Tag Archives: Perceptions

Critique of Aid, Politics

The “New” Humanitarian Fig Leaf

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You can’t stop a genocide with pills, food and blankets.  That simple truth can, however, become camouflaged by those very same pills, food and blankets.  In short, that old humanitarian bugbear, the fig leaf problem:  governments toss the hustle and bustle of relief efforts at a situation as a mask for political inaction.  In the churn of that virtuous activity, we all sleep in the comfort of our well-publicized “doing something about it”.  In the face of complex issues and hard decisions, politicians find an easy out.

It’s not a useless “out”, of course, but helps only in a limited way because the real problem isn’t displacement, hunger or illness, those are the symptoms.  Remember, humanitarians aren’t supposed to fix war or poverty, but we should cut the fig leaf effect by being loud about the need for a fix by those with the power to do so.

But is that the end of our fig leafiness?  In terms of its goodness, when you think of Switzerland, what do you think of?  I think of it as one of those relatively congenial nations, mostly full of fairness, benevolence and good chocolate.  The political neutrality of the Swiss probably goes a long way to this relatively benign impression of a state.  Thinking harder, the role of Swiss banking darkens the picture – wealth on the back of drug cartel and dictator loot.  But somehow an image of peace and tranquillity – literally, of bucolic mountain vistas – prevails.

A recent editorial in The Guardian commented on the seedy side, even of Swiss chocolate.  Child labor, dirty dealings in commodities like oil and sugar, and even noting that Darth Vader’s helmet has Swiss origins.  Then again, there’s always the Red Cross, one of the great, good things in the world.  The picture brightens.

I am used to the idea that our organizational activities might act as a fig leaf, veiling the real story behind staggering inaction to such diverse crises as the genocide in Rwanda, the earthquake in Haiti and AIDS (yes, even there, throwing medicines at a socio-political disease).  I am not as used to or comfortable with the notion that we agencies ourselves function as a fig leaf for the venal politics of nations.  It’s a fig leaf not so much as mask but as counterweight; PEPFAR funding as a balance against drone assassinations.  Does the former enable the latter, the way a mafia boss buys acceptance through a host of charitable donations?

Now we have China, Kuwait, Turkey and India all trying to join the humanitarian system.  I thought such “Western-style” charity functioned as a Louis Vuitton bag of statehood and success.  Conspicuous consumption of “have” status.  Now I wonder if they coveted something more than arrivée cred.  Now I wonder if they seek to be humanitarians as ballast for dirty deeds and bloody hands that come with BRIC power.

So now I wonder about we agencies, proud emissaries and flagbearers for the generosity of our patron states.  Who in this business thinks of Oxfam and Save as the Swiss chocolate of the British?  Ditto for CARE and World vision in the US and MSF in France or Belgium.  Who knew that humanitarian action wasn’t simply a fig leaf for the inaction of politicians – it’s a fig leaf for action as well.

[So much for originality.  I already published a paper by more or less the same title as this blog, looking at how “humanitarian protection” acts as a fig leaf.]

Ready for some viewing?  Here are two humorous (and old) takes on aid, plus two links to some great work by BBC Four that aired last week.

1.  The Onion’s send off of the Save Darfur movement.

2. Ricky Gervais’ Africa appeal. Hilarious.

3.  The Trouble With Aid.   Piercing documentary by BBC Four on the limits of aid in a messy world.  And then the panel dabate featuring yours truly afterwards.  For now, unfortunately, they’re s only available if you’re in the UK.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Corruption in Aid: Meat or Poison?

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Somewhere in the early 80s, hence more or less at the fringes of memory, I was sitting in Benjamin Couilbaly’s dusty courtyard, sharing a meal and some laughs.  His wife served a delicious meat and sauce dish, which we scooped with handfuls of tô, the millet-based paste eaten throughout much of Burkina Faso.  When I asked, he said the meat was “chat sauvage”.  Wild cat.  Fascinating. Some sort of local lynx or bobcat?  I’d figured all manner of wild cats had long been displaced or hunted out.  Then he explained.  A wild cat refers to your neighbor’s cat, when it wanders into your back yard.  Love that logic:  In a community where hunter-gatherer behaviour is still threaded through the cultural norm, it makes little sense to heap as much adulation on domesticated animals as we Westerners do.

Some interesting cyberdiscussion on the issue of corruption.  The big question being asked:  Does corruption undercut development/growth to the extent of warranting such a broken record of Westerners banging on about it?  The provocative Chris Blattman even asks if corruption isn’t an “Anglo-American fetish” (see also some of his posts this week).  ODI research jumps into the analytical fray – What are the effects of corruption, and what are the “inconvenient truths”?

The authors seem to miss an important boat as to why “Third World” corruption sparks such inflamed feelings.  Is it really only a belief that corruption is crippling poor economies?  Or the concerns of a politician like David Cameron, who worries about public backlash against the entire aid budget?

Now, allow me to bang on a bit.  Isn’t it also about the heroic myth we’ve created around aid itself – that it is formed in equal parts out of the virtue and action of us (Western) saviours, delivering the agencyless victims from certain doom?  Hence, theft of aid becomes murder of sorts, with children dying at the hand of the thief; and it becomes an act which blocks aid givers from reaping the rewards of their charitable action (on that, see my previous blog on the selfishness of giving, or in this first person account of overlooking corruption in order to preserve that reward).  Corruption is wrong, but it gets bucked up to the level of immorality incarnate.  And underneath all of that, corruption becomes a convenient, powerful, facile enabler of our own feelings of superiority.

