Somalia is off-limits to most western reporters and five Somali journalists have been killed there so far this year. Aid workers are frequently kidnapped – a million dollars is the going rate to have them released – and four WFP workers have been killed since last August.
So, to put it mildly, this was a difficult investigation to mount, relying heavily on the skills and bravery of the Somali member of our team.
He travelled down the so-called “Afgoye corridor”, which houses the biggest concentration of displaced people anywhere in the world.
The corridor is the 19 mile road from Mogadishu to the town of Afgoye and it is lined with the homes of around 400,000 Somalis, living in makeshift huts in temperatures around a hundred degrees.
Islamist militia, gangsters and warring clans have made the corridor so dangerous that the WFP’s Somalia Director admits that he hasn’t been able to visit Afgoye himself in 18 months.
And shortly after we got our film footage safely out of Afgoye, a Somali journalist was kidnapped by masked gunmen there and held for five days. But the real story in Afgoye is the plight of its people.
There is no more startling evidence of that than in the feeding centre run by a small and remarkable team of Somali doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres.
We met Abdullahi Noor who is just 16-months-old. He’s dangerously close to dying from a lack of food and water. A tiny victim of what may be the worst and least reported humanitarian crisis anywhere.
“I cannot move because of hunger” said Fatima Abdirhaman, a mother of four children too exhausted to lift herself off the ground. “I have nothing, nothing to eat. I ate a small amount of porridge yesterday, and that was the last thing I had.”
In the four days Channel 4 spent filming in the camps, the only food seen by our producer was boiled leaves, often harvested by children. At the camps we visited, elders repeatedly blamed the World Food Programme for diverting aid away from desperate people.
“It is absolutely true that the WFP brings in a very large quantity of aid” said Sheikh Mukhtar, leader of the “Ifis 1” camp which houses 310 families. “What happens is that they bring the food here to prove it has been delivered, but then only offload a small amount and take the rest back with them to the market in Mogadishu to sell.”
Afterwards the Sheikh pointed to the roadside graves of those children who had not survived. 28 children dead, he said, in the last six months. “We are at the mercy of gunmen if we go back home” he continued, “and if we stay here we are dying like flies.”
In the Bisharo camp which houses 700 families, camp leader Moallim Mohamed said his people had been forced to pay for ration cards and for the armed guards accompanying WFP staff.
“This is not a one off, this is regular,” Mr Mohamed said. “We pay the gunmen, we pay the man who gives out the cards. If we don’t pay up, they just cover the truck up, open fire on us and drive away. Even on the last trip, they fired at us and eventually we paid them money. I paid the money myself!”
The WFP say that these kinds of activities are likely to be carried by local militia demanding protection money and are unrelated to WFP personnel.
They say they have more than doubled their staff, and improved independent monitoring.
The WFP operation is run from the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, which is 765 miles from Mogadishu by road. I spent a week there, talking about what we’d found out with as many aid workers and diplomats as I could, as well as officials from the UN and WFP themselves.
Nobody would deny that Somalia is one of the most complex and dangerous countries in the world to work in.
But the overwhelming sense I came away with was one of deep concern that a vital operation which feeds 3.5 million Somalis may have crossed the line, in terms of its accountability both to its donors and to the very people it is there to help.
Watch Jonathan Rugman’s report on Channel 4 News at 7pm, Monday night or read more online now.