Famine's awkward truths

My dominant memory of this past weekend is of finding Mohammed Adane, a Somali refugee, building a house out of sticks on the dusty windswept desert plains of northern Kenya.

“There’s no rain, my farm failed, my livestock are dead,” he explained, adding that four of his children had died on the journey across the Somali border.

Mohammed told me he and his family had to sneak into the bush to escape from Islamist Al Shabaab militants. The Shabaab have not only thrown 18 aid agencies out of Somalia since 2008, but they are also trying to prevent Somalis from leaving, in what feels like an outrageous cover-up of what the UN reckons may be tens of thousands of famine deaths.

I asked Mohammed the awkward question journalists are impertinently emboldened to ask – about how his four children died.

“They died of hunger,” he replied. “God has taken them. I am OK with that.”

Somalia’s refugees have walked for days or even weeks, their children often barefoot. They have survived by eating husks of dried corn and the leaves from trees. Their resilience would put many of those burly ex-SAS outdoor survival types to shame.

And now they are living in the world’s biggest refugee camps here in Kenya, official population 386 000, though tens of thousands more are thought to have gone uncounted.

I asked Mohammed if he would ever go home, and he quickly quashed any notion of return. Somalia is a failed state and has been for twenty years, with famine and drought just the latest chapters in its sorry history of spectacular failure.

And here’s an awkward truth: the more help international aid agencies pour into these refugee camps, the more permanent they will become. A dependency culture is being created here, for want of any internal solution to Somalia’s problems.

Aid workers are seething about the fact that the Kenyan authorities have padlocked shut 160 new brick houses which could house 60,000 refugees. These houses, funded by the European Union, cost no more than $1000 each to build.

If they were opened up, the likes of Mohammed would not be making houses out of sticks, and it is ridiculous that they are not being used.

But then again, the Kenyans are understandably nervous about the scale of this influx and when it will ever end. Imagine the British government’s panicked response to the prospect of 386,000 refugees camped on the white cliffs of Dover.

The most pressing question now is whether the Shabaab will lift their 19 month ban on the world’s biggest aid agency, the UN’s World Food Programme. 2.2 million Somalis are currently beyond the WFP’s reach. If that ban was lifted, unknown numbers of Somalis would no longer feel the need to trek to Kenya.

I met Josette Sheeran, the WFP’s Director, who also happened to be visiting the Dadaab camps over the weekend. In public at least, she offered no solution to the problem. “We go where we can, when we can,” she said simply, pointing out that 14 of her aid workers have been killed in Somalia since 2008.

Yet here’s another awkward truth: Ms Sheeran is trying to raise $360 million for the WFP to feed Somalia, but because of the ban the WFP can’t deliver most of that aid in-country, to where it really needs to go.

The UN urgently has to find a new way of working in Somalia, with food re-badged and delivered by other agencies the Shabaab is prepared to tolerate. Perhaps Somali elders on local “drought committees” will disobey Shabaab orders or prevail on the militia to drop the ban, which then becomes increasingly patchily enforced.

“We need to cut the UN some slack,” the Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said in Nairobi yesterday. “If we fail to act now, hundreds of thousands will die and most will be children.”

Mr Rudd seemed to be saying that the UN should be given carte blanche to deliver aid any which way it can. It sounded like a slap in the face to the Americans, who fear that, without proper controls, aid deliveries to southern Somalia will end up feeding militants linked to Al Qaeda. And the Americans have a point. After all, when did you last see a hungry soldier in Africa?

Follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter: @jrug