To underline the Us/Them divide, corruption must also become deceptively unambiguous from a moral perspective.  There are probably lots of ways in which the term “corruption” is problematic.  But even thoughtful commentators seem to suggest that “theft is theft”.  Is it?   Is there any reader who doesn’t anger upon reading that some African politician accepted a boatload of cash to grant a political favour?  That’s corruption, right?  Theft.  Clear as day.

In much of the West, of course, being more developed nations, a certain sophistication leads to obfuscation.  Essentially, we’ve created legal or normalized channels to replace many forms of corruption, stripping away the ugliness to allow theft under a different name.  For instance, the web of election contribution rules which transform the immoral/illegal/corrupt purchase of a politician into a perfectly mundane act of election funding, or even free speech.

And in humanitarian circles?   Is theft always theft?  I think we’re back to the cat:  As the saying goes, “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”  As I’ve posted earlier, an expat using the agency’s white SUV to buy Danone yogurt at the swanky suburban mall is no less an act of aid diversion than when a member of the national staff pinches a bottle of paracetamol.  Guess who gets fired for it?  Guess who returns home to proud parents?

What about when a supersized chunk of the $5.2 billion donated for the Haitian earthquake ends up nowhere near Haitians themselves?  When it disappears into the maw of the saviours?  You know, all that housing, flights, conferences, consultancies and, of course, yogurt?  Into what black hole did that aid money disappear?  Mugabe’s Swiss bank accounts?  Or my British one?

Yes, I do think we have a fetish with the corruption of others.  But that’s really a fetish with self-preservation, because with less biased analysis, humanitarian scrutiny of corruption may not travel so far afield.

[Wanted to react on this topic.  Back to the analysis of humanitarian principles in the next blog]

Critique of Aid, Health, Our Western Identity

What’s a Little Aid Between Friends?

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[Apologies for the gap!  Been too busy.]

Whenever I open the internet the same vital message greets:  “Medical Aid Where it is Needed Most – Independent, Neutral, Impartial.”  That’s the top of MSF-UK’s web page.  Here’s the current headline:  Hurricane Sandy  MSF Teams in New York to Help Those Hardest hit by Sandy.  It has been a top story on the website for over a week.

The last few blogs have looked at the core humanitarian principles.  Not about how they come under attack by those opposed to our brand of goodness – badboy militia groups, depraved dictators and Western leaders who want aid to do their bidding – but how it these lofty values have Savile-ized by us, humanitarians who enshrine these principles in the Ark of their very being.

Impartiality is a particularly directive principle.  It instructs that humanitarian aid doesn’t go to your friends and neighbours just because they are needy; decisions can’t be based on religion, ethnicity or relationship to the country’s finance minister.  That leaves only one legitimate basis for decision-making:  need. And it implies finding those most in need rather than simply needs per se (i.e., go to DRC and everybody has needs, but where are they greatest?).  As Mark Bradbury concludes:  Assistance that is policy-driven, rather than provided on the basis of need, is no longer humanitarian.

In theory, impartiality works pretty easily in a health clinic – take the malnourished infant with malaria before the pregnant woman with a broken finger.  It gets harder as the distance grows.  Behind Door #1 Syria: violence and displacement and war-wounded. Behind Door #2 Chad: pockets of malnutrition, measles and very poor health services or infrastructure.  How do you compare suffering?

It’s no secret (actually, sadly, it is) that the major aid agencies have bent their principles in self interest, or because means were deemed less important than ends (see “Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed” for an MSF compendium of compromise).  Home society operations like those in NYC lie at the crossroads of humanitarian action and institutional needs.  It’s only a few years ago that MSF was running operations in Luxembourg, for chrissake.  GDP is over $106,000 per person. If there, then emergency botox in Beverly Hills makes sense.

Questions have always surrounded the medical impact of these missions, which can appear almost frivolous when juxtaposed against the massive needs in places like DRC or Sudan.  Normally, though, the organization admits a certain degree of self-interest in mounting these missions, a certain acknowledged violation of impartiality.  The rationalization comes later: these activities are, after all, comparatively insignificant.

But what happens when we no longer acknowledge the compromise?  What happens when we claim to be justified in these interventions, on the basis that we have responsibilities as a civil society actor?  No doubt whatsoever that Sandy has provoked health needs in the NY/NJ area (although far greater ones in Haiti, like the increased cholera to which MSF is responding, though in comparative obscurity judging by our own websites).   But if there had been no MSF in the US, would the organization have sent in the troops?  No way.   So what does that mean for impartiality?

As MSF sections in Greece and Spain look in their own back yards, they too find health needs: health systems making drastic cutbacks under economic austerity measures that offer succor to banks and pain to people.  I understand the push in headquarters, the outrage of our Greek staff and donors,  the push from the local community, and the pressure of expectation.  A little compromise is fine, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s just between us.  How to explain to the Greeks who are living this mess that their MSF can’t respond to their crisis?

