Who are charities really helping?

From Compass magazine

Twelve years ago I went to Rwanda post genocide to report on the terrible state of the refugee camps in neighbouring Congo – what was then Zaire.

The camps were hewn from the forest by members of the Hutu tribe using the same machetes with which weeks earlier they’d massacred their Tutsi countrymen. Smoke from the fires used for cooking outside thousands of makeshift shelters formed a choking cloud over these twig cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants each; the ultimate status symbol was a blue tarpaulin cover provided by the United Nations.

Bodies lay at the roadside between camps, and children with swollen bellies waited to die in the makeshift hospital tents provided by Médécins sans Frontières.

Workers from 50 charities, falling over each other to provide aid for the starving and the dispossessed, were powerless to do anything: the fact was that refugees formed themselves into groups based on the communities they lived in when they fled Rwanda. If you were a refugee who had been parted from your community, your needs were ignored. These fetid camps, in which the hard, unrepentant soldiers filled their bellies at the expense of women, children and the weak, worked under the maxim of sauve qu’il peut.

The $1 million a week that poured into the UNHCR (the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) alone still wasn’t sufficient to pay for a simple blue piece of plastic for every shelter. Which begged the question: why not simply give these people money rather than employing a workforce of young Westerners sating themselves with new life experiences? It seemed to be lost on the aid workers that they were the face of a baggy-trousered, T-shirt colonialism, looked upon with contempt by the poorest people on the planet they were trying to save.

The people of Africa knew that, unless they got to marry one of them, these charity workers were essentially useless. When the Live8 concert was going to Make Poverty History in 2005, it seemed to occur to no one that since millions of dollars were raised by the original Live Aid in 1985, Africans have actually got poorer. Aid, in other words, isn’t working.

The reason can be found in countries such as Nigeria. With oil production of 2.6 million barrels a day, it should be one of the world’s wealthier countries, but corruption has brought it to its knees. Thanks to the likes of Bono and his Live8 mates, Western governments wrote off Nigeria’s £16 billion – let’s repeat that, £16 BILLION – debt, but most of its 140 million inhabitants live on less than 52p a day. Even official figures tell us that since independence in 1960 $380 billion has been stolen by its politicians.

These people are simply sticking two fingers up at the concerns of posh white people wearing charity wristbands who anyway blame nasty capitalism rather than political greed for the maladies of the poor.

Yet charity itself is a £65 billion-a-year industry and chief executives of these organisations can enjoy six-figure salaries. A nouveau riche of thrusting young executives are falling over each other trying to persuade journalists to give them publicity and working up advertising campaigns with fatuous slogans such as “Love Your Heart” from Heart Research UK.

There are some 185,000 charities listed on the Charity Commission’s register and between them they employ 563,000 people according to The Guardian newspaper.

We used to know where we stood when we put our spare pennies in the Spastics Society box outside the Grocer’s. Now there are a bewildering range of causes clamouring for our cash. But do they deserve it? The Lottery, for example, has given money to, inter alia, The National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, which has helped terrorists fight deportation, Dancers of the Northern Ireland Filipino Association, the UK Network of Sex Work Projects – which calls for the state regulation of brothels – and £403,000 to Allavida to start community groups in Bulgaria.

Allavida, in case you haven’t heard of it: “…is concerned with mobilising financial resources, building local grant-making and grant management capacity, enhancing skills in community organisations for local development, encouraging local philanthropy and facilitating learning in and between organisations.”

It really has come to something when a charity decides that what the poor of Bulgaria, Romania, the Western Balkans, East Africa and Central Asia really need is the gobbledegook of Western political correctness. A tin with a slot on a pub counter might not be the perfect answer to solving the world’s problems, but surely it’s got to be better than that.