Progress in Mogadishu is endangered by foreign interference

Michael Maren

I was most recently in Somalia for four weeks in August-September this year. I arrived a year and a half after the last UN troops departed, and a year after most UN development agencies and NGOs left. Here are a few of my observations.

Without foreign troops to keep the port and airport open they have both closed. Two militias are facing off along the airport runway, and both factions are within 100 meters of the port. Both have the power to close these facilities. Neither has the power to open them. This creates a serious problem for Somali businessmen and is a huge obstacle to economic development.

But, despite the problems associated with a lack of any central authority, business is booming. The markets are full of goods. A large number of young men (I won't venture an estimate.) who once made their living with a gun are now "in business," transporting, importing, exporting. Though three major political factions "control" the city of Mogadishu, hundreds of business operators work all sides of the green lines, crossing the military and political boundaries as if they don't exist.

Currency markets operate efficiently. Exchange rates between the Somali shilling and a dozen foreign currencies are published daily.

Private schools and hospitals are opening up throughout the city. Teachers and medical practitioners are being paid by parents and patients.

There are now two competing phone systems in Mogadishu. City residents have a choice between AT&T or a Scandinavian carrier for their long-distance calls. In northern Somalia, calls are made via Sprint. From Mogadishu you can call anywhere in the world for two dollars a minute, a fraction of the price of a call from most African countries, and in some cases cheaper than I can call from New York. It's common to see people standing on bombed out street corners with cellular phones in their hands.

The improved communication has been a boon to business. Western Union has opened up in Mogadishu allowing a free flow of funds. By contrast, I can't send a Western Union money order to a business center such as Nairobi. DHL operates there now and negotiations are underway with FedEx. The guys who own one of the Somali phone systems have a plan to bring the Internet to the country within a year.

And the real news is that Somalia has just had its best harvest in years. Definitely the best since the civil war started in 1990, and probably better than in the final years of the former regime of the dictator Mohamed Siyaad Barre.

Yet Mogadishu remains as dangerous as ever. There are killings, mortar attacks, and robberies. And in a sad way, the violence may be the best thing for Somalia.

The violence keeps the foreigners away. It keeps the foreign money out. It stops NGOs from doing what the people are already doing for themselves. The low level continuing violence in Mogadishu has been a kind of inoculation against a the much more virulent presence of foreign NGOs.

Some people -- particularly people who work for NGOs -- may be tempted to look at what's happening in Somalia and declare that Somalis have made all of this progress despite the danger and apparent chaos in the city. But it's clear to me that they have succeeded because of the danger in the city. Their absence has forced Somalis to use their own resources. Therefore they have set their own priorities. Since they own the infrastructure, they are building only what they can maintain and what they really need when they need it. Having laid their own city to waste, they are now engaged in a process of organic development - development that is rooted in Somali culture and Somali needs -- not development that is based on the political priorities of international development bureaucracies and the fiscal needs of NGOs. The development that is taking place in Somalia today is what foreign organizations might call "sustainable development." And while sustainable development is often cited as a goal of international organizations and NGOs, it is there very involvement, ironically, that guarantees that the "development" that takes place under their auspices is not sustainable.

The phone system is a good example. During the civil war the entire phone system in the city was destroyed. The central phone exchange was looted and the wires were torn from the poles. The first post-war system was installed by David Morris, a multi-millionaire New Zealander who was under contract to supply provisions to UN troops decided that he was the man to put in a phone system, which he did. What he installed was what might be called "appropriate technology," i.e. it was old, cheap technology. It consisted of a central satellite dish linked to microwave handsets. The system worked, though not very well. The connections were horrible and overseas calls were about $4 to $ 6 a minute.

The system lasted about a year. Morris was murdered in April, 1995 and his operation folded. Immediately after that, Somalis moved to install their own systems. Somali investors came up with nearly $4 million in private money, established strategic alliances with foreign companies, and had state-of-the-art cellular systems operating within months. The businessmen didn't ask for help. They hired only what technological assistance they needed from Motorola and other companies and they used their own resources for the rest. The result is what may be the best phone system in Africa.

During the UN's heyday in Mogadishu -- the UNOSOM period from 1993-95 -- businessmen weren't investing in the city; they were starting NGOs. Nearly 1000 NGOs had registered with the UN and were seeking funding. NGO shingles decorated the walls of buildings all over town. They had names like, Feed the Starving Children, Help the Children, Somfam . . . you get the idea. Today all of them are gone. When the UN was in charge, people made a rational decision about how they were going to invest their time. The amount of money being poured into aid was greater than the amount being directed through commercial channels. NGOs were biggest businesses in town. Somalis had seen the foreigners do it. They watched young foreign kids come in, get hundreds of thousand of dollars in foreign cash and that looked good to them. Somalia's NGO economy, briefly thrived and then collapsed. It was a far cry from the real progress that has been made in the year and a half since the UN left Somalia.

