been feeding Zenawi’s regime with billions of dollars of development and humanitarian aid while filling the stomachs of starving Ethiopians with empty words and emptier promises. Western donors continue to lay out an all-you-can-eat aid buffet for Zenawi’s regime while turning a blind eye, a deaf ear and muted lips to the misuse, abuse and disuse of their taxpayers’ dollars. Despite billions of dollars in Western aid and Zenawi’s nonstop hype of a 15 percent annual economic growth, the Oxford University Multidimensional Poverty Index last year ranked Ethiopia as the world’s second poorest country, after Niger. But Zenawi brazenly insists Ethiopia will fully ensure its food security and cut extreme poverty and hunger (“severe malnutrition”) by 50 percent in 2015.
The evidence is {www:incontrovertible} that the West has adopted a “hear, see, say no evil” policy towards the Zenawi regime. Recently leaked confidential emails of Timothy Clarke, the European Union’s (EU) former ambassador in Ethiopia, show that following the May 2005 Ethiopian elections Clarke made an urgent request to the European Union for some action to restrain Zenawi: “Basic human rights abuses are being committed by the [Ethiopian] government on a daily basis – the EU must respond firmly and resolutely.” The EU and other Western donors “responded firmly” by rewarding Zenawi with billions of dollars of new aid money.
Since 1991, Zenawi’s regime has received some $26 billion in development aidfrom Western donors including the US Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the European Union, and Britain’s Department for International Development. In 2008 alone, Zenawi’s regime received $3 billion, more than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa. In March 2011, Howard Taylor, head of the British aid program in Ethiopia made assurances that Ethiopia will receive $2 billion in British development assistance in a four-year period. In 2011, the UK will hand Zenawi £290 million, not including the £48m in emergency aid. Last year, the EU delivered £152m. The fact of the matter is that a big chunk of the aid money disappears into the pockets of those holding the levers of power in Ethiopia, their supporters and bloated bureaucracies. Added to this problem is capital flight and illicit financial flows. A recent United Nations Development Program (UNDP)commissioned report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI) on illicit financial flows (money taken out of a country illegally) from the Least Developed Countries showed that Ethiopia is a top exporter of {www:illicit} capital at USD$8.4 billion.
The evidence further shows that Western donors and loaners could not care less what Zenawi does with the humanitarian and development aid they give him. For instance, an audit report by the Office of the Inspector General of US AID in March 2010 came to the horrifyingly astounding and mind-bogglingly incredible conclusion that the US AID has no idea what is happening to its agricultural programs in Ethiopia. The Report stated (at p. 1):
The audit was unable to determine whether the results reported in USAID/Ethiopia’s Performance Plan and Report were valid because agricultural program staff could neither explain how the results were derived nor provide support for those results. Indeed, when the audit team attempted to {www:validate} the reported results by tracing from the summary amounts to the supporting detail, it was unable to do so at either the mission or its implementing partners… In the absence of a complete and current performance management plan, USAID/Ethiopia is lacking an important tool for monitoring and managing the implementation of its agricultural program.
In other words, the Inspector General has no confidence in the report of the program staff. Is somebody cooking the books and pulling out statistics out of their back pockets?
But lack of proper auditing to determine what has happened to the aid money is only part of the problem. Equally shocking is the fact that Western donors have ignored time and again credible evidence and warnings that their development and humanitarian aid is being misused, abused and disused to oppress and deny human rights to Ethiopians. In September 2008, Channel 4 News in Britain, the award-winning news program noted for its extensive coverage of international news, reported extensively on how Zenawi’s regime has been using famine as a weapon against civilians in suspected rebels areas.
In December 2010, Human Rights Watch called on the Development Assistance Group (DAG), a coordinating body of 26 foreign donor institutions for Ethiopia to “independently investigate allegations that the Ethiopian government is using development aid for state repression.” In July 2010, aDAG-commissioned study issued a whitewash which concluded that its Productive Safety Nets Programs (alleged to provide “basic services in education, health, agriculture, water supply, sanitation, and rural roads”) and Protection of Basic Services Programs (alleged to “protect and promote the delivery of basic services by sub-national governments while deepening transparency and local accountability in service delivery”) “are supported by relatively robust accountability systems.” In other words, none of the aid money was misused for political or other improper purposes.
