Authors: Michael Maren
This went on sporadically for nearly a year. Tarrah was a man with a great deal to hide. One day I finally did corner him. He was alone with his coffee, and I sat myself at his table. He pled ignorance of any kind of corruption in Somalia. He knew nothing, he said. When I asked him about his wealth, he gathered himself into a forlorn look and informed me that he was living on a stipend sent from Italy by his brother. It was strange, this man who once ruled the refugees, asking for sympathy. I paid for the coffee and stopped bothering him.
B
ack in Mogadishu, I met Abdirahman Osman Raghe. Raghe had spent his life as a public servant, and, for a while, he had worked under Shirdon, administering food aid at the Ministry of the Interior.
Raghe, I figured, was in as good a position as anyone to tell me what effects foreign aid had had in Somalia. He'd seen a lot and had nothing to hide. Before he started telling me about how the system worked, he wanted me to know about Shirdon. He wanted to be sure I understood there were Somalis who stood up to the massive aid abuses. There were Somalis who protested the use of the refugees as political pawns. There were honest men in Siyaad's government, men who were willing to pay the price for their principles.
Raghe told me his story slowly and passionately. There was a look of perpetual sadness in his eyes. At forty-seven years old, his hair was flecked with gray and the vertical lines in his face conveyed the unique sadness of a man who has been helpless to prevent the ruin of his people.
Shirdon was born in Aden and had come to Somalia, where he spent ten years as a member of Parliament. Later he became general manager of
the National Refugee Commission. “He had a different attitude than everyone else there,” Raghe said. “He saw the NRC as an agency to help refugees, not as a vehicle to support the goals of the military government.” Shirdon, Raghe told me, had spent much of his career trying to close down the refugee programs. He spoke to anyone who would listen, at NGOs, foreign embassies and within the Somali government. His concern, he said, was for the lives of the refugees and the soul of Somalia. Day after day, Shirdon refused the graft that had made his bosses and underlings wealthy men. His superiors even begged him to take a chunk of the loot.
Shirdon firmly refused. At the same time, he refused to moralize about those who give in to the temptations of instant wealth. Day after day, these Somali civil servants, earning the equivalent of $50 or $80 a month came into contact with foreign officers earning $60,000 a hear, or with foreign “volunteers” earning $1,000 a month. He blamed the aid for the distortions in Somali society, not the Somalis who responded to the distortions.
“Shirdon had a way of reaching people,” Raghe said. “Intellectuals from different clans respected him even though he wasn't rich. Everyone else at NRC was rich. There was no other official like him. That's why we admired him. After a time, I established a friendship with him.
“We'd sit and have some tea and meet at a lot of different locations because it was dangerous to be seen together too often. If an international agency would have some sort of party, if there was a ceremony or something, we would meet and talk quietly. We used to talk very secretly and criticize together. Sometimes he spoke openly in the Parliament of a need for change.
“He was against military recruitment from among the refugees. He was critical of foreign aid. He would complain that foreign aid was coming in like hell and there was no monitoring by the donors. In front of the donors, aid was being divided among officials and the sons and daughters of bosses, and nothing was being done. They were pouring the aid in without any conditions; aid must have some sort of conditions. The donors didn't care if it was all going to the politicians, and they accepted none of the blame.
“We would talk about how food aid destroyed our systems. For many years we weren't dependent on food aid. We had droughts before, but in the past there was a credit system; the nomads were coming to the urban areas and taking loans that they would pay back when times were good. There was a system among the nomads of sharing resources. People worked together.”
It wasn't only the food, Raghe said. “Look into drug donations and how they destroyed our developing health system,” he told me. “We once had so many pharmacies here. Pharmacists knew their jobs. Now there are people handing out drugs who are not trained, because of the donated drugs from the international community that are so cheap. Any kind of drug is in the market from all countries.”
I asked Raghe if Shirdon had written down any of his observations. “We were afraid of writing. To keep a diary was dangerous. We had to be very careful about keeping documents around. The intelligence forces could just enter your house and take things. But it doesn't matter. The truth is the truth whether there are documents or not. Everyone knows what happened.”
In 1984, Raghe joined the Department of Food Aid at the Ministry of the Interior, and in 1989 he was appointed director general of the Ministry, just about the time his northern relatives fell under a relentless bombing attack from the very government that employed him. His clan was being run out of their homes by the refugees he was working to feed. Raghe eventually couldn't take the contradiction and soon found a job with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
After Shirdon's death, Raghe followed the path of his role model and started his own organization in the bloody ruins of Mogadishu. He formed an NGO called AfriAction with the hope that he could contribute to the reconstruction of his country.
Then he learned it wasn't that simple. The UN intervention in Somalia had once again brought hundreds of foreign NGOs. The foreign NGOs got money and resources from their governments and the UN. Then the UN invited Somali NGOs to register and apply for grant money. Suddenly more than 1,000 Somali NGOs appeared from the rubble of the city. Local businessmen began calling themselves NGOs in order to compete for UN contracts or subgrants from foreign NGOs. Driving along Mogadishu's bullet-scarred streets, one saw the signs: The Somali Society for the Protection of Children, Somali Children's Aid, Action for Children. It was endless. Some were cynical attempts to make money. Others were a practical result of the fact that in Somalia (as in much of Africa), relief and development are the most dynamic growth industries. An African entrepreneur doing a rational analysis of his economic opportunities would likely conclude that the future was in relief and development work.
And while the NGOs and UN helped create this atmosphere, they held in contempt many of the Somalis who tried to cash in on the relief and development explosion. At the UN's humanitarian affairs office in Mogadishu
where the so-called local NGOs had to register, one expatriate officer waved a fat pile of registration forms he had received in the previous days. Who do these people think they're trying to con, he wanted to know.
