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

Model Business

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The last post left off with the glow of my wife and I as givers; our sense of satisfaction, borne in the awareness of having done a good deed.   Let’s come clean:  this human sensation of good-doing pays my mortgage.  I suppose that’s old news.  The financial structure of the charity business places a primacy upon the organization’s relationship to the donor over its relationship to the beneficiary.  In terms of cash, the latter is perhaps a matter of image.  The former is a matter of existence.  The people (donors) who buy our product aren’t anywhere near the people who receive it, and that distance allows for a lot of bad aid (a well-beaten theme in this blog).

The money will flow so long as there’s a story or two, compelling photos, or a reality TV star so surprised to find poor people dying due to crap healthcare that he’s willing to sell his Ferrari and give the money to a hospital in Zanzibar.  As a business model, that’s pretty hard to beat.  Not sure, then, if I understand the stream of critics saying we NGOs need to learn from the private sector.  How many businesses have developed a model where cash comes in regardless of product quality?  Not Nike.  Not Apple.  Not Carnival Cruise lines.

The aid model is even trickier than just being able to sell an invisible product.  To begin with, there’s the religious push, imploring people to give in order to get to heaven.  Check out the Bible:  … and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35).  Or Islam, which consecrates Zakat as one of its five holy pillars. But there’s more!  It turns out giving goes deeper than a trip to paradise, which is a good thing considering the ascendancy of hedonism.

It seems humans are hard-wired to give.  Researchers believe that giving has a positive health effect on the giver (hmmm … taken to the extreme:  donation to a medical charity may improve the donor’s health more than the beneficiary’s?).  As UCLA psychologist Naomi Eisenberger puts it: “Because of the importance of support-giving for the survival of our species, it is possible that over the course of our evolutionary history, support-giving may have become psychologically rewarding to ensure that this behavior persisted.”

Turns out money can’t buy happiness, but giving it away can.  As other research shows, regardless income level, those people who spend money on others report greater happiness, while those who spend more on themselves do not.   I guess that explains the glow.

But the charity model’s biggest strength is a tendency for givers to overestimate the value of their gift.  At the consumer level, Christmas turns out to be a black hole, devouring value:  a billion of spending on gifts produces about 800 million worth of value to the receivers.  That’s bad math.  Even worse math in aid terms, because a fat chunk of giving gets nowhere near the beneficiary.  There’s my mortgage, for example.

So does giving destroy value?  Well, yes and no.  It’s a lopsided equation because it focuses exclusively on value to the recipient.   We could look at it differently.   Here’s a quote from another researcher, Arthur C. Brooks, from Syracuse University:

What many organizations misunderstand is who the “needy” truly are. In addition to those in need of food, shelter, education, the needy are also those who need to give to attain their full potential in happiness, health, and material prosperity—which is every one of us.

Giving to a charity as the moral equivalent of retail therapy!  Surrounded by beneficiaries, we humanitarians give blankets and cooking oil to the wretched and in the process give contentedness and self-satisfaction to the blessed.  Hmmm again.

I wouldn’t focus on donors, though.  I would focus on me.  On the aid worker.  We’re not exactly donors, but we are professional givers (assistance, help, protection, healthcare, solidarity, training, etc.).  Problem 1:  we therefore overestimate the value of our gift.  No wonder so many aid workers believe in the goodness of their work as a matter of faith, not measurement.  Problem 2:  If we are hardwired to derive pleasure from our work (which is far more than job satisfaction), doesn’t that create a powerful self-interest in our interventions?  In our self-perpetuation.   Now that’s a great business model.

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On the Limits of Doing Good

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OFFERED:  Used dog ball and toys

I found that gem on my local Hackney Freecycle, a terrific website designed to unite people needing stuff with people getting rid of stuff (see lessons learned on British plastic bags for a glimpse into the exciting world of marital bliss).

Can you imagine the dog whose owner collected on that offer?   Maybe a pug or Chihuahua accessory to an East London vintage girl; or perhaps some adoring chocolate lab at the heels of her strapping student master.  Imagine now its utter shame, entering the gate to Victoria Park, a hand-me-down dog ball for a toy. What latte drinking dog owner could be so cruelly cheap as to save the price of a dog ball?

