Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid by Peter Gill (OUP, £14.99)
Last year I met a woman and her disabled son who lived in a hut on the edge of one of Ethiopia’s frontier towns. Ethiopia’s ambitious, donor-funded “safety net” programme—which aims to boost food supplies and allow poor people to “graduate out of poverty”—asks able recipients to work in exchange for assistance. The woman told me how her food aid, for which she worked on a road built with spades and axes, made her weak. She was not talking of its nutritional value, nor the shame of it, but of the way it separates her from her community. “I chose to come and live here and take this aid,” she said, “because it lessens the burden on my family. But when I don’t come to clan meetings to ask for welfare, I neither give nor receive, and I don’t belong any more.”
“Food aid is killing us,” said another.
The public works resulting from the aid programme are sometimes useful, sometimes not. Meanwhile, on the Bole Road in the capital Addis Ababa shops sparkle with costly clothes and electronic goods. New polytunnels filled with flowers and vegetables creep across the plain around the city, creating wealth but displacing the poor.
The characters in Peter Gill’s book tell the story of Ethiopia over the 25 years since Live Aid turned its famine into a global issue. Gill, one of the first journalists to report the famine, travels from one end to another of Africa’s third most populous country and reports the abstractions of officials and the unvarnished clarity of ordinary people. Each person recounts how she or he is involved in making Ethiopia. The elites argue and the people duck and dive, manage and sometimes thrive. Based on solid research and a reporter’s instinct for whom to speak to and which questions to ask, Gill’s writing reveals the precariousness of life for the country’s 80m people, as well as the firm beliefs of the powerful that they, and only they, know what to do about it.
Everyone speaks according to their script. The IMF wants a free market and it delays loans, arguing with the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The coalition, in turn, persists with a centrally-controlled economy and a tight political grip. The aid donors—led by the World Bank and Britain’s department for international development—construct elaborate and expensive public programmes. Meanwhile, the aid implementers are sure of their simplistic solutions to the challenge of millions of urban and rural poor. The people themselves speak with striking realism, compared to the squabbling ideologues.
The ruling party still romanticises the peasantry, says Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in an interview with Gill. Zenawi emerges as an analytical, brilliant and ruthless autocrat. He is engaged in a grandiose exercise to rebuild Ethiopia from the dark days of the 1984 famine, the years of economic downturn and the political terror that followed. He paints a glorious future while acknowledging how close the country is to famine, war and even genocide. The romanticised peasant and the radical student are no longer his allies; they have become people to fear. Thus Zenawi justifies his heavy political hand.
Just before Ethiopia’s dramatic elections in 2005—in which Zenawi’s coalition won a majority amid widespread allegations of voting fraud, prompting protests and arrests—I was in the Somali region in the southeast of the country. An old man explained the administration’s relationship with the people. “They fill our boreholes with cement, they fight us, they bulldoze the dams. They arrest our people and then wait for us to bring money… We have to pay 5,000 birr [about £200] to release a woman, for a young boy 3,000, an old man 1,000. If politics and government are like this… how do you expect development?”
I didn’t hear the UN making much fuss about human rights violations in the Somali region when I was there. People who did so were transferred out of the country. Most of the big donors and development agencies have bought into the food safety net that takes 7.5m people off the annual anti-famine appeals in a sleight of bureaucracy. Gill reports that, in its first five years of operation, fewer than 3 per cent of its beneficiaries have “graduated,” despite an investment of several hundred million dollars. For each questionable aid programme, the donor-agency officials have excuses: land holdings are too small, the population is too high, the agricultural technology is too backward.
But that’s not the point. While their programmes are not working too well, they are bringing in cheap foreign exchange: $3.3bn (£2bn) in 2008, much of which went on financing building contracts and paying bureaucrats. Compare that to foreign direct investment in 2008, which stood at just $109m, and to trade earnings of $1.5bn, and it is not surprising that Zenawi keeps up the game of aid. As Joseph Stiglitz noted, it’s the most reliable and cheap source of money there is.
The foreign aid officials maintain distance with terms like the “chronically food insecure.” The government does not object to this technocracy, happy for the agencies to keep out of politics. Zenawi suggests that NGOs have not solved Africa’s problems of patronage; instead they have taken a share of it. But, counters an Addis intellectual, NGOs have also become a convenient scapegoat for government failures. And so the arguments continue.
It seems that relations between citizens and the state are deteriorating and the aid agencies are doing nothing to improve the situation. But Peter Gill’s refusal to provide easy conclusions is a refreshing antidote to the raft of “I know what’s wrong with Africa” books.
The heroes of his story are brave people: people like Amare Aregawi, the editor of the Reporter newspaper, who takes an uncompromising position on press freedom and even-handed reportage; people like Baida, a Muslim, and Mesay, a Christian, who run a remarkable family-planning clinic despite religious worries; like Berhanu, who takes on the ministry of education over schooling for nomadic people; like Abdi Umar, who spends months in prison because his research seeds local debates about making life better; and like an unnamed grandmother, who is putting a complaint to a council of elders.
As Gill himself told me: “It is a beautiful thing that there are so many modest ordinary people like these. I spot them in the crowd and they invariably have fascinating things to say.”