Today there are certain groups of people dying to get the aid gravy train back on track in Somalia. Some of those people are waiting in Nairobi at UN offices, at the offices of the European Union (which has an entire Somalia department) and at the hundreds of NGOs headquartered there and just itching to get their hands on contract money. Aid bureaucrats have one purpose in life: spend money. In the absence of a policy or some greater plan for dealing with poverty in the Third World, we spend money. Organizations that claim to be lobbying on behalf of Third World causes have one measurement of their own success -- the amount of money they can get governments to spend. They don't pay much attention to how successful or devastating those development projects might be. That's too objective to really measure. Our concern or lack of concern, for most of these people is determined solely by the bottom line on the foreign aid budget.

And there is one more group in Somalia that really wants the aid to start. This group in already in Somalia. It is the warlords and their supporters. The economic development of Somalia is the greatest threat to the power of the warlords because it is making them obsolete, marginalizing their influence. If businesses can supply jobs to young men they'll put down their guns and work for cash instead of patronage. Political loyalties in Somalia run as deep as the warlords' ability to pay. Development aid and relief aid are resources that "governments" even as constituted by the warlords can control. Business is beyond their grasp.

In August, a UNDP delegation paid a visit on Hussein "Aidid" to discuss returning aid to Somalia. Aidid milked the visit for public relations, proclaiming to his countrymen, who really don't see him as their president, that a United Nations delegation had come to see him. Therefore he must be the head of state. The aid bureaucracy needs a system into which to feed its largesse. It knows only how to deal with governments, with ministers of finance, ministers of planning, and other people with titles. And in the absence of a credible government, as is the case in Somalia, it will invent one.

Today in Somalia, the European Union has some $60 million to spend in Somalia. There's an office full of bureaucrats in Nairobi dying to find a way to spend it. When I returned from my last trip to Mogadishu a nice young man who was second in command at the EU office called me in and asked me what I thought of what I'd seen in Somalia. I told him that any infusion of aid into Mogadishu would make an already volatile situation explode. The warlords would fight over the aid. It would inevitably be fed back into the warlords coffers and be used to buy ammunition, which is no in short supply. And it would threaten the progress already made. Aid would give the warlords prominence that they were fast losing. In short, I told him, stay away. Let the political situation sort itself out.

For another 2 hours he tried to convince me -- and himself -- that there was some good that could be done with their 60 million dollars. To admit that I was right would have been his admission that he was doing a pointless job and that he should probably resign. But here was a young man on the move, a young man with a great job with great benefits and a bright future. He has no incentive to turn to his bosses and say, `lets wait a year, two years, before we dump any more money into Somalia." He needed to do something now. And the EU office in Nairobi needs to spend the money, all the money, if they hope to get any more next year.

So they've done something. The EU is doing a food monetization program with CARE in one peaceful area of Somalia in the southwest, and area called Gedo. Gedo is peaceful. And Gedo is peaceful because it is controlled by an Islamic fundamentalist organization called Al-Itihad. Al-Itihad recently set off bombs in Ethiopia and has plans to turn Somalia into an Islamic fundamentalist state. They are terrorists. (By terrorist I do not mean to imply that they are not legitimate. Al-Itihad has admitted setting off bombs in Addis Ababa. In my opinion, attempting to kill innocent civilians makes one a terrorist -- whether you are an Islamic organization or the U.S. government.) But they keep the order in this region of Somalia so NGOs can work there. Money from the EU, via CARE, is now ending up in their coffers. They can claim to the people under their control that they are bringing peace and aid from abroad. Their hand is strengthened.

The other area where the EU now proposes to spend its money is in the town of Bosasso in the northeast of Somalia. Bosasso is a thriving city state. The ports work. There is peace and order in the town. This is because the UN largely stayed away. There have been no development projects in Bosasso for the last six years. The economy is booming. The EU has decided that now it needs help.

Not to be left behind, the UN has just produced its plan of action for Somalia. It has to do with spending $25 million there in the next year. A consultant who helped draw up the plan told me that the UN feels very competitive with the EU and is not willing to abandon Somalia to those people from Brussels. The UN's food and Agriculture organization is also dying to get back into Somalia. They just issued the following press release:

FAO Report Warns Of Dwindling Food Supplies In Africa

NAIROBI, Kenya - The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), has warned that despite an improved food supply in sub-Sahara Africa, 13 of these nations are suffering from food shortages and emergencies.