But that’s only the start.  These are dogs, not people.   Imagine the poor dog’s pulse quickening in fear, its master blithely cocking his arm to toss the ball.  Imagine the fear of that poor dog!  It knows.  It knows from the holes in the used dog ball and it knows from the ball’s scent.  That ball belonged to a rotweiler. Or maybe a raging Doberman-pit bull mix.  That ball belonged to 50 kilos of canine killing power and there now is his owner, about to toss that ball out into the park. Imagine that poor dog scanning the horizon, scanning scanning scanning for the ball’s former owner to cock his head at the first whiff of his long lost toy and the simpering runt of a pooch running after the thing.

Now, where do I go with this?  How about the topic of fear?  We humanitarians struggle to convey what is often the most damaging element of life caught in crisis, the years of waiting for violence to leap out from behind the curtain of poverty and desolation.  It’s relatively easy to convey starvation, disease or actual violence , but for the most part, protracted, pervasive fear remains invisible to medical data and escapes capture in a photo.  Recall that time somebody appeared behind you on a dark street?  Now elongate that momentary distress over years.  Or maybe it’s the life of a Palestinian child who wets himself every time an olive branch bangs against the zinc roof of his home.

 That was a diversion, a case of indulging my solemn side. 

I’ve seen lots of oddball stuff on offer at Hackney Freecycle – pavement slabs, broken darkroom equipment, 17 assorted felt cuttings – but that used dog ball takes the proverbial cake.  It struck me as an icon for the limits of do-gooderism.  It’s a story of how the feeling of goodness surpasses actually having done some good.

My wife and I have been experiencing the sense of being good as a result of our giving.  It took me by surprise, as I’d been getting more and more miffed as time constraints killed off my plans to sell much of it.  So up onto the Freecycle website went the items we couldn’t carry over to the Salvation Army.  Often, the phone rings almost immediately, so eager are people.   

These are people with stories:  Joe, binding a stack of heavy duty moving boxes for his garden (??) and then carrying on the train to Dagenham; Enrico, starting a new business, sputtering off with a heap of ring-binders; or the fantastic Veronica, heading to the bus stop with our 180 cm tall book shelf (translation for the metric-impaired from showing-off American:  approx. six feet), the first piece of furniture for her new apartment.   A bookshelf on a London bus!  I wonder if the driver dared challenge her determination.   These are people who are grateful and seemingly thrilled with the idea of getting something useful for free. 

And there stood my wife and I, like proud parents, our furniture going out into the world, each piece a helping hand in the untold thousands of fresh starts happening right here in our little corner.  We basked in the glow of the giver, modern day Johnny Appleseeds.  Somewhere, a former dog ball owner is doing the same.

Next blog:  Part II on this topic, because that sense of doing good is what pays my rent.

Critique of Aid

Once Again, Wishing I Were George Clooney

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George Clooney just got himself arrested, protesting in front of the Sudanese embassy.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, was it his radiant smile as the cop ushered him along, but somehow his arrest didn’t quite remind me of that archetypal image, repeated over and over again in places like 1960s Mississippi, 1980s South Africa, or the Arab streets of last year, of protesters being hauled off to the certainty of beating, torture, rape or disappearance.  I suspect George will not have his face rearranged by interrogators.  I suspect our tax dollars will not pay for his water-boarding.

With a world still excited over the Invisible Children video phenomenon, the last thing the Sudanese government wanted was to become famous like Kony.  They should have paid the WDC police not to arrest the most handsome gray-bearded man on the planet.  And even if there are plenty of similarities between Kony 2012 and the oversimplification of the Save Darfur Campaign, I’m not going to complain much about the useful fact of celebrity catastrophe tourism.  Let’s give Clooney some credit, because like Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and some others, he has consistently made an effort, not just showed up at a few cocktail parties.

Celebrity altruism is at times comical, at times pitiful, and now firmly established as part of the humanitarian landscape.  As Madonna’s publicist explained to Mother Jones:  “She’s focusing on Malawi. South Africa is Oprah’s territory.”  See MJ’s clickable map of celebrity African do-gooding.     I guess I’m used to the idea of NGOs shamelessly exploiting celebrities, trading souls for search hits.    Celebrityism is just one more stunt, a questionable and yet undoubtedly profitable response to a world where American Idol losers are more famous than Omar Bashir or Joseph Kony or the entire nation of Chad. 

Should we question one children’s agency’s lucrative use of David Beckham, by all accounts a devoted father and footballer, simply because he’s pretty much a poster child for the sort of rampant materialism that’s consuming childhood itself, not to mention the idea of spending more money on a pair of underpants than 2.7 billion people earn in a week? Yes, of course we should, but it’s not such a big deal.

