Stayees and the people who have sense

And then, the realisation that the people who suffered most after a refugee crisis lasting many years were actually those who stayed at home (now after years granted their own bit of jargon: ‘stayees’). In Juba in 2005 the Juba people saw themselves as heroes for having lived through 20 years of hell (and it was truly grim) and the SPLM who believe they should be grateful for being liberated (and incidentally should give up their posts and jobs to the incoming SPLMs who ‘enjoyed’ -- according to Juba people -- in exile). The people coming back from 15 years in refugee camps in Uganda were taller, healthier and much better educated than those who had stayed at home. Something which was the case in eastern Congo also where refugees came back who had had no interruption to their education when they were in exile, to live among a mentally, and sometimes physically, stunted (better word xx) population whose schools had all been closed for years.

In another place, aid workers could be heard actually to question whether a water supply or an electricity supply was a good thing. Questions no one would dream of asking in Ghana or Kenya, or in Europe.

And then what about the time when the wars in Congo were dying down and the UN system declared that it was now time for the population to start going back home to Bunia. A whole integrated programme was mounted along the route from North Kivu, way stations provided with water and so on. But no one went. Why? Well once again, no one actually asked the people. Their children were all in school. The school year had three months to run and there were important exams to take. No one was going to move until they were over.

During all this, I wondered how we forgot, occasionally, our common sense. One of the kindest people I know who over the years, by his practical approaches has made life easier for so many people in conflict and post-conflict areas, seriously suggested, after the massacres in Bunia that one way to guarantee a better future would be to make sure that we only aided schools where all the children of the warring tribal groups attended together. This was just months after massacres, when the communal graves were everywhere What parent would take (or send) her child across the increasingly serious line between the factions to make an ideological point?

Numbers ending in a lot of zeroes.

In Southern Sudan there were six million people in the census in the early eighties (including me). Most people believe that by the mid-nineties only 2 million remained in the south, 2 million had fled and 2 million died who shouldn’t have. This number ‘feels’ right, sounds convenient and is very easy to keep alive in documentation. I have used it myself.

Yet, I have always said: Never believe any figure ending in three zeroes, especially if it comes from a UN body or an NGO. It is usually plucked out of the sky.

So what about these figures ending in six zeroes? Well, certainly, it is impossible to verify them. I have a close knowledge of certain parts of the Southern Sudanese population, originating in Equatoria. I taught the parents and now know the children and I have to agree that one third of them have certainly been in exile (probably more), another third are in a strange limbo, sometimes in, sometimes out (it is a border area) but I could not justify a claim that one third of them died. That would mean that of the six hundred students we had in our first year in Juba Day Secondary school, 200 had died. Even allowing for the normal death rate, and for specific cases I know about, such as one executed for some infraction when he became an SPLA officer, and the baby of one of my ex-clerks who died from his father’s drunken neglect, and a group of wild life officers executed by the Arabs in 1992 for suspected sympathy with the SPLA incursion into Juba (which left lasting resentment, as the SPLA didn’t follow through, so many people who had revealed their sympathies were punished by the Arabs when the SPLA withdrew). I cannot say that I know that one third died.

In Congo, through knowledge of people I work with, the ‘extra deaths’ theory would seem to be more plausible. The mother of one of my trainers was the only one of nine Hema women captured by the Lendus one day who was not hacked to death. There are huge areas where there has been no modern medical care for years, even preceding the war. Still, three million ….

Often when we find that an NGO is reporting devastation in ‘its’ area, if we examine a little deeper we find that a good part of the population didn’t die, they just fled. Goma went from 50,000 people to 500,000 people in ten years. Much of the increase was of people flowing in from conflict-ridden rural areas. Schools closing in rural areas were matched by heavily overcrowded schools in the town And this urbanisation will 'stick'; not everyone will go back, ever, whatever we in agencies think should happen.

I am civil society

‘Civil society’ as a phrase has an honourable ancestry in politics. One phase of the evolution of countries post-independence and of the evolution-in-parallel of NGOS and UN bodies has been the gradual emergence of the idea of ‘Civil Society’ ... as opposed to uncivil society? To military society? To ecclesiastical society? …. Well, that is another question.

