The Road to Hell (3 page)

When I slowed down for a moment to consider what was happening, it became clear: Aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. Groups like CRS are paid by the U.S. government to give away surplus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food CRS gave away, the more money they received from the government to administer the handouts. Since the securing of grant money is the primary goal, aid organizations rarely meet a development project they don't like.

All of this came into greater focus one morning at an office meeting. We were discussing a famine situation that was developing in Turkana in northwestern Kenya. I had recently returned from the area, where I'd been looking into doing some food-for-work projects. I wasn't very optimistic about succeeding in my efforts, since many of the people were too weak to work and it would be difficult to demand that some people dig holes and move rocks while others were getting food for doing nothing. A young woman who worked for CRS at the time and who was my immediate supervisor conceded my point but said we had to find some way to establish
a program in the region. “We have to take advantage of this famine to expand our regular program,” she insisted.

For her, and the organization, famine was a growth opportunity. Whatever the original intentions, aid programs had become an end in themselves. Hungry people were potential clients to be preyed upon in the same way hair replacement companies seek out bald people.

As ignorant as I was about development projects, there was no shortage of donors willing to hand over cash for me to spend for them. Within a few months additional funds were made available for the food-for-work projects. I now had money to buy pipes and cement and apparatus. I came up with an idea: to travel the deserts of northern Kenya drilling wells and setting up windmills to pump water. That, I had learned, was appropriate technology. Appropriate technology was all the rage. It meant anything but high technology, things that didn't run on electricity or require a lot of maintenance. There was money available for appropriate technology. It made donors* eyes light up. So I secured funds to purchase some windmills from a company in the American Midwest, as well as an electronic device that could be used to locate underground sources of water. I'd read some books about how people can dig deep wells by hand; we'd use food-for-work for that. And for places where they couldn't be hand dug, I'd use a not-yet-purchased portable drilling rig that I could drag around behind my Land Cruiser. I'd be the Johnny Appleseed of water. Soon the nomads in northern and eastern Kenya would be drinking clean water and taking showers.

As I was getting excited about the project, a friend suggested that I talk with an American named Andrew Clarke, who lived near Nanyuki to the north of Mount Kenya. Clarke had drilled some wells in his day and knew lots about Kenya's dry frontier areas. I went to see Clarke on his ranch and told him about my plans. I expected him to be excited. Instead, he told me to sit down.

He took out a pencil and drew a small circle in the center of a sheet of paper. “This is the desert,” he said, waving his hand across the whole sheet of paper. Then he pointed to the circle: “Here is your well. During the rainy season this well will provide extra water for the nomads. It will allow them to have bigger herds. When the dry season comes, the nomads will begin to migrate toward your well or any permanent source of water. They will arrive with larger herds and begin to denude the land closest to the well. Soon they'll have to wander farther and farther from the well to find food.”

He drew a large circle around the first circle. “Cows must eat and drink water every day. As soon as it's more than a day's walk from the water to the grass, the cows will die.” He drew a third, larger circle around the other two. “Goats and sheep can go several days without water, but as soon as the food is consumed for a two-day radius from the water, the goats and sheep will die.” He drew a fourth large circle around the other three. “And then there's the camels. The camels can go days without drinking water, but soon the walk will be too great for them. And when the camels die, the people die.”

This was not a hypothetical scenario, Clarke explained. It had happened, and was still happening. Aid organizations were coming in and giving water to nomads, the gift of life, and it was killing them.

Then he asked me if I'd seen the windmill on the road to Moyale. I had. In northern Kenya just below the border with Ethiopia, beside a road, was a windmill tower crumpled like an aluminum can. The windmill apparatus lay on the ground. Clarke told me that some well-intentioned missionaries had ordered a top-of-the-line windmill apparatus from the United States and had hauled it to northern Kenya, where they proceeded to build the tower from local materials, held together with Kenyan-made bolts. Attracted by the water, a community gathered and prospered. After some time, the heavy-duty American apparatus began to weigh upon the flimsy Kenyan structure. The bolts sheared and the tower crumbled in the wind. The community disintegrated, and Clarke had heard that some members had died before they were able to find a place to relocate.

“You can put a water system in a community,” he warned me, “but then you'll have to be there all the time as a policeman. You'll have to make rules: People can drink from the wells but animals can't. You won't really be able to explain to the people why their cattle can't drink from the water. For them, their herds are everything. A man's wealth and status is dependent on the size of his herd. So he won't understand why you're standing between his cattle and the water. Is that really what you want to do? The water will make you responsible for the community. And that's not why you came here.”

Clarke had successfully soured my plans, but more important, he taught me to ask questions about so-called development projects. I still could have gone and drilled wells across the countryside. No one would have stopped me. I could even have gotten substantial grant money to do it. There was no one watchdogging the development business. There was no central authority curbing the ambitions of young people like myself. With my English degree and suburban upbringing and white skin, I could walk
into an African village and throw money and bags of food around. I could do anything I pleased. I had, admittedly, enjoyed the feeling of power. Suddenly it scared me.

If my project created a disaster, no one outside of the village would ever hold me accountable. The missionaries who erected that windmill near Moyale, and other aid workers who bring destruction to communities, are probably still running around doing their “development” work in remote villages from where news of their failures will never emerge.

Kenya was a wonderful place to work and it attracted thousands of aid workers. The place was crawling with them. Aid organizations competed with each other for grant money and projects. Kenya's politicians loved it. They could give aid projects as gifts to their supporters. They weren't about to start asking tough questions or demanding long-term environmental impact statements. No one questioned the idea of aid. It was as if the good intentions alone were sufficient to redeem even the most horrific of aid-generated disasters.

