Coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa has fixated on the amount of aid going into the region and humanitarians’ estimates of how much more will be needed. According to the U.N. Coordination of Human Affairs office, the $1 billion already committed to assistance is less than half of what will be needed—but who knows whether the final figure will be anywhere near the stated $2.3 billion.
Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are flooding out of their country into neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia because massive refugee camps and daily high-energy rations are better than the situation at home. This migration is no different than that of the Israelites in Exodus or Ruth: surely 3500 years and half-a-dozen moon landings later we ought to have a better way of doing things?
Well we do, but the U.N. and the rest of the humanitarian establishment have lost the patrimony of Moses, and so have been wandering around the desert, dispersing aid to no effect, for a good deal more than 40 years. There is, thank goodness, a growing realization that U.N.’s materialistic solution is not working, as Ian Ernest, the chairman of the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa, said last week:
We would not only want to work on the immediate needs, but we are thinking, because this is becoming a chronic problem, we have got to see the root causes and fight it.
World leaders cannot help developing Africa, of course, unless they understand developing Africa, and that is hopeless if they do not understand human nature. There can be no to help for the world’s poor that does not come from a correct understanding of the human person. Modern humanitarian efforts undermine the dignity of the human person by treating the people of developing nations as mouths to be fed rather than the entrepreneurs who will pull their countries out of poverty.
Eva Muraya, a Kenyan businesswoman and one of the voices of Acton’s PovertyCure project, put it this way:
We begin to say no to poverty and begin to redeem the dignity of the citizens by virtue of creating business opportunity.
My biggest asset, I will say without a doubt, is the people who have worked with me, have worked alongside me.
As long as the U.N.’s mission in the Horn of Africa is unchanged, progress made by Somalia and other countries will be despite mainstream humanitarian efforts, not because of them.