In August 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the BBC reported the “Ethiopian government is using millions of pounds of international aid to punish their political opponents.” The report presented compelling evidence of how “aid is being used as a weapon of oppression propping up the government of Meles Zenawi.” Despite numerous documented reports of aid abuse and misuse, Western leaders continue to hide behind a policy of plausible deniability and do nothing pointing to the massaged and embellished reports of the faceless swarms of international bureaucratic poverty-mongers creeping invisibly in Ethiopia.
Starve the Beast!
The best way of preventing famine and massive human rights violations in Ethiopia is simply by denying all aid and loans to Zenawi’s regime. In March 2011, I discussed the grave moral hazard in U.S. policy in Ethiopia and Africa in general, but the logic of my argument applies to all Western donors:
By shifting the risk of economic mismanagement, incompetence and corruption to Western donors, and because these donors impose no penalty or disincentive for poor governance, inefficiency, corruption and repression, African regimes are able to cling to power for decades abusing the human rights of their citizens and stealing elections. Western donors continue to bail out failed African states for two reasons…. Recent Wikileaks cablegrams have documented that the most important objective for Western policy makers in Africa is to support a strongman who can guarantee them stability so that they can continue to do business as usual. Basically, they want a “guy they can do business with.” Second, Western donors believe that the few billions of aid dollars given every year to guarantee “stability” in African countries is more cost effective than helping to nurture genuinely democratic societies in Africa. The moral hazard in Western policy comes not just from the fact that they provide fail-safe insurance to repressive regimes but also from the rewards of increasing amounts of aid and loans to buffer them from a tsunami of democratic popular uprising.
As long as the U.S., U.K. and the rest of them continue to bankroll Zenawi’s regime, Ethiopia will be in a permanent state of famine and starvation of not only food but also democracy and human rights. But the West is not fooling Ethiopians, and they should not believe that because Ethiopians are poor they are also gullible . Ethiopians can clearly see the evidence of Western {www:hypocrisy} about democracy, human rights and accountability in their country.
The U.S. talks a good talk about accountability and prevention of corruptionbut will not walk the talk and put the brakes on aid-related corruption in Ethiopia. The height of U.S. hypocrisy in aid to African countries is evident in the recent rhetoric of the top U.S. aid official. This past May, Rajiv Shah, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) {www:harangue}d the leaders of the yet-to-be 54th African state of South Sudan that “President Barrack Obama is ready to invest millions in South Sudan” but “it remains the mandate of the government of South Sudan to ensure that all funds directed towards improving agricultural productivity are not diverted for other purposes. We need accountability.”
South Sudan was not even a formal sovereign state in May 2011 when Shah got on his high horse to scare the dickens out of the heroic leaders of that long-suffering nation. But South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit has anti-corruption on the top of his agenda: Last week, he told lawmakers at the opening session of the South Sudan’s new parliament that “The people of South Sudan will not sit idly and allow corruption and abuses of public resources to continue unabated. We need to abide with the principles of accountability.”
But accountability is not a word that will slip past Shah lips even accidentally when it comes to Zenawi. Despite the accumulated evidence of misuse and abuse of U.S. aid in Zenawi’s regime over the years, Shah’s lips remain zipped. What a hypocrite!
The U.S. needs to make a fundamental choice of policy in Ethiopia: continue to unreservedly support Zenawi and his repressive regime in the name of promoting American military and security policy in the Horn of Africa by providing him billions in aid and risk a sudden popular upheaval, or take measured steps to strike a balance between its security interests and support for the human rights and welfare of the Ethiopia people. Current U.S. policy is out of kilter and skewed towards blindly supporting Zenawi so long as he is seen to be a guarantor of “stability” and a proxy warfighter in the region. U.S. policy needs to change!
The U.S. should learn from recent events in North Africa and the Middle East. Ethiopians are no different from other oppressed peoples in their demands for dignity, respect for their human rights and insistence in having a voice in their governance. Like all oppressed people, they want to be free from persecution, brutality and dictatorship. They want to be free to elect their own representatives, to speak their minds and to hold their leaders accountable. They want what Jefferson and the founders of the American Republic wanted when they declared their independence 1776: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Feed the People!
