Tag Archives: Neo-colonial

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Time for a Punch in the Face?

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Can the leopard change its spots?

Across the humanitarian sector, a surfacing of anger, denial, repent, frustration, recognition, shame, rationalization and hope. The sector moves into action: webinars, all-staff meetings, executive suite statement, and ‘This time!’ promises of a new zero tolerance.  This is not 2020, but 2018.  Did culture or power shift?  Hard to say.  How did our sector perform such a deep dive into abuse of power and not seize upon the issue of race? That remains a riddle to be unpacked.

As it now stands, the aid sector is again being frogmarched into a confrontation with what it has always exercised the privilege to ignore. And we should ask: This time, will the sector’s anti-racist protests  or the mea culpa declarations prove the spark to escape its inequitable relationship with people?

It is difficult to bet on success. The humanitarian sector has established a relatively unblemished track record of escaping from the challenge of transformation, leaving change agendas chopped down to technocratic reform.  The practice of reform – a seeming good – hence becomes a practiced evasion, an avoidance of addressing deeply embedded inequalities that coalesce in a cluster of ugly isms – paternalism, sexism, colonialism, elitism, and racism.  That incomplete list constitutes a straightforward humanitarian defect, namely that the sector is not humanitarian.  We may provide vital relief (as might a NATO or even a McDonald’s food distribution) but we trample at existential peril our distinct purpose as enshrined in the principle of humanity.

The difficulty of achieving transformation from within should not surprise us as much as our faith that we will succeed.  It is not simply that the sector relegates big fat disturbing truths to the bottom of the to-do list (too busy saving lives).  It is also the very humanitarian way in which we address symptoms without unearthing the causes.  Example: As the discussion on racism unfolds, Paul Currion explains that terminology like ‘localisation’ looks “suspiciously like language used to avoid talking about the lingering effects of racism.” In effect, localization, the sector’s ‘solution’ to the problem of its resources and power already being localized (i.e., in the West), employs terminology that functions as a terminus, as a building block of the selfsame problem.

So, will COVID-19 and the climate emergency combine to make this moment a critical juncture? Perhaps. Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine claims that “only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change.”  Or perhaps it is clearer in the less academic analysis of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Will the public outing of the humanitarian system’s institutional racism or its blind fragility amount to a punch in the mouth?  Will somebody “take a sledgehammer” to the entire system, as was suggested in a last month’s must-watch panel discussion hosted by The New Humanitarian? 

A call for disruption

To answer this question, let’s turn it around: what does this sledgehammer look like?  What does humanitarian disruption look like? And can a system disrupt itself from the inside? Can it punch itself in the mouth? In the TNH discussion, the panel explored how the perception of the US as a fragile state might be just such a driver or change. Kenyan cartoonist and political commentator Patrick Gathara asked, for example, if we can imagine African peacekeepers deployed to the United States. 

That question holds the potential to disrupt the dominant narrative, because it asks us to confront the underlying paradigm. To answer, humanitarians must imagine South-to-North humanitarian programming (see my examples, p. 26ff).  This leads to struggle, because we must reconcile our assumed legitimacy of North-to-South humanitarian action with South-to-North humanitarian work, which strikes us intuitively as wrong, or even nonsensical.  Should we not build, for example, a training scenario exercise where Cuban medical teams respond the opioid addiction crisis that killed almost 47,000 Americans in 2018 (compare to last year’s death toll of 11,215 fighters and civilians in the Syrian war)?

In previous analysis of how the humanitarian sector responded to the crisis of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I concluded that the intervention exemplified a more equitable and limited model of humanitarian action. The difference in how humanitarians conceived of their role in New Orleans versus in ‘humanitarian contexts’ surfaced the bias in the sectoral lens, and we can now recognize this bias as heavily embedded in racialized verdicts on the neediness, competence and agency of some people.

Humanitarian and disaster relief teams descended on the stricken city of New Orleans and delivered stuff – water, food, blankets, shelter. In other words, a decidedly punctual, modest response aiming to meet basic needs via the delivery of emergency relief. Contrary to the way it intervenes in the ‘global South’, the humanitarian intervention did not conceptualise the crisis in larger terms, and did not see the need (or feel the paternalistic urge?) to engage in rights-based political and social engineering with the goal of ‘fixing’ New Orleans. As a result, it did not seek to address long-standing structural vulnerabilities and problems of violence, corrupt governance, substance abuse, racial segregation and discrimination, gender oppression and violence, shockingly poor education and health services and the myriad of other needs the humanitarian system has captured within the scope of the ‘humanitarian crisis’. (DuBois 2018; 6, citations omitted).