Well, we do that sort of explanation all the time in countries where there are greater needs though, of course, less affiliation.  There, we are a global actor, magnanimous to offer assistance and hence privileged to deny it.  There, we sometimes go home, as has been done in the face of stunningly bad, though “developmental”, health needs:  closed programs in places like Angola, Liberia or Sierra Leone.

The key point here is that a humanitarian organization must maintain its legitimacy precisely through its refusal to be a civil society actor; through a clarion refusal to privilege localized constituencies over the only constituency that we possess – the whole of humanity. Impartiality operates from the starting point that all human life is inherently (and equally) precious. The idea of preferential treatment should be anathema to humanitarian action, and we must fight the urge to privilege the needs of people who are, literally, close to home.

Why send doctors to Brooklyn?  Well one reason is that there are people there in crisis.  But what level of unmet medical needs in the wealthiest nation on earth?  So it is also because decisions are driven by television, by a social and political proximity to the victims.

As Nick Stockton has put it:  “‘[T]raditional’ humanitarian assistance is concerned first and foremost with the task of saving lives in imminent danger, the notion of a moral or political ‘triage’ that somehow separates the deserving from the undeserving beneficiary, is for many humanitarians ethically repugnant.” Acting upon a supposed responsibility as a civil society actor equals political triage. In the end, there is something fundamentally contrary to humanitarian action and to impartiality if we intervene on the basis that some victims are more deserving than others because of their relationship to us.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Working in Humanity

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It’s the whine.  God, I hate that whine.  One mosquito in the room and my ears prick up, straining for a location.  But maybe it’s not the whine that makes me nuts.  Maybe it’s the anticipation, the anxiety of the future bite.

In a place like Ivory Coast or Congo, that anticipation comes loaded.  An itchy bump is one thing.  Your child’s face, eyes pinched almost shut by malarial swelling, is another.  Now switch to Pakistan.  Mosquitoes are unswatable there.  And they’re present day and night, insistent, watching.  Worse still, they’re loaded not with disease but with the firepower to take out a house.  “Mosquitoes” are the way some Pakistanis refer to the drones that hover in the sky, placing them in a perpetual state of terror.  Children peeing in their pants and grown men tossing from nightmares. This new age of remote warfare is ugly, ugly policy, isn’t it?

Here’s a riddle Frank Gorshin would be proud of: From the perspective of the recipients, what’s the difference between a village being vaccinated by our angelic forces of good (yeah for the humanitarians) and a village being vaccinated by the US military as part of a campaign to win hearts and minds (boo for the commandos)?   Many would answer that there is none; that only we humanitarians would insist on our action as humanitarian and action as perversion of aid.  To justify this arrogance, we fall back on the principle of humanity.  As in:  we have it, they don’t, and that makes us better.    Humanity is our opposable thumb.  It’s what sets us apart.

Oddly, humanity sometimes disappears when we discuss humanitarian principles, but it’s mightier even than impartiality or independence or the right to be driven around in a white Landcruiser.  Humanity is the double-barrelled motivation for our action:  compassion which draws us to aid those who suffer combined with the idea that all people together form one human body, possessing a fundamental and inalienable dignity.  Without humanity, it may be a good thing (think relief assistance, military aid), but it’s not a humanitarian thing (even if it may still be a good thing, like other forms of aid or relief).

Truth is, you can’t really infer humanity because an NGO is constructing a feeding center; and infer self-interested counter-insurgency strategy when the military does the same thing.   Or infer only a profit motive when it’s the private sector delivering the aid.  I’ve met military health personnel who were genuinely motivated by that sense of compassion, even if their superiors ordered the actions for different reasons.  I’ve met plenty of corporates, who do it because they want to help, even if the corporation does it for the PR.  Not unlike, I might add, the situation where one of us self-anointed guardians of humanitarianism intervenes because there’s a fundraising interest.

The commonness of “we’ve got it, they don’t” ideology betrays its importance to humanitarians.  It’s part of our self-identification.   So we bristle with the idea that the military could be doing our good work because we don’t want to be like them.  In fact, we want to oppose our actions to theirs.  I get that.  Our opposition, though, is not directly about the individuals in the military, it’s about the institution.  It’s about the whole shebang. It’s about mosquitoes.

At a certain point, principles and values must pervade an organization, not just lots of the individuals in it.   Can a government killing civilians and terrorizing communities really also claim to embrace the principle of humanity?  Water boarding, Shock and Awe, Cast Lead…   No.  It doesn’t work that way.  When judgment day arrives, the list of good deeds isn’t a get-out-of-hell-free card.

My colleague PM recently returned from a visit to MSF’s field mission in Somaliland.  Usually quite jaded, and certainly not one given over to sentimentality, she writes:  The team here are extraordinary and make me very proud to be part of MSF. They hail from all corners of the globe; there’s a couple of Kenyan Kenyans, a couple of Somali-Kenyans, the obstetrician is from Beijing, the ER doctor from Cuba, the surgeon from Italy. There’s a couple of Danes, and a couple of Belgians, and a very very nice English guy . . .  Many have left their wives, husbands, children at home to do this work. None are motivated by the money; it’s the focus on the patients they like, they tell me. These are not just good people, they are the best kind of people . . .  true ‘humanitarian’ compassion exists here.