The more interesting story is the celebrifrication of the humanitarian crisis itself.  It is no longer just a question of celebrities shining the light of attention on a particular cause; it has become the interpretation or “reality” of that cause.  We increasingly perceive the disaster itself, be it the suffering of Somali refugees or the war in Nuba, through the eyes of movie stars, as opposed to the eyes of academic experts, humanitarians, or journalists.  Our views still exist, but who sees them?  Now, the story is the celebrity visit itself, not the disaster, and the suffering of others reaches us through the lens of their experience.  Here’s Sex in the City’s Kristin Davis fresh off the plane from Dadaab camp in Ethiopia. 

This is only partly sour grapes.  We should give some celebrities credit, for rolling up their sleeves and getting far deeper into the issues than many NGO CEOs like myself, who drop into major mediatized crises and demonstrate little timidity around cameras and starving babies. 

So as the celebrity experience of the suffering, catastrophe and crisis overshadows our own, who do we in the disaster cartel resemble?  Why, it’s the Somali, Congolese, or Sudanese people themselves, who we academic experts, humanitarians and journalists have spent decades rendering almost completely invisible.  Hooray for justice.

P.S. If you want to see a gray-bearded humanitarian take a stab at acting, click here.

Critique of Aid

New Kids on the Block

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Most madmen love the idea of fame so Joseph Kony’s wet dream just came true. He’s trending. He’s gone viral. He’s bigger than Victoria Beckham, Tiger Woods and Newt Gingrich all together. He’s still nuts, of course, but his madness has become the social media equivalent of a cuddly polar bear cub eating an ice cream cone.

Have you seen the stir caused by the success (over 50,000,000 views!) of Invisible Children’s video; of their campaign to stop butcher extraordinaire Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army? Check out Michael Wilkerson’s blistering critique, and then the critique of the critique (in the comments). The blogosphere is choked with aid agency pundits like me getting steamed by the sheer ego of Invisible Children.  Even the Ugandans are pissed off.  Although Obama jumped on the bandwagon.

Ok, they’re an easy target. A problematic approach to facts (oops, you mean Kony isn’t even in Uganda), a seemingly unprecedented exploitation of sentimentality (ugh, not his own oh-so-cute son again), ego so far beyond borders it becomes the ether of the message itself, a healthy dose of white-man-to-the-rescue-ism, and a “solution” that solves little . . . the critique is all spot on. Then again, what’s so new about any of that in the world of charity fundraising? Just look at some of the appeals launched around the Somalia crisis, Darfur, or, perhaps in the near future, the Sahel. Invisible Children isn’t that different. They’ve just raised the game.

So why, really, are we aid insiders so bothered? It’s the big green monster. Is there another charity whose message has captivated so many so fast? About six months ago, my niece “Lisa” in Chicago excitedly asked me to contribute to Invisible Children.  At the time, I’d never heard of it. I poked around. I can’t say I was taken by the cause, but I couldn’t help feeling envious of IC’s having so effectively reached Lisa, usually more interested in dance and boys. These young upstarts at IC are the next big thing. And we aren’t.

Why? Well, for one, they have a simple message that people grasp. For another, good looks. More importantly, Invisible Children has discovered what the entertainment industry figured out a decade ago. It’s not about us old timers. It’s not people who read the Philip Roth or contribute conscientiously to their pension fund. It’s about the under 25s, maybe even the under 15s. It’s about the kids. That’s why there are a couple dozen TV shows about teenage vampires. That’s why we have Jedward.

The aid industry has just been Biebered. IC’s hundreds of thousands of donor / activist – they were invisible to us.  Kids. That’s the target and that’s the message. If you think the aid world depends on gray haired HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals, aka rich folk), wait and see what IC does with its pubescent legions.

My advice to the aid industry? First, get over it. Then, get on the boat. Invisible Children has more than an audience, more than loyal donors. They’ve built a repository of faithusiasm that will make change happen. As a colleague of mine lamented, too bad we can’t do for tuberculosis or Eastern Congo what they’ve done for Kony. Invisible Children might well deserve our scorn, but we’d be smarter to take notes. They are schooling us in comms, mobilization and fundraising. While we try to exploit social media to improve return on investment, IC turned social media into operations itself.