The Katrina response hence demonstrated crisis intervention without further ‘humanitarianisation’. In contrast, crisis in the ‘global south’ produces short-term and assistentialist approaches that “are normalized to compensate for the persistence of structural problems related to rule of law, democratic accountability, public services and deep-seated social division.”[1]  Sounds like a key brick in the wall of humanitarian expansion.

The point is that challenges to the assumptions of North-to-South humanitarian action can be illuminating. However, the risk is that we do not probe deep enough.  One surprising moment in the aforementioned TNH webinar came as a number of panellists agreed on the worrying signs of instability in the US – threats of violent military repression of democratic protest, an uncontrolled virus that devastates ethnic minorities and the poor, divisive and corrupt politics, economic ruin of millions of Americans while a stock market sets records, etc.  That discussion included a proposition: “Should we consider the situation in the US a humanitarian crisis?” The audience answered in the affirmative, 45% saying yes versus 20% for no.

Is American really Yemen (or CAR, Sudan…) in disguise? This question, provocative and as emotionally satisfying as it may be, seems like the wrong question. The issue is not that the sector needs to treat the US more like the ‘dark continent’, it’s that it needs to treat the ‘dark continent’ more like it treats the US.  We should reject the idea that the US today is a ‘shithole’ in the way that resembles the ‘shithole’ countries that we have self-referentially defined as humanitarian contexts. We should learn to see that these so-called humanitarian contexts actually resemble countries in the West, full of contradictions and corruption, achievement and incompetence, massive advantages and terrible needs; and full of people whose dignity (a) rejects the assumption of needing to be saved and (b) demands the right to own their struggles.

The TNH poll thus invites the ‘white gaze’, where the deviation from a presumed White/Western norm of wealth and stability generates an exceptionalist break from history and politics, and yields the virtuous hierarchy of giver/savior above the helpless, incompetent victim.  Arianne Shahvisi captures this racially biased gaze in her concept of ‘tropicality’, and David Chandler has described this as a perception of non-Western countries as “incapable of rational policy-development and prone to corruption and nepotism,” peopled with victims in need of Western intervention against their “corrupt and inefficient elites.” 

To disrupt humanitarian power is to remove the legacy of racism from the justification and extensiveness of our interventions in places like South Sudan, Bangladesh, Haiti, or CAR.  It is to subvert the privilege of believing that our good intentions magically overcome our causal relationship to the profound injustices of those places.  For that sort of disruption, though, we should perhaps look outside the sector, because it will not come from within.

[Edits for clarity were made to the original post, on 28 August, about five hours after posting.]

[1] Fiori, J. et al. (2016) The Echo Chamber: Results, Management, and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda. London: Save the Children, p. 54.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Privilege of Control

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Anti-racism protests have prompted unprecedented conversations across many parts of the humanitarian sector.  Institutions and their leaders have raised their hands as witnesses and responders to the destructive practices of racism, and to being spreaders and perpetrators of it.  There is a flow of apology and commitment.  We see strong vows to change, to listen, to understand, to do better, to open up uncomfortable spaces, to rectify, and to eradicate.  An odd gap in this litany of promises?  Reckoning.  Justice.

Let us begin with the simple fact that various forms of racial discrimination – both individualized acts of racial discrimination and institutional racism – are not examples of bad behavior.  They are examples of wrong behavior.  They are deemed in much of the world to be an offense, usually a civil offense but in some states a criminal offense.  Legal codes attach this gravity to racism because racial discrimination and racism (just as sexism, etc.) constitutes an act of direct harm upon an individual, and it is a particularly insidious category of harm because it targets and violates that which is immutable about a human being.

In a textbook display of privilege, agencies within the sector have assumed the capacity to act as both defendant and judge or jury. Defining the boundaries of how they will talk about addressing their racism marks an appropriation, so for instance deciding to look forward but deflecting accountability for the present or the past.  Angela Bruce-Raeburn asks the question that is erased by these declarations:  “Can a chief executive ‘apologise’ for racism and stay?”

This is a particular exercise of privilege, because it both masks and is a product of our virtue. As I’ve written before, the legitimacy of the sector is challenged by its susceptibility to moral licensing, allowing its good works to facilitate or counterbalance bad stuff. We downplay the offense and then rationalize our actions.  Why such persistent difficulties with community engagement, localisation or ‘downward’ accountability? Because we justify our inaction and allow our racism to hide in the plain sight of “power over” policies or practices of knowing what is best for them.  Move fast fast fast and you do not notice.  Beware the strong resemblance to the original humanitarian sin of its colonial legacy, the enterprise of subjugation and resource extraction being justified by the civilizing mission.