What do we make of an organization full of such people, compared to the sort of organization that spends its time deciding how to accomplish its goals through the use of violence?  Or figuring out how to feed people in order to earn a profit?  I don’t work for those organizations.  I work with humanitarians.

Yippee?

Not so fast.  I work with a lot of people who might be surprised by PM’s declaration that staff are in it to help people.  Many don’t believe that our Kenyan or Haitian or Pakistani colleagues are motivated by compassion.  The corridors in our Western HQs grumble with the “unfairness” of our current salary structure, whereby “they” are paid a Western salary, which is a really really high salary for them, rather than the pretty crummy one it is supposed to be for us.  The corridors grumble with the belief that they don’t do it for the same virtuous reasons as us.  It’s our volunteerism versus their best paying job available.  And our corridors don’t grumble at all with the rules which are based on ascribing traits and abilities to people based on their nationality, ethnicity or race.  Did you know that local staff can’t be objective, so you need expats?  Did you know that being Congolese is a mark of corruption?  Or, in reverse, did you know that we expats are all racists?

And then there is the way we treat each other, myself also a part of a directorship full of Alpha males who at times thrive in an atmosphere straight out of a NATO war room, less the holsters.  Or the disappearance of diversity as one climbs the corporate ladder.  Or looking around at the humanitarian circus, where agencies abuse children to raise funds, or launch advocacy campaigns that are every bit as political as, well, politicians.  When ends justify means, humanity becomes a takes a black eye.

We may not shoot people, but we spend a lot of time endorsing an us/them logic, one that, as a rationale, perfectly echoes the root cause of conflict, terrorism,  ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Humanity cannot be occasional or segmented in a humanitarian NGO.  Humanity cannot belong only to the act and actions of the caregiver, logistician or teacher.  It either functions as a principle occupying the very heart of the organization itself, or its absence instructs that we are not humanitarian.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Development vs. Independence

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When a pseudonymous filmmaker put out the laughable, execrable Innocence of the Muslims, did anybody foresee a KFC getting torched?  Not to mention a Hardees.  (Which begs the question:  When was the last time anybody outside of Tennessee even noticed a Hardees?).   Apparently, these heart disease outlets are symbols of the USA, a nation that is being held responsible for Sam Bacile’s vile film.  Just yesterday on BBC, a British military expert referred to it as “the U.S. film,” as if it were an official product of the State Department.  Funny that sort of attribution.  Seems unfair.  Like holding the entire Muslim world responsible for 9/11.

There is no link from bad fast food to American foreign policy (let’s not quibble about U.S. Govt efforts to help U.S. corporations establish overseas markets).  Yet the perceived link is as real to rioters on Lebanon’s “Arab Street” as salt in a Big Mac, isn’t it?

That’s the lesson for independence in humanitarian circles:  we NGOs can’t fully control perceptions; we can only improve our chances.  Independence is factual:  being able to make decisions and then implement programs in such a way as to ensure impartiality trumps political opportunism (i.e., that aid goes to those most in need).  And independence is about what people think.  What does KFC have to do with the American government?  And what does the American government have to do with Bacile’s film (“Sam Bacile” and “Imbecile”:  curiously close!)?  Sometimes, it doesn’t matter.

ALNAP’s recently released State of the Humanitarian System report raises the concern of a growing split between “traditionalist” actors, like MSF and the ICRC, and multi-mandate organizations, like Oxfam or World Vision. (Scroll down on ALNAP’s site if you want to see a video of yours truly in action).  Tellingly, it concludes that “many humanitarian organizations have themselves also willingly compromised a principled approach in their own conduct through close alignment with political and military actors” (SOHS p. 79). Bingo.  That’s your first step to a burned down chicken shack.   But what does this compromise look like up close?

There is the obvious acceptance of funding for programs, especially for work in war zones, from Western governments that are one of the belligerents.  Most international NGOs really struggle with those decisions, attempting an impossible calculation between benefits of the program versus negative consequences for the NGO.  Will “they” shoot at us if we take U.S. Govt money?  Will “they” give us access?

Less obvious for some reason are the ways in which agencies go further than accept government funding.  Responding to the recent Cabinet shuffle in the UK, here’s what Christian Aid had to say about the departing head of Department for International Development (DFID):  “Andrew Mitchell can leave [DFID] with his head held high. He has been a passionate defender of the need for the UK to help people living in poverty around the world.”   That sort of asskissing is so commonplace many NGOs no longer even register its existence.  Here’s Save the Children’s UK CEO, saying that he “completely” trusted David Cameron’s Conservative government on aid and development.

In an astute blog, Jonathan Glennie casually concludes that “Pandering to power is an inevitable part of being a large international charity or research organisation these days; it’s where much of the money comes from.”  Say what?  Inevitable?  Like death and taxes?

The issue goes beyond money.  It goes to achieving organization objectives.  And the relationships go much deeper than offering public praise (which, btw, DFID strongly “encourages” for NGOs receiving funding).   This is not self-promotion, this is partnership.  Many large NGOs must actively cultivate a public, political relationship with a government.  In 2009, Save UK hosted the Conservative Party’s launch of its aid policy.  Right now, Save is preparing to host the Labour Party’s annual conference on int’l development.   Another example:  Islamic Relief co-hosted a Ramadan dinner with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (that’s not the aid bunch, that’s the politicos).