They don’t have any shame, and they don’t have doubts.  They don’t have any hang ups about dreaming.  When was the last time any of us from inside the aid cartel conveyed a dream? Oh, and because I can’t resist, what’s one more thing IC doesn’t have? A sense of irony. With image after image of saluting school kids in uniform, they’ve built a business model on the commitment to cause and enlistment of children in the service of one man’s vision. When they finally get him, I bet even a madman like Kony will appreciate that.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Rest of the Story

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When I get nostalgic for folksy American journalism, I think of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” broadcasts.  In his rather unique delivery, Harvey would tell some story, hiding until the end the identity of its protagonist.  That was the surprise that transformed the rest.  Like a story about a kid who was so scared of heights, he was afraid to get on a playground swing.  The poor lad would have been mercilessly teased and abused a child, crying to his mama on a daily basis.  And then (after the commercial break!) Harvey would reveal that child to have grown up to become somebody like Orville Wright or Yuri Gagarin.

Now Saturday’s Observer brings us similar broadcast.  A fading superpower rides the high and mighty humanitarian horse of generosity, compassion and moral imperative into crisis. The good nation sends heavyweight envoys to demonstrate commitment.  They make thoughtful, pained pronouncements on the terrible suffering of the innocents.  The good nation scolds other actors into stepping up the response.   The good nation even organizes a conference to help stabilize the country, because it’s a very messy place.  Then, lo and behold, it turns out there is oil to be found underneath that mess; a failed state whose failure doesn’t bode well for extraction industries based in the good nation.  The countries?  The UK and Somalia.  “And now you know the rest of the story.  Paul Harvey.  Good day.”

I doubt very much that The Rest of the Story broadcasts would have lasted over thirty years if they contained such an anti-climactic finish as that one.  Sorry, you probably saw in coming.  And I have no doubt there will never be a self-contained “rest” of the story for Somalia. 

Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s International Development Secretary, strenuous denied the accusation, awarding the Observer’s journalist “the prize for the most cynical piece of journalism this century”. 

Unfortunately, sexy accusastions resonate a lot better than predictable denials.  (Odd, isn’t it, that the one thing retractions don’t have is traction?). Somalis will be repeating for two generations that we humanitarians were sent to their country because of the oil. Here’s Bashir Goth’s take on it:  “No politician and especially a British for that matter flaunt naked objectives. They have to be sugar coated with diplomacy and altruism.”  So billions of dollars of work is reduced to the colorful exterior of an M&M.

Apologies for repeating the message of the previous blog.  But humanitarian don’t need more nails in the coffin of our perceived integrity.  As if the good doctor were not enough.  A government like the UK working to advance its military, economic and security interests is, well, what a government like the UK is supposed to do.  

What is maybe more interesting is the rest of the story.  We humanitarians are often in search of our own oil, in search of the donations we are able to extract from our (marketing claims of an effective) presence in the Horn crisis.  Humanitarianism is increasingly constructed on this basis of extraction and exploitation.  Using misery to mine gold.  That doesn’t mean it fails to deliver good.  Ditto for the UK government in Somalia.  But we need to make sure Somalis like Goth aren’t writing the same thing about us.

Critique of Aid

The Good Doctor Calls

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“Dr. Shakeel Afridi is the unsung hero of the war on terror.”  So sings U.S. Congressional Representative Dana Rohrabacher in nominating Afridi for the Congressional Gold Medal.  (You can read his full speech here).   Humanitarians are well familiar with Dr. Afridi’s exploits, though perhaps somewhat less likely to heap praise:  Afridi is and will continue to be the unsung cause of a lot of deaths.

 Who is Afridi?  He’s the medical doctor who engineered a fake vaccination campaign in a certain part of Pakistan, allowing him to enter the house of Planet Earth’s #1 most wanted bearded man.  It was the good doctor’s intelligence that supported the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.  In essence, Afridi did for the widely held (and wildly exaggerated) belief that we humanitarians are spies or soldiers what Monica Lewinsky did for rumors of Bill Clinton’s philandering.  So when the al-Shabaab militia group in Somalia accuses UN agencies and NGOs of being the enemy, using that as an excuse to expel vital aid organizations from famine-stricken areas of Somalia, it is easy to label the Shabaab callous or insensitive or even murderous, but you can’t label them nutters.

 Afridi’s exploits create a shot heard round the world, the well-hyped example which transforms an obscure event into common knowledge.  I have a feeling it will live on.  For anybody with a sense of skepticism or suspicion, for people who need to trust their doctor, it’s a simple confirmation  that humanitarians aren’t what they appear to be.  Confirmation that the conspiracy theorists, gossipers, rumor mongers, and anybody else with a interest in stopping aid work aren’t just people with a loose screw. 