Self-accountability

In the almost 25 years since the JEFAR first recommended that humanitarians needed to be held accountable by an independent body, the sector has devoted consistent, massive effort to producing codes of self-accountability, an ever-expanding lists of best practices, standards, targets and other technocratic non-fixes to the problem of the sector’s social injustice.[1] Complaint mechanisms, suggestion boxes, agency hotlines and help desks are emblematic of the twinned mindsets of privilege and of charity, a uniquely inebriating potion that mixes good intentions with an (un)conscious “it’s better than nothing” (“happy to get something”?) rationalisation of sectoral shortcomings.  In the end, the underlying distinction of humanitarian accountability is that it does not produce the state in which an agency must give and then be held to account for its decisions and actions. Aid requires a reckoning.  And when an offense is committed, it demands justice as well.

The starting point of the internal discussions to come should be letters of resignation. It is not for me to say if they should be accepted, but they should be sincere and on the table. Truth and reconciliation? Independent adjudicators? National inquiries in the countries where aid takes place? Grace? This is easier for me to write than to now predict if I would have had the integrity to submit my own back when I was director.  I made the choice to remain, a choice rationalized by the good being done and by my occasional and completely ineffective protestations. My decision marked the mistaken weighing of moral obligations against programmatic output.

Critical to change is recognition that weak sectoral and negligible external accountability do not give rise to or permit racism in humanitarian action.  The problem to be addressed is the reverse. Racism gives rise to the sector’s insufficient accountability. The solution is simple in theory.  As Themrise Khan astutely argues, “it is the aid ‘recipients’ who must push back against the white aid system”. Accountability is not an internal treasure for the dominant agencies of the Global North to bequeath, but rather a power, authority and even a vocabulary that will need to be taken and will need to be constructed. 

To do that, society must counter the sector having approached accountability as an internal or isolated exercise.  MEAL programs and internal reporting can and do contribute to accountability, but accountability requires a multiplicity of external prongs.  This is what you would find in the West, where accountability for the work in an NGO (or business) arises from the independent work of journalists, review-based websites (coming soon?), official ombudsmen, law enforcement, lawsuits, citizen watch-dog groups, government regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc. The blindspot should now be apparent. Efforts to improve governance and strengthen civil society should be pushing for the requisite frameworks and skills to hold foreign aid agencies to account and protect people from harm.  The neo-colonial gaze means never seeing ourselves as the problem to fix, and yet we exert enormous power over the lives of people in crisis.

The external equivalent of Bruce-Raeburn’s taking issue with non-resignation resides in the governments and civil societies of the states and communities where humanitarians work.  How can an organisation that understands itself to have racism threading through its work and culture – driving the conceptualization of programs, framing the narrative and imagery of ‘heroic’ aid, suffusing the relationship with its employees – simply assume that it should or is able to remain engaged in said work? In other words, what is the significance of and process by which we construct ourselves as fit for the purpose of delivering assistance and protection to (predominantly) people of color? This is white privilege at work. Accountability for its racism requires resignation of the humanitarian project, to be accepted or rejected by the governments and communities that have suffered the offense. 

[21/July: I made two edits to this post — minor cosmetic changes in the first para and the insertion of a missing “not” in the fifth para.]

[1] While there is considerable external accountability to HQ or institutional donors, this relates more to responsible financial management and log-framed targets, and not to the character of the aid or to the relationship of the agency to the community.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Finding air

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I can’t breathe. A novel virus that has choked the breath out of over 400,000 people and a white police officer who choked the life out of man by driving his knee press of historical, pervasive American racism into George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

A stirring, frightening global juncture and a moment for humanitarian ‘thought leaders’ to offer their opinions on whiteness, racism, and colonialism in humanitarian action.  An opportunity to share my thinking and to engage in the efforts to ‘make a difference’.

I have spent the week trying to find the right words. Long draft essays. Perhaps less is more.  Approaches to privilege:

  1. Listen to our colleagues and to the recipients of aid, because we don’t know enough about the consequences of whiteness. 
  2. Listen to and interrogate the excuses we have made, because we have certainly known enough to act.
  3. Listen to critics (or here) who see a dangerous, active institutional racism in the power dynamics and practices of our sector, not just in the people leading it. 
  4. Think about how to relinquish  space.