Beyond partnership, there is the co-mingling of staff.  Lots of NGOs hire directors from the ranks of the political world.  This is a matter of hiring skilled, connected leaders.  Positive impact?  Loads.  Negative impact?  Hard to measure, but a full 30 years after Bernard Kouchner left MSF, the organization still had to issue press releases to distance itself from his actions as French foreign minister.

Let’s get something straight.  I’m not being critical.  Really.  Well, sort of.  This “partnering” has become a policy, not just a practice.  In other words, one NGO’s pandering is another NGO’s advocacy strategy.  Check out journo Peter Gill in his excellent Famine and Foreigners: ‘The intimacy between Oxfam and the Labour government was defended on both sides […] An impressive national consensus was built in Britain around the merits of aid which after decades of [Conservative party] scepticism was endorsed by […]David Cameron.”  (pp. 179 – 180).  Gill was critical of the relationships, but he’s right to realize that they proved an effective vehicle for change.  And lest the sanctimonious pretend they are different, here’s MSF showing some love for none other than the heavyweight champ of drone missile diplomacy, pushing the agenda for HIV/AIDS funding.

The problem lies in the multi-mandate status of most large humanitarian NGOs.  When it comes to development programs and policy campaign objectives, creating a close and public relationship with key governments is crucial to ensuring success (e.g., adequate aid flows, effective policy).  The cosier the better – politics makes for mundane bedfellows as well – even if their new best friends also happen to be shooting up a few war zones.  Put simply, there is little imperative for a development organization to safeguard the perception of independence. The oops factor comes from the fact that development is only half the story of some NGOs.

In the end, the difficulty for big charities to demarcate and safeguard their independence from government blots out the NG in NGO.  In the UK, carrying the Minister’s bag means carrying the bag of the man who said “Using the UK’s aid budget to secure progress in Afghanistan will be my number one priority … Well-spent aid is in our national interest. Nowhere in the world is this case clearer than in Afghanistan.” (UK Minister for Int’l Development Andrew Mitchell, July 2010).

That sort of co-mingling has an effect.  Look, not even people in the same country will trust your motives.  When Save recently highlighted the problem of hunger in Britain, people uncomfortable with that message undermined it by suggesting there was a rat loose.  As reported in the illustrious Daily Mail, “Conservative MP Brian Binley told civilsociety.co.uk he had general concerns as Justin Forsyth […] had worked for the last Labour government”, and suggesting that the report’s alarm over hunger in the UK was part of a “political agenda”.   Turn now to people in foreign lands.  With guns.  Or a sick child.  As I have written before, in the midst of humanitarian crisis, independence goes to the heart of aid, to its integrity.

Which brings us back to KFC.  Bad enough that independent Western NGOs may be targeted as a way of venting anti-American or anti-Western suspicions and anger.  What happens when it turns out that these NGOs actually helped fry the fowl?

Critique of Aid

Where is Development’s Dawn?

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“Being disabled is in the mind, if you don’t accept it, then you can do anything you want.”  That is Ghanaian wheelchair racer Raphael Botsyo Nkegbe.  If you’ve followed the Paralympics, you’ve no doubt heard similar statements. One thing for sure, it is definitely in the mind.  But whose?

Now hundreds of great sporting performances later, many pundits have announced the dawn of a new age for the disabled.  Mainstream media and public sentiment seem to have embraced the plot of sport and competition and achievement over spectacle and pity.  Could it be that we have truly turned a corner in our treatment of people who do not look like the people in magazine ads, even if none of us really look like the people in magazine ads except in so far as limb count?

Or could it be something else, such as the conspicuous, slightly uncomfortable invasion of the ranks of the disabled by strapping veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  These are people we cannot fault for their disability (i.e., not wheelchaired in a gang shooting or drunk driving accident or stupid diving board stunt).  They grew up with us, not ghettoed by disability, not shunned from sight to the same mental closet as those with Down’s syndrome or cerebral palsy.

No, methinks we are not callous enough to place the vet in that closet.  Even opponents of war cannot escape the sense that Paralympic rower Nick Beighton, his two legs blown off by an al Queda IED, is heroic.  Is a normal guy.  Is a casualty of a democracy in which we the people have sent him to that blast.  (For the link to the aid biz, see my blog on how we market to the public a victim who is worthy of their donations, because innocent of his or her suffering.).

There is an idea in Nkegbe’s and Beighton’s and Pistorius’ determined self-definition – wresting control of one’s identity from the judgment of others – that appeals to me on an intuitive level.  Yet I struggle not to see disability.  I get it that Patrick Anderson is a wheelchair basketball scoring machine who could probably knock down 8 out of 10 from the foul line.  Translation:  he possesses a degree of hand-eye coordination that is, in comparison to my own, roughly equivalent to the relative difference (advantage mine) in our mobility.

Yet I don’t feel disabled.  And nobody perceives me as disabled.  Nor do I risk being defined or limited as a person because of what I cannot do as a result of my mediocre athletic coordination.  Ditto for speed or strength or any other physical traits – they define much about me, certainly how successful I might be in sport (or, for that matter, dance) – and yet the skills I don’t have don’t stand out as holes.  My coordination is not missing.  It’s not made of metal.  When I look at Beighton, when I think about his lost legs and what that must mean for his life, I still come to this dreadful word:  disabled.

