Food summit jamboree brought together the leaders of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tanzania and South Sudan
NAIROBI (AlertNet) – The band played a popular tourist tune as the wine flowed and the guests queued to pile their plates from the heaving buffet, offering a choice selection of meats and salads from one of Nairobi’s finest hotels.
“Well, there’s certainly no hunger here,” joked Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist famed for his theories on ending poverty, as he queued for lunch.
The Kenyan president, seated at the high table between the Ethiopian and Somali heads of state, looked bored, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. His Mercedes, with its lengthy convoy of presidential escorts, waited across the lawn, ready to whisk him back to State House.
“Jambo Jambo Bwana… Visitors are welcome… There are no problems in Kenya,” the band sang to several hundred diners seated in a marquee in the grounds of the United Nations compound.
The Somali journalists laughed.
“They are lying. Visitors are not welcome in Kenya,” said one.
The Kenyan police are notorious for harassing Somalis with numerous cases of unlawful detention, even shootings, documented by rights groups.
BLAMING THE WEST
The late lunch marked the end of a two-day summit to discuss long-term solutions to the hunger crisis affecting over 13 million people in the Horn of Africa. The leaders of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tanzania and South Sudan attended along with scores of donors and officials from the United Nations and non-governmental organisations.
The summit followed a pledging conference two weeks earlier in Ethiopia under the auspices of the African Union. There will be a technical follow up meeting in Djibouti this week, with a mini-summit planned at the United Nations headquarters in New York the week after.
Horn of Africa leaders veered between belligerence and begging, emphasising the failure of the West to do a deal on climate change, to send troops to halt the carnage in Somalia and to provide enough aid money.
“We have meetings and meetings and summits and summits until the television cameras set in and you see the emaciated bodies of children,” said Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
“That is when now people believe there is a problem.”
He also castigated the world’s rich nations for failing to act on climate change, which several presidents identified as a driver behind the hunger crisis.
“Unfortunately the solution seems elusive because those who are responsible for the problems of climate change are not yet ready to do what is required of them,” he said, adding that he was hoping for a breakthrough at November’s United Nations climate change conference in South Africa.
“Being governments of poor nations, the international community has to perform its historic duty of assisting us where our own efforts cannot cope,” he said.
CREDIBILITY GAP
Governments presented national action plans detailing how they would end hunger, which mainly affects nomadic herders who roam the Horn’s arid lands with their livestock.
Kenya presented a programme requiring $2.4 billion over the next 10 years. The initiative would involve setting up a myriad of new institutions, such as National Drought Management Authority, a National Drought Contingency Fund, a National Commission on Nomadic Education in Kenya and an Arid and Semi Arid Lands Secretariat.
The government proposed that donors put money directly into the National Drought Contingency Fund, rather than through international agencies, to reduce transaction costs.
Nothing was said about the elephant in the room: corruption.
Just weeks earlier, reports emerged about members of parliament raiding the existing Contingency Fund – money set aside to cater for national emergencies like floods, fires and relief – to pay their tax arrears.
Last year, the World Bank stopped funding a huge, long-running Arid Lands Management Project, aimed at reducing hunger among pastoralists, following revelations that $4 million had been stolen by corrupt officials.
Opening the summit, Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Minister Moses Wetangula congratulated Kenyan citizens for raising $8 million to feed their starving compatriots.
Wetangula was recently reappointed following his suspension last October (at his own request) over the loss of $14 million in a deal to buy a new embassy in Japan.
Not a single official has been brought to account for these scams.
Is the West really the main culprit to blame for the suffering in the Horn of Africa?
(Edited by Katie Nguyen)
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