I have not posted a blog here since July. To some extent, I was busy.  To some extent, a loss of voice. A birthday reminds me that the time to speak out is not well served by ‘maybe next week-ism’.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Localization

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Localization — the agenda formerly intending a shift of humanitarian power?

The Good

The one year anniversary of the World Humanitarian Summit’s ‘Grand Bargain’ offers time to take stock of progress.    At a conceptual level, a key goal of the Grand Bargain is to drive the humanitarian sector towards the irrefutable good of contextualizing its work: re-imagining a humanitarian action that departs from top-down, cookie-cutter approaches and empowers programming that is borne in and is effective in meeting the needs of people within a specific context.  It will do so by shifting greater focus and cash to responders, a departure from a system based on the near monopoly of international aid conglomerates. We call this the localization agenda, even though a more neutral perspective would grasp the humanitarian system as already suffering from an over-localization (in the West).

The Bad

Let us imagine this contextualization in full bloom, a localization that moves beyond its current emphasis on the location of the funding recipient and beyond even the crucial focus on meaningful participation/involvement of local communities. To truly embody the shift in power first envisioned by the localization agenda, it should also comprise a locally-driven rethink of how to address people’s needs. How do we build the freedom for that rethink to occur? How do we avoid the seemingly unstoppable bulk transfer of managerial systems, best-practices and standardized (read: homogenized) methodologies that decontextualize humanitarian assistance in the first place?

This ongoing stampede of North-to-South ‘capacity building’ exercises risks producing globalization instead of localization, a kicking of the humanitarian can down bumpy local roads. [link] We already know the contents of this can — dozens of colourful guidelines on the same topic, neatly venned organizational processes and tick-box exercise after tick-box exercise to ensure quality control.  As the NEAR Network has declared: “Local actors have had more than 30 years of supposed capacity building and ‘partnership principles’ which has not resulted in any significant gains.”

This Trojan Horse of sectoral bureaucracy accompanies a more insidious globalization as local responders clamber for direct funding from Western donors. As I have written elsewhere, the prospect of local agencies tethering themselves to the soft power and avowedly self-interested geo-political ambitions of Western donor funding has already proven itself a debilitating experience for the Western INGO.  We must also guard against the globalizing effects of reducing localization to a donor-driven search for cheap labor, a rationale of efficiency gains by which localization reduces transaction costs by decreasing layers.

More deeply, localization must pierce the imposition of our (globalized) world view, and the universalist approach to exporting our truths, even where the underlying values may be universal in nature.  In other words, humanitarian ideals may be universal, but the architecture and processes designed to realize and defend those deals must be seen as a rather localized product of history and geography.  Let’s not confuse universal with sacred cow.

The Ugly

It has taken nine months of discussion to settle simple questions because they came burdened by complex institutional consequences: What is a local responder? What does ‘as directly as possible’ mean? To answer simply requires only an understanding of the catalyst for the localization push – the spectacular North-South power imbalance and inequitable distribution of resources within the humanitarian sector.  As it turns out, local responders were effectively shut out of owning the local response, even though often sub-contracted to deliver it. One stat summed up the embarrassing state of affairs: a mere 0.4% of international humanitarian assistance in 2015 went directly to national and local NGOs, a situation that makes global inequality look relatively tame.

The definitional debate, however, has compromised this clear intent. The accommodation of political and bureaucratic interests means that a local outpost of a billion-dollars-per-year INGO could be considered ‘local’, and that funding funnelled to local responders via the same old rent-extracting Western INGO intermediaries may count towards the Grand Bargain’s target of going 25 percent local (an issue still to be settled).

Proponents of localization take note.  Lesson 1: wealth and power are not so easily captured. Lesson 2: a logic of localization based on effectiveness and efficiency favors the status quo.

Lost in these debates over effectiveness and efficiency, lost in the scramble of trying to establish INGO standards of financial accounting in smaller, differently-developed local organizations, is any notion of localization as an ethical undertaking. The modern humanitarian sector is founded upon the principle of humanity, that a fundamental human dignity resides within each one of us.  There, we should house the right to self-determination and the ability to possess at least some degree of power over the forces affecting one’s life.

Enter the humanitarian machine at a time of crisis, wielding its monopoly power over decision-making as to who will live or die. That is an abusive power inhering in its unaccountable decisions as to who will and who will not receive aid.  That is a sovereign power being held by a non-sovereign body. It is time then for a realization that localization may or may not yield either effectiveness or efficiency, but those laudable goals should not be the standards by which it is ultimately judged. The ‘decolonization’ of humanitarian action constitutes an ethical mission, not simply a technocratic one; a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies but from an alien civilization to a home society. Accepting such a meaningful transformation (read: loss) will not be easy for people like me. But our humanitarian action in their house? Time to admit that we haven’t exactly gotten it right, and the principle of humanity means that they should hold the power to get it wrong.