 About the only upside is this:  if people only suspect that we are secretly working for the CIA, maybe they won’t notice all the other ways in which we humanitarians do the bidding of others, be it a specific government, institutional donor, or that amorphous bogeyman, Global Power.  Thanks, Dr. Afridi, for improving our street cred as spies.

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My Job as a Bagman

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So what do you do when the honeymoon is over?  Move house. 

We’ve been in the throes of moving for the better part of two weeks.   I’ve got a fair amount of stuff and she’s got a fair amount of stuff, a term which in her case includes such sundries as the packaging for everything she owns, every shopping bag that has entered the premises, and two thousand record albums (including some truly great 70s era funk, soul and reggae).  Comparing our stuff is in this manner is unfair  – my life’s sundries are sitting in a buddy’s attic in New Jersey and, mostly, in my folks’ spare room.  Lawyers call that an “admission against interest”:  having Mom sort my stuff from time to time ranks pretty high on the Loser chart for somebody over the age of 30, let alone 50. It’s part of the humanitarian identity.

Anyway, moving involves throwing stuff out.  Not a little stuff.  Lots of stuff.  So I’ve now earned a PhD in the demise of the British Empire, as exemplified in their ability to produce a decent garbage bag.  I’ve been buying the “heavy duty” models; real garden and trash bags.  Green and black rolls.   These bags should be manly, designed to satisfy the deepest of macho DIY urges.  These bags should be the plastic equivalent of a crowbar or a paint stripping machine. 

Well, thus far, and I think I’ve been through the full assortment of bags on the market, the Brits seem to have a problem with the concept of “heavy duty”.  As far as I can judge, they mean bags suitable for heavy duty cotton balls, or maybe heavy duty pieces of Styrofoam.  Half of the makes are as see-through as the Sudanese government’s official reason for not granting a travel permit.  Shove in trash with edges, say a cardboard box or a rolled piece of carpet, and the bags split like pea pods in the summer sun.  Worse than that, they seem to split along pre-existing fault lines, splits straighter and quicker than the tear lines between two bags.

In my book, you shouldn’t have veto power at the UN Security Council if you can’t make a garbage bag that works.  And you certainly shouldn’t be flying war planes over the Falkland Islands, or menacing Syria’s dictators, or discussing the invasion of Iran.

I’m not one of those Americans who chant “USA, USA!” when an American helicopter flies over a ballpark, or thinks that American crap is any less crap than un-American crap.  But have you ever used an American garbage bag?  Maybe you’ve seen an ad for them.  A guy with pipes for arms fills one with tree branches, shards of broken window pane, maybe a little tornado-torn aluminum roofing, and then adds a box of rusty 3 inch nails.  Then they drive a Hummer over the thing, or shoot it with a concealed weapon.  Then throw in a full Encyclopedia Britannica to press the sharp bits into the plastic.  The thing won’t rip.   Not even holes.  You could carry tropical fish in it.  Or suffocate an enemy combatant being held indefinitely without trial.

That’s really all I wanted to say.  I know, this blog is supposed to be about humanitarian issues.  Apologies, my brain has been on leave for eight weeks.  So, to pull a rabbit out of a hat, here’s the moral of the story.  The presence of NGOs  in DRC or Haiti or Somalia may look like humanitarian aid, it may come in the same color and wrapping as humanitarian aid, and it may even have the same ”heavy duty” label as humanitarian aid… But that don’t make it humanitarian aid.

Our Western Identity

The New Black

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Apologies for the long delay between posts.  I’ve been busy taking care of a few little matters, like getting married and going on a honeymoon…

Returning to Heathrow yesterday, tired, I finished the 18-mile trek from the gate to the passport control hall.  Picture that cavernous space, vacant on the right (some unmanned desks) and largely empty on the left, where my wife was heading with her British passport.  In the middle, a dense block of humanity, switchbacked through the maze of ropes guiding non-EU citizens to their inquisitors. 

The block was not only dense, it was dark.  Suddenly it clicked.  The gates next to our Alitalia flight (we were returning from the Puglia region of Italy – the heel of the boot – which I can enthusiastically recommend) were filled by two planes from Jet Airways, another two from Kingfisher and Air India, along with Arik Air, which a Google search confirmed is a Nigeria based airline.  There was also an Etihad plane.  That’s not the same thing as a mix of passengers from Delta, Qantas and Air Canada.  That dark block would move slowwwwwwly.  It looked like 90 minutes of frustration. 