Last year I met a woman and her disabled son who lived in a hut on the edge of one of Ethiopia’s frontier towns. Ethiopia’s ambitious, donor-funded “safety net” programme—which aims to boost food supplies and allow poor people to “graduate out of poverty”—asks able recipients to work in exchange for assistance. The woman told me how her food aid, for which she worked on a road built with spades and axes, made her weak. She was not talking of its nutritional value, nor the shame of it, but of the way it separates her from her community. “I chose to come and live here and take this aid,” she said, “because it lessens the burden on my family. But when I don’t come to clan meetings to ask for welfare, I neither give nor receive, and I don’t belong any more.”
“Food aid is killing us,” said another.
The public works resulting from the aid programme are sometimes useful, sometimes not. Meanwhile, on the Bole Road in the capital Addis Ababa shops sparkle with costly clothes and electronic goods. New polytunnels filled with flowers and vegetables creep across the plain around the city, creating wealth but displacing the poor.
The characters in Peter Gill’s book tell the story of Ethiopia over the 25 years since Live Aid turned its famine into a global issue. Gill, one of the first journalists to report the famine, travels from one end to another of Africa’s third most populous country and reports the abstractions of officials and the unvarnished clarity of ordinary people. Each person recounts how she or he is involved in making Ethiopia. The elites argue and the people duck and dive, manage and sometimes thrive. Based on solid research and a reporter’s instinct for whom to speak to and which questions to ask, Gill’s writing reveals the precariousness of life for the country’s 80m people, as well as the firm beliefs of the powerful that they, and only they, know what to do about it.
Everyone speaks according to their script. The IMF wants a free market and it delays loans, arguing with the ruling coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). The coalition, in turn, persists with a centrally-controlled economy and a tight political grip. The aid donors—led by the World Bank and Britain’s department for international development—construct elaborate and expensive public programmes. Meanwhile, the aid implementers are sure of their simplistic solutions to the challenge of millions of urban and rural poor. The people themselves speak with striking realism, compared to the squabbling ideologues.
The ruling party still romanticises the peasantry, says Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in an interview with Gill. Zenawi emerges as an analytical, brilliant and ruthless autocrat. He is engaged in a grandiose exercise to rebuild Ethiopia from the dark days of the 1984 famine, the years of economic downturn and the political terror that followed. He paints a glorious future while acknowledging how close the country is to famine, war and even genocide. The romanticised peasant and the radical student are no longer his allies; they have become people to fear. Thus Zenawi justifies his heavy political hand.
Just before Ethiopia’s dramatic elections in 2005—in which Zenawi’s coalition won a majority amid widespread allegations of voting fraud, prompting protests and arrests—I was in the Somali region in the southeast of the country. An old man explained the administration’s relationship with the people. “They fill our boreholes with cement, they fight us, they bulldoze the dams. They arrest our people and then wait for us to bring money… We have to pay 5,000 birr [about £200] to release a woman, for a young boy 3,000, an old man 1,000. If politics and government are like this… how do you expect development?”
I didn’t hear the UN making much fuss about human rights violations in the Somali region when I was there. People who did so were transferred out of the country. Most of the big donors and development agencies have bought into the food safety net that takes 7.5m people off the annual anti-famine appeals in a sleight of bureaucracy. Gill reports that, in its first five years of operation, fewer than 3 per cent of its beneficiaries have “graduated,” despite an investment of several hundred million dollars. For each questionable aid programme, the donor-agency officials have excuses: land holdings are too small, the population is too high, the agricultural technology is too backward.
But that’s not the point. While their programmes are not working too well, they are bringing in cheap foreign exchange: $3.3bn (£2bn) in 2008, much of which went on financing building contracts and paying bureaucrats. Compare that to foreign direct investment in 2008, which stood at just $109m, and to trade earnings of $1.5bn, and it is not surprising that Zenawi keeps up the game of aid. As Joseph Stiglitz noted, it’s the most reliable and cheap source of money there is.
The foreign aid officials maintain distance with terms like the “chronically food insecure.” The government does not object to this technocracy, happy for the agencies to keep out of politics. Zenawi suggests that NGOs have not solved Africa’s problems of patronage; instead they have taken a share of it. But, counters an Addis intellectual, NGOs have also become a convenient scapegoat for government failures. And so the arguments continue.
It seems that relations between citizens and the state are deteriorating and the aid agencies are doing nothing to improve the situation. But Peter Gill’s refusal to provide easy conclusions is a refreshing antidote to the raft of “I know what’s wrong with Africa” books.
The heroes of his story are brave people: people like Amare Aregawi, the editor of the Reporter newspaper, who takes an uncompromising position on press freedom and even-handed reportage; people like Baida, a Muslim, and Mesay, a Christian, who run a remarkable family-planning clinic despite religious worries; like Berhanu, who takes on the ministry of education over schooling for nomadic people; like Abdi Umar, who spends months in prison because his research seeds local debates about making life better; and like an unnamed grandmother, who is putting a complaint to a council of elders.
As Gill himself told me: “It is a beautiful thing that there are so many modest ordinary people like these. I spot them in the crowd and they invariably have fascinating things to say.”