As a subject of study, the depths of identity are far better plumbed by others.  We all get it that the world creates these categories of dysfunction or “abnormality” by making, at an almost pre-conscious level, judgments against the backdrop of a “normal”.  This normal becomes a standard, and is of course heavily weighted by our common, contemporary set of capacities. In contrast:  the synonym for people like sprinters Oscar Pistorius and Jonnie Peacock:  they are invalids.  Not valid.

Switch now from the fields of sporting endeavours to the fields of sorghum in Burkina Faso.  Switch now to poverty, to the “have nots”.  Switch to the third world, developing countries, lesser developed countries, and the global south.  What makes these labels?  What makes these countries so disabled?  Well, let’s avoid that debate and just agree that it’s something like per capita GNP.  In other words, wealth.  So who decided on that?  Who decided that societies should not be ranked according to the rate of marriage failures, or the number of unwanted teen pregnancies, or levels of drug addiction, or the percentage of old people who spend most of their life separated from family, or the number of adults who follow Rihanna on Twitter?

The real question, though, isn’t who decided the rating system by which nations are placed into the category of disabled.  The real question is this:  how do we launch the dawn of a new age in which these nations, and the billions of people in them, do not define themselves as disabled? How do we arrive at a world where huge chunks of humans do not think of HD TV or paved roads the way we think of Beighton’s missing legs?

I have no idea whatsoever.  But I have a feeling it is that very internalization of the identity of being disabled which is the true disabler.  And I have a feeling that this is the overarching challenge to development.  It slaps a giant “PART OF THE PROBLEM” sticker on the back of the aid industry. There, it is a matter of mind, a matter of definition that the Third World should see disabled when they look in the mirror.

Health, Our Western Identity

Baby Helmets for the World

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Yummy!  There’s a Whole Foods Market in Stoke Newington.  That consumed an hour yesterday afternoon.  And about 50 quid.  The excitement mounted as I meandered through that bastion of American food and health branding.  Dare I admit to titillation at the prospect of real pretzels and something besides mayo-based sauce to put on a salad?  Or Mexican style salsas that aren’t made by Old El Paso, which seems to be the only brand sold in Britain, which is like having 65 million people who think the Ford Fiesta is the only car in the world.

Part of the WFM experience involved discovering Kallo Low Fat Rice Cakes.  Think about that for a moment.  Low fat rice cake.  That’s not exactly the same thing as a low fat English breakfast.  The label boasted 0.2g of fat.  What do you figure, that’s down from 0.3 grams?  Maybe 0.4g?  (Just for comparison sake, a rather basic version of a Full English boasts about 400 times more fat).  Oh, and a pack of Kallo’s Low Fat Rice Cakes costs £7.64, which is only slightly less than the price of platinum on the basis of weight.  People are willing to pay for health.

Our visit to Whole Foods Market came just after getting lost in Abney Park Cemetery, a hidden gem that’s part graveyard and part medieval forest.  Reading the 19th C gravestones there, it’s hard not to remark the ordinariness of children or young adults dying.  Cut to 20 years ago:  walking through Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans, digesting the significance of family headstones with three or four children perished within a stretch of three weeks.  Makes you realize how far removed many of us have become from the reality of the human condition being nasty, brutish and short.

In the chasm between “haves” and “have nots”, we can conjure many dividing lines:  The digital divide, the education divide, the life expectancy divide.  Yet I find it hard to imagine a deeper division than the one in which the “haves” side includes a chunk of people suffering panic attacks over the fat content of a rice cake.  The luxury of that effort, the obsessive nature of that fear, the idiosyncrasy of that market all point to a rarefied environment, to say the least.

So we must ask:  How many of us shoppers at Whole Foods think of ourselves as rarefied (read: nutters) as opposed to normal arbiters of healthy living?  How close is that luxury/obsession/idiosyncrasy to those who hold power in the humanitarian business?  And how far removed is it from the world of the beneficiary?  What does this gap say about the values underlying aid programs dealing with health?  We must ask these questions because the removal – the distance – is not so easily contained to the many absurd disparities between a society in which hunger is a permanent and defining ache and one in which people study the labels of organic yoghurt as if reading the instructions to defuse a bomb.

No, the distance here is generated by the value assigned to health and, perhaps, to life itself.  It is that value – the hyperinflation of health – which underpins our worrying about the fat content of aerated rice flour.  We come from societies “evolving” to the point where the minute risk of ill health or injury prompts such overly protective behaviour as the baby helmet or the craze for umbilical cord banking.  Here lies a fundamental disjunction between medical humanitarian and beneficiary, one largely invisible to us.  How else to describe our obsession with their health; with our overweening valuation of their health more than their own valuation of it?

OK.  We live in a different world. I guess my question is the degree to which we unwittingly export our world, or impose it; to which we remain blind to our way not being the only way.