[7 July 2017.  In response to comments that the original blog misstated certain elements, changes were made to the second paragraph of The Ugly.]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Feeding the Fire

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[Apologies for the absence.  Just back from two fascinating weeks — our anniversary! — in Egypt.]

Just last week I was climbing the seriously magnificent Temple of Hatshepsut with my wife.  Its sheer beauty absorbs one’s attention.  Even my peripatetic gaze.  At least until a discordant note in the form of a young Polish woman in a micro sleeveless dress descended the stairs from the first courtyard.  Her dress was day-glo orange.  All of it. And fully radioactive in the noon sun.  In my entire life, I don’t think I’d ever seen clothing that color, save for road crew vests. Not even Dennis Rodman in his lunatic prime.

In the late morning of November 17, 1997 a different sort of scene unfolded on the terrace of that very same temple.  Armed with automatic weapons, six Islamic militants aligned with Al-Gama’a al-Islamyya massacred 62 people, mostly Western tourists.  They unleashed a Breivik-esque melee, for example hacking and dismembering a few honeymooning Japanese couples.  (Tangent alert: Doesn’t it seem less than coincidental that the attack took place at the temple of the first woman pharaoh?).

Those militants understood the enormous value of tourism to Egypt.  It seems they also despised the equally enormous Westernizing impact of tourism on the predominantly Muslim country.  Today, even with an elected President from the Muslim Brotherhood, more stringent Islamic groups in Egypt still take aim at tourism.  The people earning filoos kateer (gobs of money) from Egypt’s tourism, not to mention the people scraping by on its leftovers, simply curse this kind of thinking.  The government, for its part, have put in place greater security.  The question for me:  Why the hell was day glo orange slinking down those steps in the first place?

The point is not at all that women wearing mini-skirts are legit targets for attack.  The point is not to suggest an actual justification for their actions (i.e., women who dress provocatively aren’t “asking for it”).   The point is that some behaviour – disrespectful, abusive, neo-colonial, whatever – creates a justification in their minds.  Gimme a reason! You got one.

The message was consistent in all the tourist books, and in the advice we received:  show respect.  To do that in Egypt, dress and behave conservatively: women and men should cover flesh, don’t walk around the streets snogging, boozing, etc etc.  (In one café that served beer, they asked us not to sit near the door – essentially a tactic of not rubbing the public’s nose in alcohol).  But those with the most to lose in the long run seem the least concerned in the here and now.

The Red Sea resort tour companies offering blitzkriegs of Luxor or the Pyramids seem to be the worst offenders if measured by the sheer volume of people being disgorged from their buses who don’t give a shit.  The scene:  sunburn-glowing Poles, Germans and Brits, dressed for an appearance on Baywatch, mobbing past Egyptian families dressed in galabiyahs.  In close second place were the fat Nile cruise boats, moored along Aswan’s corniche, gleaming white hulls matching the jellified flesh prancing around the pool deck.  In third place, as a matter of unscientific impression, were the French, cloaked as always in the self-assurance of being French.

The point is that Little Miss Day Glo wasn’t just an insensitive tourist. She became a recruitment poster, fiery sermon topic and a rallying cry all rolled into one.  To anybody with an anti-Western agenda, she’s ammo.  So if I were those tour operators, I’d be making sure people who got on the bus weren’t dressed to insult.  Not because it will matter to the militant.  You can’t stop the militant.  But you can stop ordinary people from listening to the militant.  You can stop people from joining the militant, or having sympathy for his cause.  You can stop making the militant’s job easy.  In the end, there is something fundamentally wrong with the everyday Egyptian left cringing, clutching the family closer, one hand across their children’s eyes.

But I’m not a tour operator.  I work for a humanitarian organization.  And yet I ask the same questions and reach the same answer:  What about our behaviour as aid workers?  We need to stop wearing the day glo orange.  We need to stop making it easy.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Battle of the Models

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Can we all agree that my last post set forth definitive proof of the fundamental superiority of the aid industry’s business model?  Eat your heart out $600-per-share Apple!  Aid NGOs will be around long after the I-Phone’s fashion accessory status pulls a Milli Vanilli.  My mortgage is safe.