No matter what Raghe did, he was seen by foreigners as another Somali profiteer jumping on the aid bandwagon to make a buck. He was still struggling to build his organization when I began to quiz him about the aid abuses of the past.
Raghe explained some of how it all worked: “Institutional feeding was going to hospitals and schools and orphanages. Each agency was collecting its allocation from the food-aid department. We would get it from the Ministry of the Interior, which got it from the Ministry of Planning, which got it from the World Food Program. Everybody wanted to have some. We thought the Ministry of the Interior should have control, but it was very sensitive. The Ministry of Planning had legal contacts with the UN agencies and was responsible directly to the president. And then we had to involve the Department of International Economic Cooperation, which was part of the Ministry of Planning but was then moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was controlled by the president's half-brother, who wanted it there because he wanted to sign all agreements. He took the whole department and put it under his command.”
Raghe went on describing the maze of ministries involved in the food procurement and, ultimately, diversion. The Ministry of Health was involved with food for hospitals, and the Ministry of Education got their hands on food that was sent to schools. The systems were ad hoc and changeable day to day. The sole purpose of the exercise was to get as many loyal hands as possible into the grain bin. The government kept changing the rules. The donors grumbled among themselves but kept the food flowing.
“This was a formal misappropriation by the authorities,” Raghe said. “It was systematic, not some small employee stealing food for his family. The worst was the Commodity Import Program [CIP] from USAID because of the amount of food involved. It usually arrived when people were harvesting late in September. Many rich people in Somalia are rich as a result of that program.”
Although the most visible American food in Africa is relief food donated in “Gift of the People of the United States of America” bags, that is actually the smallest part of the American food-aid program. The vast bulk of food aid comes under other auspices.
All U.S. food arrives under the authority of Public Law-480. The law has three mechanisms for delivering food to poor countries. The food we see
on television being fed to starving children is Title II, which is emergency food. Title II food is also used regularly for food-for-work projects and nutrition programs such as school feeding and mother-child health. Most of these are administered by NGOs.
Much food also arrives in poor countries under Title III, which is “food for development.” These are commodities that are sold in developing countries and the money used for development projects such as the Save the Children project at Qorioley. In all, some 300 development projects in Somalia were funded with the proceeds from American food.
The largest part of PL-480 is Title I, foods which are simply sold to merchants at bargain-basement prices, rates so low that they often don't even cover the cost of freight. This part of the program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. If Somalia had had some semblance of a free market, auctioning U.S. food would still have undermined farmers' attempts to get a fair price for their agricultural produce. But an additional injurious factor often intrudes when this food is sold in Africa. Almost all governments require that merchants have permission or otherwise be licensed to purchase foreign commodities. The buyer pool is entirely controlled by the man at the top. Permission to benefit from the foreign aid flow is bestowed as a favor upon close kin and loyal political allies. In Somalia, Siyaad's authorization to buy Title I food was a license to print money.
Indeed, when it came to buying up the U.S. subsidized food in Somalia, it was the president's inner circle who grabbed all the grain. “This CIP food was meant to be monetized as budget and development support,” Raghe explained. “This is where the government's friends put their hand in. A normal man can't get an allocation from that. A minister sends his brother or cousin. So farmers are reduced to beggars.”
As Raghe continued assembling the pieces of the system for me, I realized for the first time the extent of the malfeasance involved. The minister of agriculture was one of the people profiting from selling imported food, he told me. He paused to let this sink in. Did I understand what this meant, he wanted to know. The very people whose job it was to promote agriculture and increase production were instead making money selling imported food they were, in essence, given for free. Their personal economic interests fell into direct conflict with their jobs.
“The minister was a farmer, trader, landlord, everything,” Raghe said. “We were developing the beginning of feudal systems. The inputs to small farmers were diverted to large estates owned by government officials. Every officer in the Ministry of Agriculture had a big farm in the Shebelle region.
And when the minister wakes up in the morning, the first thing he thinks about is his own business.”
The minister, who was supposed to help farmers produce food, was now working to keep production low and prices high. And since many of the farmers were from the despised and powerless Rahanwiin clan, there was little fallout from suppressing food production. And not only did donors undercut farmers, they undercut legitimate Somali importers. An entire segment of the business community vanished as high-quality American and European cereals were sold at 50 to 60 percent less than they could have been purchased for. Food aid, Raghe emphasized again, had turned Somalia from a self-sufficient exporter of food to an aid-dependent “kleptocracy.”
But the corruption didn't stop there. The government elite reaped additional benefits from the destruction of Somalia's agricultural self-sufficiency. Most of the country's agricultural land along the rivers was ideally suited for growing bananas, melons, and other fruits that could be exported for hard currency and huge profit. A joint venture with Italy, Somalfruit, was the country's single largest export firm and was largely controlled on the Somali side by Siyaad's family and friends. With cheap food imports replacing homegrown grains, more land was free for planting lucrative export crops.
Ironically, the United States was promoting free markets and privatization at that time in Somalia. Siyaad Barre's socialist policies were being officially blamed for the country's food problems. So the large state-run farms were broken up by the Ministry of Agriculture. Abdi Aden Ali, aka Abdi Dheere (tall Abdi), had been a regional director for the Ministry of Agriculture in lower Juba. He considered himself a scientist, a technician concerned with pest control, irrigation, and other matters. One morning in the mid 1980s, he got a letter from the Ministry in Mogadishu ordering him to transfer a state farm to a wealthy individual in Kismaayo. The letter also instructed him to use the government's resources to help revitalize the farm. Abdi Dheere wasn't: sure what to do, so he stalled for time by writing a letter back to the minister asking for instructions on the procedure for transferring public property to private hands. He was summoned to Mogadishu and told that he had no right to pose that kind of question. He apologized.