These aren’t the sort (read: color/nationality) of people who get waved through after a perfunctory passport check.  Sad but true:  years of experience in queuing for passport control all across Europe and North America informs me to pick the line with the fewest dark faces.  Also to be avoided:  turbans, skull caps and headscarves of any kind (save yarmulkes), and (increasingly) Chinese faces.  (Assuming the oh-so-wrong idea that there is such a thing as a Chinese face).

[At this point, I need to make a disclosure.  I asked an attendant if I could be put in the Fast-Track lane, usually reserved for the doddering and doolally or the 9-month pregnant, in order to catch up with my wife.  I was then surprised to learn that if we were travelling together, I could join her in the queue for EU citizens.  Yes, an official benefit of being married! I sailed through with her, 5 minutes max.  Another disclosure:  in my youth, I may have felt guilty, or even stood as a matter of principle with the downtrodden.  But I am no longer young.]

Back to humanitarian action.  Administrative delay already impairs aid work in some countries, including outlandish difficulties to obtain the necessary visas and work permits for entry.  Long gone (mostly) are the cowboy days of driving around Country X without first getting a few signatures.  The trend strikes me as interesting.  Will the growth of non-Western humanitarian NGOs allow aid recipient nations to institute a two-track system, with us inching forward in a snaking line of uncertainty, enviously watching others whizz through? (Much as exists today though in our favour, for example, in obtaining UN or institutional funding.).   What happens when our identity, our identification as White/Western/European/Northern agencies, increasingly acts as a steroid pump up for the iron fist of administration gripping our collective throats?  Will queuing sap our drive and verve and effectiveness?  Will we grow to resent our hosts as they don’t appear to welcome out gifts? 

Those are relatively pragmatic questions.  More importantly:  will we learn to accept the indignity of second-class citizenship?  It boils down to this: in humanitarian action, white is becoming the new black.  And how will we manage being black?  Here’s my guess: not very well at all.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Birthday Declaration

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On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 broadcast Andrew Mitchell, the UK’s Secretary of State for International Development, talked about the situation in Somalia.

Presenter – But as long as there is no effective government in Somalia, it’s very difficult to see how it will be sorted out […] and I quote ‘ Britain is going to deepen its involvement in Somalia’ is that right?

Mitchell – Well it’s right that we should deepen our involvement because Somalia is a very direct threat to the security of the UK.

Not content with explaining Britain’s commitment to saving lives in Somalia, Mitchell thought it important to scare us with this factoid:  there are probably more British passport holders in Somalia training to be terrorists than in any other country in the world.  

What?!  Security used to justify aid?  OK. Cue it up.  Here comes another pissy rant about “blurring of the lines”.  About how if something like food aid is in the interests of British national security then it will be in Al Shabab’s interest to block it.  About the ultimate arch villian of all aid workers, the dreaded “erosion of humanitarian space”. (Note for you blog fans who are not insiders: we’ve easily passed the million mark on publications, conferences, workshops and papers discussing the erosion of humanitarian space.  My research has shown that any actual erosion is the consequence not of aid’s politicization but of all the people who left aid work on the ground – you know, giving stuff to victims – in order to talk incessantly about why they can’t give stuff to people.).

Anyway, you guessed wrong.  I’m going cold turkey.  No more banging on about the fact that the military is building schools to win hearts and minds. Here’s a quote from my reflections on MSF’s 40th birthday, posted yesterday:  It is now, in middle age, that we acquire the maturity to accept what has always been true: it is ridiculous to expect governments, rebel groups, insurgents, criminal syndicates or national armies to adopt the benevolent positioning of a charitable organisation, and that the abuse of humanitarian aid is an enduring and inevitable component of the landscape in which we operate.

You should read the full piece, here at the Huffington Post (UK edition).  Shameless plugging.  Here’s another.  MSF published a new book, called Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed, which the French think is a catchy title.  The book delves into MSF’s compromise, the well-hidden part of our work where we “angels of virtue” (my favorite Paul Theroux term) sacrifice principles like independence and integrity at the altar of access, in order to deliver aid in perverted landscapes like Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Congo (or, more cynically, to ensure our own institutional relevance). 

You want proof of the book’s quality?  They didn’t accept my proposed submission.

Happy holidays to everyone.  Have a great new year.  We’ll be back, bigger and badder and funnier and more provocative than ever in 2012.  Sound familiar. That’s right friends, I have become aid itself, promising to finally get it right if you please please please keep believing in us.

This blog is supposed to spark critical discussion around current issues affecting humanitarian action. And have some fun. (For more, click on the ABOUT button).