When Somali elders prefer a cataract surgery clinic to primary healthcare for their community, do we listen to their request or overrule their unenlightened undervaluation of the health of a two-year-old?  When a Sudanese woman runs a risk by not bringing her child to the clinic, what is our reaction?  Do we question our own alarm at that minimal risk?  Or do we construct an entire narrative of victimhood, where she is forced to make such a “bad” choice in order to collect firewood or care for her other children?  Or do we construct a narrative of her ignorance, where she doesn’t understand the consequences of her own actions?  We export, in other words, our valuation of risk.  Will the humanitarians of the future insist she walk three hours to pick up her baby helmet?

When a Zimbabwean man refuses to wear condoms or stop visiting prostitutes, what is our reaction to his running the risk of catching/spreading AIDS?  Do we accept his choice or, again, construct an idea of his ignorance?  More importantly, do we even register our imposition and increasingly commercial marketing of biological longevity as some sort of universal right?  Do we recognize in ourselves the front men of a pharmaceutical industry whose wet dream is a world population sucking down as many pills as we do?  What of his response to our attempts at steering him on the right path; at our incessant moral hectoring and ever-so-repetitive educational demand that he change his behaviour?  Some days, I think we miss his response altogether:  “Hey, you, loosen up.  Chill out.  Eat some deep-fried food.  Live a little!”

Politics

Secret Agent Man

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Anyone out there remember James Bond’s funeral?  Yes, Bond died.  Sort of.

The burial at sea of MI6 ace spy comes early in “You Only Live Twice”.  Seems the cloak of having died was necessary for 007 to foil SPECTRE’s capturing of US and USSR spaceships, which threatens British high tea with the unsavoury effects of nuclear war.  Key to the plot is Bond going undercover, becoming a Japanese fisherman in a small island village (near the fake volcano island being used by Blofeld as a secret rocket launch station and underground base).  He marries a Japanese secret agent (named, as they are, Kissy Suzuki) and settles into village life with neither fanfare nor, apparently, the notice of any of the other villagers.

Are you following this picture?  Sean Connery circa-1967 disguises himself as a Japanese fisherman after a wee bit of surgery to make his eyes look slanted.  In fact, it looked like somebody put scotch tape on his eyebrows.  That’s the same Connery who emerged bare-chested from the surf in “Dr. No” and looked no less unlike a Japanese villager than Lassie.  That stretch of the imagination is called Hollywood.  See also, John Wayne playing Genghis Kahn.

Out here in the real world, though, spies probably don’t stick out quite so sore thumbly, as it’s bad for business; worse for health.  Spies in the real world probably look like people on TV, even reality shows.  They probably look like well, you or me (even if we would never agree to be on a reality show).  That means they probably look like NGO workers.  Recent news suggests that they may in fact be NGO workers.

First it was the Norwegian government admitting that its secret service had agents inside Pakistan, which was widely understood to mean NGO workers.  Then, last week, the Dutch government saying that it used journalists to spy on the Chinese.  Ouch!  Those are the good governments; the ones with actual moral scruples.

Well, that news fits the times.  I blogged on the CIA’s recent use of a fake vaccination campaign to identify and kill OBL.  Here’s how that myopic action is playing out right now, in Northwest Pakistan, where military commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur refuses to permit polio vaccination, because “spies could enter the region under the cover of vaccination teams to get information”.

Add on top of that the way we here in the West usually view NGOs as organizations where the NG means something, but NGOs in many parts of the world are very G, amply and expressly tied to the interests of the rulers or the State itself.  So it would be perfectly normal for people in the countries where we work to be suspicious of our self-proclaimed neutrality and independence to begin with.

What now?  It’s not like humanitarian agencies have policies on what to do with spies in the house.  Presumably, we’d strap them to a table with a laser beam inching its way towards their groin.  In the absence of a laser, we could terminate their contracts, although that’s not really the same thing as having a policy on the issue.  (Interestingly, we sometimes “know” that one of our national staff is a spy for the host country.  And what do we do?  Nothing.  It’s not a bad thing – helps create transparency (i.e., the security goons in the government can see what we’re up to)).

Do NGOs have responsibility to do a better job of protecting their integrity and neutrality against infiltration?  Do we have a duty to vet more robustly our employees?  NGOs typically perform a criminal records check, but I’m relatively certain there’s no website to verify if somebody isn’t a CIA assassin.  Random lie detector tests?  Push governments to publicly disavow this abuse?  Make it a criminal offense for a government to do this?  Ignore the issue until it becomes “common knowledge” that there are spies in the house?  Ignore it until our beneficiaries have suspicions about us?  Until they fear talking to us?  Until people warn them against talking to us?

Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Why would anybody with my background and training do this job for so little pay?  Well, I’m exposing this issue in a blog, so it couldn’t possibly be me.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Narrative Divide

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Check out this trenchant writing from Kenyan author/journo Binyavanga Wainaina on the perception bias infecting western media (and here’s another take on that topic).   He rather hilariously bull’s-eyes a spear in the gut of Western journalism, their spouses and their tennis partners, we do-gooders at the big aid agencies.

Coincidentally, his rant covers some of the same territory as my recent post on Chinese model of “charity”.  Glad to see he doesn’t get sucked into a romanticization of Chinese exploitation.  Rather, his point seems simpler:  many Africans would prefer to get screwed by Chinese businesses than patronized or sanctimonyized by the proverbial whites in shining armor of Big Aid.