T
his book is about aid and charity—aid and charity as an industry, as religion, as a self-serving system that sacrifices its own practitioners and intended beneficiaries in order that it may survive and grow. Much of this book is centered in Somalia, but it draws on my experiences with aid organizations over nineteen years around Africa: in places such as Kenya, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Like most people in the United States and Western Europe, I've heard the pleas of aid organizations and boasts of their accomplishments in the Third World, but the Africa I know today is in much worse shape than it was when I first arrived. The futures of Africa's children are less hopeful than ever before. The countries that received the most aid—Somalia, Liberia, and Zaire—have slid into virtual anarchy. Another large recipient, Kenya, inflicts unspeakable abuses of human rights on their own citizens while aid pays the bills.

In Africa, the people who are supposed to benefit from aid see what is happening. They hear foreigners talking about development, but they know development was a colonial policy. Development was a policy of subjugation. When colonials came ashore, they didn't say, “We're here to steal your land and take your resources and employ your people to clean our toilets and guard our big houses.” They said, “We're here to help you.” And then they went and took their land and resources and hired their people to clean their toilets. And now here come the aid workers, who move into the big colonial houses and ride in high cars above the squalor, all the while insisting they've come to help.

As in colonial times, the foreigners employ an elite cadre of locals to carry out their work. The elites are rewarded for their relationships with the foreigners. They enjoy higher pay than most. They have access to foreign goods, education and visas to foreign countries. And, just as in colonial times, the foreigners use this elite as their link to the rest of the population. They are regarded as the voice of the people and employed to speak on their behalf. In reality, however, the elite, with their vested interests in the system, tell the foreigners exactly what they want to hear: The system is good; the system works.

Thus affirmed, the aid establishment moves forward, as the colonial one did, ignorant of the widening rift between them and the supposed recipients of their beneficence.

I
n 1981, I left Kenya to take a job with USAID in Somalia. I knew little of what was going on in Somalia except that perhaps a million and a half refugees had entered the country fleeing the Ogaden war in Ethiopia. The world was mobilizing to help. I thought it was a good opportunity to try something new and get a fresh start in a different country. Alert to the corrupt and politicized aid business in Kenya, I felt ready to deal with the situation in Somalia.

I had learned to view development aid with skepticism, a skill I had hoped to put to good use to help ensure that aid projects, at worst, didn't hurt people. But Somalia added a whole new dimension to my view of the aid business. My experience there made me see that aid could be worse than incompetent and inadvertently destructive. It could be positively evil.

LAND CRUISERS

—Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

T
he town of Baidoa in southwestern Somalia, it seems, will forever be called “the city formerly known as the City of Death.” Did workers attached the City of Death label during the famine of 1992. Before that, Baidoa wasn't really known as anything. It was a dusty little market town in the center of Somalia's agricultural region where nomads would exchange camels and milk for grains, cooking oil, cloth, and other items. In early 1991, after the government of dictator Mohamed Siyaad Barre was overthrown, Baidoa became a battleground, an arena of spectacular brutality. The dictator's retreating armies fled through the region, looting and killing as they passed, wrecking everything they couldn't carry off. They made a special point of pillaging farmers' traditional underground food stores in an effort to halt the advance of the pursuing forces of the United Somali Congress, who nonetheless managed to find more to loot and destroy. Before it was over, the armies would pass through the region four times, achieving monumental levels of destruction.

But Baidoa didn't become famous until the battles ended and people began to starve there. That's when the relief workers showed up with
truckloads of food. That food along with everything else the outsiders brought were the only items of value in the area, so the relief supplies became the center of a new regional economy. It was an economy of theft. In the anarchy that followed the fighting, freelance militias, criminal gangs, ruled the roads and towns. They extorted money from relief organizations or simply stole the food. The nomads and others who fled to towns such as Baidoa expecting to be fed, waited and died.

After the relief organizations brought the media to videotape, photograph, and otherwise capture the death for the outside world, Baidoa became an international symbol of starvation. Then it became a symbol of liberation when the U.S. Marines rolled into town just before Christmas 1992, escorting a first symbolic shipment of relief food for the starving. The next day they escorted additional symbolic food shipments out of Baidoa to the hinterlands. Journalists crowded around to get the first shots of the first shipments arriving and leaving the City of Death. On New Year's Day 1993. President George Bush, on his final official trip, dropped into the symbolic city to meet the marines and tour an orphanage. He was greeted with banners and songs. “The marines saved us. Welcome, President, welcome,” the orphans sang in Somali.

As he smiled and waved and grasped hands, Bush betrayed no sense that this site of his bold humanitarian act had once been the focus of intense American interest of a different kind. Under his administration and the previous ones, the same Siyaad Barre who delivered death to Baidoa was a friend and ally. Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush, in their campaign against communist influence in Africa, pumped massive amounts of military and economic aid into Somalia and kept the hated dictator in power. Fortress Somalia had been in part built from bags of food, relief food for the hungry refugees from an earlier war. The food fed the troops and kept the cadres in step behind the regime. It enriched loyal merchants in the capital and kept the president's family and friends awash in luxury. And though no one dared stain Bush's visit with questions of history, the Somalis who saw the convoys of food rolling inland toward Baidoa understood something that these relief workers and soldiers did not: The show unfolding before them was much more than a grand gesture of charity. Food was power, and so long as the food came in, the battle to control it would continue, as it had for years.