This is just to celebrate the enterprising man who not only declared in a coordination meeting in Goma that he represented ALL of civil society, but that his NGO was called Civil Society. Like the Church of God which appears in its name to have monopolised all religious possibilities at least for monotheists, Mr Civil Society presented himself as the unique interlocutor. His only reward though, was to be ignored by everyone.

Coordination

Coordination is rarely in the interest of the beneficiaries, and not always in the interest of agencies. Discuss.

When there were four refugee camps around the town of Yei in Southern Sudan, managed by four different NGOs there was an interesting ‘market’ for the refugees. It was not long before opinions were clear, while education might be better in camp A, health care was definitely better in camp C. Logically, this should have led to better services all round, but lax monitoring led instead to a different outcome: each refugee family distributed its members over all four camps.

And they got 4 food distributions.

Coordination actually takes away the ‘free market’ element from the beneficiaries and reduces their freedom to choose. It can be seen as a ‘disempowering’ [jargon] act as it takes away some of their possible choices and takes away from the agency the need to provide quality service, because there is no competition. We would not tolerate this in business, allowing people to set themselves up as a sole provider, and with limited provision at that.

While it is clear that beneficiaries do not always benefit from coordination, the agencies are also ambivalent about it. They subscribe to the principle, attend the meetings, but because they are also competing for funding they do not always subscribe to the practice, and may indeed sabotage it. Examples can be cited from any level from grass-roots NGOs (‘these are my people; no one understands them like I do’) to very big agencies (‘We accept coordination of course, but only to the extent it helps us’ – actual quote from a Unicef Representative).

just to show how keen we are on coordination consider this: In Goma in the early 2000s the four agencies in one compound always went to coordination meetings in four cars.

And how many times has a UN house actually contained ALL the UN bodies in a given town?

NGos are nto exempt - often coordination seems to exist only to cover up the fact that the NGOs don't have enough money to do all they want.

Not joined up

UNICEF, like many other international agencies does procurement for all its activities in Copenhagen or Dubai, because it is cheaper. No account is taken of the huge number of small enterprises everywhere in Africa which folded – or never grew -- because of this decision, and the massive unemployment which followed. UNICEF says it is because it is a humanitarian agency, not really a development body. Yet alongside, UNDP and others are busily saying that they are developing.

After the volcano I had a hard time getting permission to have school desks made locally, even though there was no shortage of wodd, carpenters, or saw mills.

However, we should also be a little honest also - sometimes, local procurement is not doing a lot for the locals, because we procure from big Lebanese or Indian compaies, which are actually exploiting their workers (but do provide a cheaper price).

Room for a bit of ethical thinking here, I think. .

A bright idea in the 1980s in S Sudan

An NGO, I think it was Oxfam (usually known as Oxfarm, which seemed more logical on agriculture projects), had set up a good project among the Acholis of Sudan building on the system, widespread in the region, of ‘brigade’ farming. In this system a group of young farmers worked together to cultivate their land. The practical number was around 20 and they would all congregate on one persons land, weed it, or hoe it all day and then in the evening the person they worked for provided the entertainment and food. The next morning, crack of dawn, or even before, they were at the next plot, and so on. This way with their tremendous energy, copious flows of grain-beer (actually fairly nutritious, another problem when the anti-alcohol laws came in) they covered large areas.

Oxfam/Oxfarm’s innovation was to provide oxen, not actually traditional, but which greatly magnified the area covered. There was one snag though. They kept on getting slaughtered by the elders for their next marriage to a young girl. The young men had no say in this (and truth to tell might well have done the same if they were older). So there was simple clash of meaning, as anthropologists might say.

For young Odongo the ox was his tractor; for his uncle Okello it was exactly what was needed to have a good traditional ceremony, and was already in the family so it was free.

Along comes Oxfam’s young agricultural worker who has pondered the situation. He meets the elders and asks them if they have noticed that he injects the oxen every so often, and that the oxen are not actually very productive on the reproductive front. So?, said the elders. Well, said the extension worker, anyone who eats the beef of these animals will probably suffer the same loss of powers.

Problem solved; no animals were slaughtered again!