Wainaina rages and we humanitarians seem high on the hit list.  That can’t be good.   It is easier to counter the pampered elites of the Western intellectual critocracy than someone born and raised in one of the nations we’ve been so diligently saving these past forty years.

Moreover, his view of aid seems reinforced in many of the 199 comments on his piece.  Here’s Cornhil on June 4:  “You would have thought that after the disaster that is and was the post-earthquake agency bonanza in Haiti, a little humility would be appropriate from the Aid Industry, but apparently not.”

Damningly, even some who take umbrage with his “stereotyped” or “sneering” diatribe remark that he is of course spot on about the aid workers of this world, almost as if it were to be taken as a given.  Ouch!  Defending the West but leaving the aid industry out in the cold.  Where’s the love?  Where’s the understanding?  Where’s our money going to come from?

(A digression: “In 1991, Africa ceased to exist. The world was safe, and the winners could now concentrate on being caring, speaking in aid language bullet points.”  That’s an almost perfect summation of the intermingling of politics and aid — the establishment of governance through the imposition of a world welfare state.].

Wainaina is at his sharpest showing our collective Western understanding of Africa to be based upon the most preposterously stereotyped terms.  Hold that thought and flash back to the fit of humanitarian arm flapping at Kony 2012’s volcanic success.  As I blogged, the criticism of Invisible Children’s vanity video went pretty viral itself.  In that outburst of backlash I failed to grasp the significance and weight of Ugandan voices criticising a Western organization in the Western media.  What gives?  Weren’t Ugandans supposed to be invisible?

Recently, I heard digital media expert Paul Conneally challenge us humanitarians to avoid becoming an analogue enterprise in a digital age (see his speech here).  The entire humanitarian arena is abuzz with the potential of digital technology to improve its work.  From SMS health messages to patients (“Please remember to take your ARVs now”) to real-time satellite mapping of epidemics to a fundraising blitz of mobile phone chuggers, we are fast imagining a new golden age.  But Conneally’s core message wasn’t about technological advances of NGOs  – a reform in how we do our work – but in the transformation driven by the digital empowerment of the beggar/victim/beneficiary/target population.

People who will want to talk about our work are going to have access not only to information, but to the means of producing it.  They will have access not only to our opinions, but to our opinion platforms.  In other words, the helpless victims of Africa, like the Ugandans who outed Kony 2012’s disdain for accuracy in depicting the reality of Uganda today, are going to take away our western monopoly over the narratives defining their societies.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, white ears and eyes will consume the stories of brown people as told by brown people themselves, not white visitors to brown places.  In the process, these browns may have something to say about all those starving baby fundraising appeals.  They may even have something to say about all the appeals, letters, articles and interviews from the agencies whose guidelines prohibit the use of starving baby images and so sleep well in the self-evidence of their enlightenment, beneficence and narrative integrity.

Critique of Aid

Changing of the Guard

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Last Monday I flew home from a family visit to Philadelphia.  As a recovering TVholic, defined by not having lived with a television for several decades because I’d lose my job (or, now, my new wife) over an inability to wrest my eyes from the likes of Gilligan’s Island, the first thing I do upon boarding a long haul is check out the movie catalogue.

US Airways has two film libraries:  new releases and classics.  I opted for classics.  I had a strange craving for a western, an old classic like Red River, or maybe something newer like Unforgiven.  For months now I’ve also had a hankering for The Misfits, but didn’t hold out much hope of finding that gem.  Even after deliberately adjusting my expectations downward (it’s not like I was hoping to find Fellini on a bargain flight out of Philly), the selection caught me by surprise.  Here’s one of the films:  Night at the Museum:  Battle of the Smithsonian.   Seems I needed to adjust my understanding of classic.  Honestly, I could feel the very tectonic plates of beauty, reason and truth grind and crack at the idea of a Ben Stiller sequel nudging up next to Casablanca, The Big Lebowski, or even Rocky (the first one).

That earthquake came directly on the heels of a wonderful party hosted by my parents, to celebrate my recent marriage.  There, two generations of guests came repeatedly and without collusion to the same exact conclusion – I got extremely lucky and my wife must have a hidden impairment.

Anyway, as we milled around the garden on a sunny afternoon, I couldn’t help noticing the deep gray of my folks’ octogenarian crowd seemed to have gone viral among my gang of college buddies.   The moment struck me as deeply, starkly revelatory.  There they were, a mirror of life’s next stage and hence a window on the delusions of the present.  In vernacular:  a reality check.  When was the last time you saw an aid worker who doddered?

Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ flashed to mind.  That is an understatement when my own understanding of what is classic turns out to be about three decades and a whole lot of classicalness out of touch with reality.  It raises the question of whether or not we recognize the changing of the guard.  Whether there are signals in place to let us know that the world has shifted, gone in a different direction or left us in the dust.  Maybe we are hardwired to be the last to know.  Of course, the guard isn’t changing at all.  We’re changing.  And at the same time we’re the guard, standing still, left behind by an evolving world.

For humanitarians, I can only say this.  One of the other classic movies on offer?  Rise of the Planet of the Apes, starring James Franco.  Does anybody even remember the pathos etched on Charlton Heston’s face as he rode up the beach, only to find the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand?  Or to paraphrase digital humanitarianism guru Paul Conneally:  How long before we know if we’ve become an analogue organization in a digital world?