Or is it?  Like cassette tapes being vanquished by CDs, and CDs by MP3 format, even the most perfect business model can be destroyed by a paradigm shift, such as by the appearance of a new model.

There are plenty of threats to the aid model.  But we will survive our collective Whites in Shining Armour tendencies.  We will survive the continued politicization of aid.   We will survive the Somali Spring’s challenges to the humanitarian cartel.   We will survive because these problems don’t touch the business model.  The givers will still give.  What we will not survive is this ancient Chinese proverb:  “Forget the favours you have given; remember those received.”

When I first heard a different version of it – “If you help somebody, they should never forget; but if you help somebody, you should never remember” – Professor Li Anshan (a Chinese academic) was explaining the difference between charity and the transactional (mutual interest) aid proffered by China.  We humanitarians scoff at the idea of beneficiaries paying for charity.  Professor Li scoffs (though, I must say, much more politely) at the idea of philanthropy-based aid.  He writes: “China has never used the term ‘donor-recipient’ (a philanthropic idea) to describe China-African relations, using “partner” instead. China believes that assistance is not unilateral, but mutual.”

Back to favours.  Take your Uncle Ken, who goes on and on about the time he gave you his prize bass fishing lure because you forgot your tackle box.  Twenty years ago.  That’s the first thing about favours:  your Uncle Ken will never shut up.  Even after he passes away, his kids will remind you of the time he gave you that lure.  Favours are open-ended, indestructible, immortal.

Favours lesson #2:  the giving of the favour is worth far more than the thing itself.  What would a bass lure cost?  Five bucks?  If you’d paid Uncle Ken a fiver, a year later he’d never even remember the transaction.   That’s because the favour isn’t about the thing, it’s about the thing at a given time.  How much would you pay for a glass of water if you’re stuck in the desert?  So it might cost $1M to build a hospital in Sierra Leone, but that’s $1M Salone doesn’t have.  Enter, stage right, the aid industry, Johnny on the spot with a favour.  Voilà.  The hospital Salone will be hearing about for the next twenty years.

And then there is the Trojan horse effect of favours, of charity, because the thing you get is never yours.  If Apple sells you an I-Phone, Stephen Jobs (RIP!) couldn’t care less if you download porn with it.  Not so with charity – just try converting that hospital into a police post, or a pub.  Daily Mail: “Ungrateful government turns British Taxpayer millions into a brothel.”  Ditto for those tirades against poor people who use welfare payments to drink beer, bet on horses or eat Big Macs.  Favours:  they never go away and you never own them.  What does that sound like?  Power.

The thrust of Professor Li’s critique places Western aid at the center of philanthropic elitism.  I’d say it goes further: philanthropic subjugation.  Debt and power:  we know aid comes with strings attached.  But because it’s charity, because it’s a favour, this debt comes concealed in the form of a vague expectation, to be exploited in perpetuity.  As the proverb says:  Sierra Leone should never forget. That’s a pretty damned good return on investment. Better even than usury.  Like usury, though, it only works if the poor don’t have a choice.  Transactional aid constitutes a second option.

Building a hospital in Guinea in return for access for Chinese state capitalists to bauxite mines is an exchange.  It presents poor/powerless governments with the opportunity to “pay” for services rendered.  The debt is fixed in time and kind; the hospital is Guinea’s to use as Guinea sees fit.  There is no principle of humanity or compassion through which the giver then morphs into the self-anointed judge, loudly denouncing the human rights violations or the fragility of the government while reminding us all of the favours that have been delivered.

Isn’t it strange how the span of the favour receiver seems to become the business of the favour giver, as if privacy itself had been overcome.  Rather impudently, I once told a Sudanese official that if they didn’t like noisy NGOs cranking on about “sovereign” matters, they only had to make good on their sovereign responsibility to ensure their own people weren’t starving to death or being attacked.  With favour-givers like that, who needs enemies?

Let’s not romanticize China’s approach.  We all understand the underlying imbalance of the bargaining power.  The beauty of the Chinese model, however, isn’t in the equality of the practical arrangements.  The beauty of the model is in the origins of the proverb:  human dignity.

The charity model, the creation of a scheme of favours, installs human hierarchy:  giver/receiver, success/failure, superior/inferior, saviour/beggar, hero/victim, upright/genuflected.  Uncle Ken didn’t just do me a favour, he engaged in philanthropic subjugation. Next time I need a lure, I’ll buy one from Uncle Wu.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Taste of Our Own Medicine

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As a former lawyer fighting housing discrimination in New Orleans, I still get a wave of satisfaction when I see white people raise their voice in anger against the perceived injustices of affirmative action.  What!?  They hired an unqualified black guy instead of your Uncle Cracker? Almost magically, discrimination based on one’s skin color is transformed, from liberal bleating (more usually damned as political correctness) into a self-evident violation of fundamental human rights.

