Famine in Africa? Quelle surprise!

As I predicted a week or so ago, we are now getting the tear-jerking, withers-wringing appeal for aid to starving Somalis. There’s Angela Rippon on radio (remember her?) telling us with breathy urgency that unless we open our wallets now Amina’s starving waif will die of hunger, thirst, and general shortage of breath.

So what are the realities?

First, Somalia is not a country. It is a geographical concept. It has no government, no recognisable administration, no law and order, no public safety, nothing that comprises ‘the state’. It has been engaged in apocalyptic fighting between rival clans and between religious fanatics for almost ever. There are no goodies and baddies here; only baddies and baddies.

So who will administer the feeding programmes?

The locals? If so I would not rate highly the prospects of the food getting to the neediest.

The aid agencies? It is difficult to see how it would be wise or safe or even possible to deploy foreign aid workers in all the current circumstances, so distribution would have to be done by locals. See above.

And then Somalia is not short of money.  It has a highly profitable shipping industry in which foreign shipping companies pay huge sums of money to get their ships back. It is sitting on billions of dollars-worth of ships pending settlement with the owners. If it has to spend money on food it will have less to spend on terrorism and funding Al Qaeda.

Now I see that Wateraid has climbed on the bandwagon. Twenty-odd years ago I worked very closely with Wateraid on an EU-sponsored committee aimed at water development in poor countries. It was the charity of the water industry that makes vast profits, and the charity projects were funded entirely by the water companies. So what are they now doing by begging off the public?

Perhaps the needs of Somalis could be met by their co-religionists, as they conspicuously failed to do in the Pakistan flooding.

It would seem that there is not too much concern in neighbouring Ethiopia, where it hasn’t rained for 18 months. One million people are in need of water plus 100,000 Somali refugees.

The government is anxious to privatise the state breweries, the likely buyer being Heineken for $164 million. They use vast quantities of water and so have been given exclusive rights to the only efficient deep well in the region but the local population is rationed. The regime has also abrogated colonial-era treaties governing the water flow in the Nile and has embarked on a major programme of dam-building, not primarily for water supply but for power.

Egypt and Sudan are not best pleased.