Unless exceptional food assistance is allocated to these countries, the agency said in a report, the countries will face increased hardships....

The hardest hit countries are Burundi, Liberia and Somalia. ..

Even in the best of times it was nearly impossible to know what was going on in Somalia. Between 1978 and 1989 the World Bank, USAID and other donors invested about $600 million in development projects, many of which were concerned with generating a knowledge base about how rural Somalis were using natural resources in generating food and cash for survival and socio-economic advancement. At some periods there were almost fifty expatriate professionals with degrees in statistics, agronomy, sociology, livestock science, ecology, nutrition, public health, demography, fisheries, economics, agriculture, etc. working in Somalia. Most of these professionals had long experience working in Africa. . . Many of these were either based for long periods in the rural areas, or making frequent visits to them. At that time it was possible to drive and spend the night ANYWHERE in Somalia. And even then no professionals knew enough to say that "x" percent of the population were malnourished, or that "y" thousand tons of food would be needed to keep them alive, although droughts and famines did from time to time occur or were claimed to occur.

The problem is that no one in the supply side of the aid business has a vested interest in saying "I don't know" or declaring that aid should end. The big aid bureaucracies use aid and relief as a substitute for real policy. And the NGOs depend on it money from the bureaucracies for their survival.

Most NGOs receive most of their funding from governmental organizations, The U.S. Agency for International Development, (USAID), Britain's Overseas Development Association (ODA), or the latest entrant into the field, the European Union. The other big funders are the UN bureaucracies, the largest being The High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), The United Nations Development Program, (UNDP), or the World Food Program (WFP). When you add up this funding and look at the balance sheets of NGOs you see that in many cases these organizations are receiving 75 to 90 percent of their funding from governments. Save the Children and CARE are close to 90 percent. World Vision and other organizations are up there as well.

The private funding that these groups raise is usually little more than administrative operating money that allows them to chase after the big grant money. In NGO parlance, donated funds are "leveraged." This allows NGOs to make the claim to the public that 80 percent or 90 percent of their funding goes to "program" even though nearly 100 of the money that the public actually donates goes into administration.

Without this government money the NGOs would have to actually have to do their work with the money they get from individuals. The would have to cut way back on administrative costs. For this reason, NGOs have rarely seen a development project they didn't like. Aid bureaucracies trust the NGOs as their eyes and ears in the field. NGOs get to tell the bureaucracies how much aid is needed and then the bureaucracies go and get the money for NGOs. This also explains why NGOs work in environments in support of power structures that are often responsible for the problems in the first place. For me the conflict is obvious. In most of the Third World most economic problems are caused by governments. NGOs and development organization must work through these governments. No government is going to allow a development organization to undertake projects that aren't in its best interests. By working in many countries, especially in Africa, NGOs are supporting the forces of economic repression. Their activities ultimately make things worse for the people they claim to be trying to help.

There is no independent disinterested analysis of the NGOs or the bottom line effect of the money that is spent. Everyone just wants the books to look tidy and every penny to be accounted for. That's what I was told by an exceptionally honest officer at USAID in Nairobi a few years ago. CARE had just gotten an $8 million grant to do development work in Somalia at a time when very little development work was going on. I asked this woman why the money was being spent, and why CARE, which in my opinion had been responsible for hundreds of stillborn or destructive projects in Somalia.

"They keep good books," she told me. "With CARE we have no worries when it's time for an audit."

For me, that encapsulates the relationship between NGOs and development bureaucracies. It is entirely incestuous. When aid bureaucracies evaluate the work of NGOs they have no incentive to criticize them. If a USAID officer is responsible for giving CARE a million-dollar grant, he's not going to report back to Washington that CARE completely screwed up the project. It makes him look bad and will result in a drop in funding the next year. In many cases if you look at project evaluation reports on file you find that they are self-evaluations. Save the Children and CARE and World Vision are allowed to tell the aid bureaucracy what a great job they have done spending their money.

Ultimately there is no checks or balances in the world of aid. Anyone can practice "development." You need a licence to sell hot dogs in New York City but anyone can be an aid worker. It is a closed cultish club of people who strive to make their reports and discussion so boring that no one on the outside will pay attention. And then they go on and on spending money -- our money -- in ways that help no one but themselves.

The progress that has been made in Somalia is substantial. Somalis themselves posess most of the resources they need to rebuild their own country. Sometimes this is difficult for Westerners to accept. We want to believe they need us. The truth is that they don't. Without foreign intervention Somalis will rebuild their economy. Then they will rebuild their political systems. Foreign interference now will only result in more power to the warlords, and more suffering to the people.