Tasting our own medicine may not appeal to our sense of a genteel enlightenment – after all, Two wrongs don’t make a right – but you can’t deny its effectiveness.  Getting shafted (i.e., “hoisted by one’s own retard”, to quote Lionel Shriver) makes for a pretty good teacher.  So how will we ever see the errors of our neo-colonial ways, let alone even recognize them, if we aren’t forced to wear the shoes?

Shoe switching to the other foot

Well, it’s starting to happen.  A friend forwarded me this story knowing that I worked in Angola.  Its former owner Portugal, having drag-netted the assets from the colony upon its precipitous 1975 departure, is now holding out the begging bowl.  There’s more:  look at the Eurozone’s desperation for China to pull a superman act with billions of bailout cash?  How delicious to see the self-anointed saviors of the world trading in their expensive loafers for a pair of sandals made out of recycled car tire.

But it hasn’t gone far enough.  It’s time for the tables of self-righteousness and superiority to be turned as well.  Why doesn’t Angola lecture Portugal on the bankruptcy of consumer spending beyond its means?  Why don’t they demand reform, and tie any loans or investment to a timetable of fiscal belt-tightening to be taken?  Why doesn’t China tell Sarkozy and Merkel that loans to help shore up the euro will be linked to improvements in the way France and Germany treat minorities? Or preconditioned on the dismantling of Fortress Europe? Or timed with the ending of agricultural subsidies that harm China’s allies in Africa? Now that would be interesting!  You can bet Western politicians will ring a few bells on the global hypocrisy meter.  I can almost hear the indignant, fist-pounding denunciations of the breach of sovereignty.  How dare China tell us…

A turn in the humanitarian tide

Warning!  We humanitarians need to watch our glee, lest we find ourselves staring at the same other side of the coin routine.  Will it not be long before an expat’s using the white SUV to buy Danone yogurt at the swanky suburban mall is branded no less an act of aid diversion than when the national staff stock manager pinches a bottle of paracetamol (and is fired)?  Or when an NGO using its hard won donations for the huddling masses is deemed no less corrupt for renting a luxurious multi-story compound than is the Deputy Minister of Health for redirecting a chunk of the healthcare budget towards the construction of a mansion in his home village?

Will you forgive me one last adage?  What goes around comes around.

Our Western Identity

The New Young Turks

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Having finally trudged through the post-holiday backlog of email, I ignored the pile of freshly printed reading to surf the crisis in the Horn of Africa.  I found an Al Jazeera story which I would call interesting on two counts.  First, for the fact of it.  And second, for the invisibility of that fact (i.e., that even people following the aid biz didn’t seem to notice).

The story is a fairly simple one, and I recommend reading the author’s full analysis. In August, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited a camp for starving IDPs in Mogadishu.  Can you imagine being equally unaware of a Sarkozy or Cameron visit to Somalia?  Or a UN ambassador like Angelina Jolie?  I mean, there’s more coverage of Obama eating a hotdog (actually, a chilidog, which is definitely more macho).   The visit was the move of a true world leader.  Not only the first non-African head of state to see Somalia in over 20 years, Erdogan took his wife and daughter, a clear statement that the war-torn capital of Somalia is not necessarily the Call of Duty shooting gallery we make it out to be.

The fact of this visit, though, is more interesting than the media non-coverage.  Here is the new direction not just of Turkey, but of the next wave of world players.  Countries like India, China, Qatar, Brazil and South Africa.  Countries that are heading to Africa for profit, influence, minerals and for the prestige long accorded to powerful Western nations/leaders doing the philanthropic waddle.  Erdogan’s visit was accompanied (already some weeks ago) by roughly $250M in Turkish donations to the crisis, mostly from the Turkish public.  I think (too late for dinner to research it) that’s more than UK public donations.

That fact alone speaks of a world that is changing faster than we imagine or plan.  I think of non-Western governments increasing their humanitarian spend, but actual public compassion and donation?  That’s supposed to be our Western genome, a unique manifestation of our goodness and superiority.  Apparently, there are even Turkish celebrities who play the humanitarian ambassador role, meaning you can see non-terrorist Omar Sharif looking guys visiting camps as well.  (Please don’t comment, I know Sharif wasn’t Turkish or a terrorist and I don’t really believe that all guys with thick black mustaches look alike).

