“I have seen massive humanitarian interventions. I will not say that they have done much or are doing much. It is difficult to define who is deciding their agenda,” Katembo argues. Katembo has seen many of the biggest humanitarian, human rights and relief groups come and go from the DRC, and the former Zaire, through many political transitions, always working with each new man in power.
He points out that many organizations have been here over 15 years now, and he questions their efficiency, if nothing else, asking how they can still be dealing with an emergency. For him, the reasoning seems pure logic, “having the chaos also allows them to have the jobs, and they [humanitarian aid organizations] will do whatever they can to keep it going. They are the masters of the chaos. I have never seen an assessment of what is achieved,” he summarizes.
Vital Katembo offered this insight in Goma in 2007 but soon afterwards he was fired from ICCN, threatened, forced to run for his life and go into hiding after openly denouncing international humanitarian organizations operating in Eastern Congo.
Humanitarian aid in the eastern Congo provinces is an octopus whose tentacles reach far and wide. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) serves to “mobilize and coordinate effective and principled humanitarian action in partnership with national and international actors.” This is according to their mission statement, which hangs opposite a wall of cubbyhole mailboxes in the front office in Goma.
Nestor Yombo-Djema, Senior Liaison Officer with OCHA, explained that OCHA coordinates 126 organizations, including 10 United Nations agencies and 50 international NGOs, and scores of donor, state and national NGOs. OCHA also works with Congolese governmental officials and donors.
Even with all of this AID infrastructure, poverty, malnutrition and human rights abuses run rampant—not to mention the permanent state of war and millions of internally displaced people, half of which are in North Kivu, according to OCHA’s 2007 Humanitarian Action Plan. And that was produced before the waves of fighting that displaced an additional 143,000 people in October 2007, and the additional hundreds of thousands displaced in 2008.
By mid-October 2007, some 500,000 to 1.2 million people were internally displaced in Eastern Congo; with 33,000 newly displaced Congolese people fleeing North Kivu on October 25. Ugandan military had forcibly occupied parts of Orientale Province, while a militia highly suspected of being supported by Rwanda was fighting FARDC troops in North Kivu. On October 25 last year, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon issued a statement of “deep concern” citing “surging sexual violence and a hike in the number of civilians uprooted due to fighting.”
One year and hundreds of thousands of dead people later—things have only gotten worse.
The 2007 OCHA budget, alone, was $US 686,591,107, “roughly the same level as in 2006,” with an additional $40,000,000 infusion announced by MONUC in October 2007. The final 2008 budget for the World Food Program in DRC was $426,878,043, with 56% of all food resources designated for North Kivu.
Developing Inefficiency
Kisangani is a town just north west of Goma in the province of Orientale. It is where Jean Dupont (name changed to protect his career as an international consultant) worked from 2003 to 2005. For 11 months of that time, he worked for Chemonics International Inc, an American company that helps donors define and implement programs; the biggest Chemonics client, when he was with them, was USAID.
Dupont talks about his experience with Chemonics as a reality check to what humanitarian work really is. “Before going, you think: people give $100 and that one hundred dollars goes to someone, somewhere, to make them happy. And that’s not the way it happens.”
Dupont sheds some light on why so many humanitarian organizations in DRC—and it is the same in most of Africa—develop nothing much more than inefficiency, waste and a small profit.
He sympathizes with the fact that Africa may be poor, but it is not cheap. Workers and companies expect to be paid well if they are to perform well. The constant reality of people—local and expatriate—putting money in their own pockets is also an element.
But in many situations, where money isn’t a heavy constraint, like with the wealthy USAID, the biggest difficulty is ineffective and inappropriate programming.
Humanitarian work has put itself in a trap, Dupont explains. “We were forced to do crappy projects to show we were spending money,” he says. Spending money to get more money, funding allocations in general, and underlying politics are the problems Dupont experienced and witnessed with the humanitarian sector in the DRC.
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