The current famine in Ethiopia requires use of new rules of engagement for the West. It should be no longer acceptable for the West to hand over billions of dollars in humanitarian and development aid to Zenawi and look the other way wishing no one will seek accountability on how the aid is used. Western donors and loaners must attach and stringently apply transparency requirements on Zenawi’s regime and insist on maintaining effective independent oversight in the storage, transportation, and distribution of humanitarian aid in the Ethiopia. Rigorous and sustained oversight is also needed for the administration of development aid. Ultimately, the West needs to come to terms with a larger moral issue. Ought they give aid to a regime which uses that aid to systematically engage in repression and persecution of its opponents and massive human rights abuses with impunity?
For well over four decades, U.S. humanitarian aid policy in Ethiopia has been driven by rescue or crisis intervention. Recently, describing the situation in Ethiopia and the Horn region as the “most severe humanitarian emergency” and the “worst that East Africa has seen in several decades”, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced $17 million in new U.S. aid. As of August 15, 2011, total Western humanitarian pledges, commitments and contributions to Ethiopia amount to USD$574 million. The U.N. estimates some 12 million people in Ethiopia and the region are in danger of starvation and at least USD$2.5 billion is needed to avert a humanitarian catastrophe this year. Everyone knows a lot more money than $2.5 billion is needed to deal with the expanding famine.
The fact of the matter is that the famine in Ethiopia and the Horn region in 2011 is occurring under the least favorable international famine relief environment in history. There are clear signs of donor fatigue (people tired of giving to famine relief) in countries where relief has been forthcoming in the past. Americans are experiencing severe economic problems of their own with overstretched budgets, two wars, a rising debt problem and a possible “double-dip” recession. They are most likely give to their churches, favorite charities and organizations and local community groups before stretching a helping hand to famine victims in Africa.
European countries are experiencing severe economic problems also. If the recent riots in poor communities in the U.K. are any indication, those residents may insist on getting the billions in aid earmarked to Ethiopia by Howard Taylor, head of the British aid program to Ethiopia. Most of the other Western donor countries are preoccupied with their own financial woes, high unemployment, debt crises and general economic downturn. There are no celebrities to raise money for Ethiopia. The great Michael Jackson has fallen silent and will not sing “We Are the World” to save Ethiopia’s famine victims. Bob Geldof is nowhere in sight to assemble another Band Aid; and he will not be singing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” again after he was roundly criticized last year following revelations of misused relief aid in 1984 by Zenawi’s rebel group.
The famine of 2011 will be like no other and the toll it will take will be heartbreaking and gut-wrenching.
A Blast From the Past
Last week Mengistu Hailemariam, the junta leader and father of the infamous “Red Terror” campaign in Ethiopia in the late 1970s and the man who flat out denied there was any famine in 1984-85 when a million people died like flies from starvation, crawled from under his rock in Zimbabawe and gave an interview. He blasted the “woyane” regime waiving the flag of Ethiopian nationalism. In his “message” to the Ethiopian people Mengistu said, “Everyone knows the current situation in Ethiopia. All Ethiopians have a duty to free Ethiopia from woyane. If they fail to do that, generations to come will condemn them and we will all wear a blanket of shame.” The history books are full of anecdotes in which Stalin and Hitler condemned each other. Mengistu can wrap himself in the Ethiopian flag from head to toe but it will not blanket his monstrous crimes nor his long train of abuses while he was in power. He cannot conceal his blood-drenched hands by wrapping it in the Ethiopian flag. Remarkably, Mengistu’s memory has faded over the years. He should be reminded that the “woyane” he now wants the Ethiopian people to kick out are the same “woyane” he allowed to march into town unopposed 20 years ago as he sneaked out to his hideout in Zimbabwe in the dead of night. Mengistu should know the difference between himself and Meles to Ethiopians is the exact same difference between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
How To Save Ethiopia from a Famine of Food and Democracy
President Obama said, “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” The “moment” to “save” Ethiopia is now! But is there anything President Obama and the world can do to save Ethiopia?
STARVE THE BEAST! FEED THE PEOPLE!
Previous commentaries by the author are available at: www.huffingtonpost.com/alemayehu-g-mariam/ andhttp://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/