To me, our Western thinking on aid still hasn’t grasped the sheer acceleration of the entry of other actors – governmental donors, aid organizations, and concerned publics – to the global arena of humanitarian action.   These actors don’t have colonial histories, don’t suffer the white man’s burden, don’t seek to moralize about human rights violations, and don’t necessarily subscribe to a model of aid based on charity.  All good news.  I’m thinking there could even be a job in this after MSF, working for one of the new global humanitarian leaders.

Our Western Identity

Opening Salvo: Ask the poorest for funding

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How does one inaugurate a blog?  If I wait for that deep inspiration, some 3 paragraph reflection that cuts to the bone of the humanitarian aid industry … Well, now you understand why I didn’t get this going last year.  The other strategy is to opt for a more simple debut by just starting.  

Forget DFID (oops: UKaid).  Forget USAID.  Forget even CIDA and SIDA.  Humanitarian aid agencies should start seeking funds from the foreign offices in the countries where they work.  Need money for a cholera treatment centre in Zimbabwe?  Why not ask Botswana, Congo and Ivory Coast for funding?  Need to mount a measles vaccination campaign in Nigeria?  Why not ask the government in Sudan for funding. 

Well, one rather obvious answer would be the unlikelihood of actually getting any money.  And we all know it’s all about the money.   One can only imagine the confused faces of Zambian bureaucrats when a billion per year INGO rep asks for money to run its projects in Bangladesh.   But one other answer, and the answer you’ll likely receive from these governments and INGO HQs themselves, is fundamentally wrong.   The poorest in the world will have turned an important corner when we all get rid of the answer:  “Because we are poor.”

Did anyone notice the news last week that South Africa will launch its own development aid agency?  (See the IRIN article here:   http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91651).  South Africa joins emerging powerhouses such as India, China and Brazil as recipients of aid who are now entering the hallowed ranks of the aid business.  Whether a ploy to boost the standing of the country, part of a strategic investment in foreign relations, or, contrary to that rash of cynicism, the governmental embodiment of compassion for those in need, I think it deserves a couple of thumbs up.

In other blogs, I’d like to examine this as part of salutary trend towards ending the Western hegemony of what we refer to as aid.  The Western donor-INGO duet could use a little competition.  But I’d like to focus on something else.  The act of standing up.  In the IRIN article, Ivor Jenkins, of the non-profit Democracy for Africa (IDASA), has this to say about the SA announcement:  “I do think it’s important for us as a country to start to have a sense of responsibility, and giving and not only receiving as we have for many years.’”  

Sense of responsibility.  That just about nails it on the head.  Western aid agencies have been taking increasingly damaging and certainly well-earned straight rights to the chin on their neo-colonial and/or neo-imperial attitude.  {I’ll be writing about that in future blogs).  We swagger through other people’s homelands, delivering the aid to the victims of the state’s own failure towards its people.  States don’t mind the aid, but aren’t quite as keen on the swagger.  Imagine that.  But some governments have had an easy time of playing it both ways, finger-pointing at neo-colonialism while hiding too easily behind neo-colonyism, the international relations equivalent of a Stepin Fetchit routine.  Poor countries as beggars who must shuffle through the corridors of the rich nations, whose economic and historic superiority impose an expectation of  moral duty to ship their money South.

The stereotype creates an existential split.  Not between wealthy countries and poor countries, as if those categories determined who should and should not give aid.  Certainly not between nations actually capable of sending aid to other nations and those incapable (Should Ireland be sending its cash anywhere?).  No, this is a split between those nations assuming the role of beggars or victims and those who assume the position of lord and savior.  More than acknowledging a sense of responsibility, SA’s move is a declaration that poverty is no excuse for the incapacity to help nations, just as wealth is hardly a guarantee for either compassion or generosity.

So future kudos to the first aid agencies that stop reinforcing the existential victimhood of governments in the developing world.  Let’s treat every government as sharing in the responsibility to come to the aid of people in crisis, both within and without their territory.  Let’s stop acting neo-colonial and ask governments to stop acting like neo-colonies. 

And kudos to the government of South Africa for embracing a lesson already being taught by poor people the world over.  If you look closely in places like Haiti, Darfur and Eastern DRC, you’ll find not places where the Western aid enterprise has saved helpless masses of people, but where the WFP convoy-sized gap in aid (2200 kcals per day!) is filled by the countless invisible acts of kindness between families, neighbours and strangers, all part of the same community of the abject poor.