Stolen food aid intended for Africa’s drought relief.
Africa has received food aid donations from many governments and organizations around the world, but none more significant than from Ukraine amid the ongoing war.
The Grain from Ukraine humanitarian program has shipped 140,000 tonnes of wheat from Ukraine since November 2022. On March 20, 2023, Kenya received 30,000 tons of wheat from Ukraine through the World Food Programme (WFP). The shipment arrived at the port of Mombasa Kenya and was received by Kenya’s deputy president Gachagua. Another shipment of 16000 metric tons of sorghum was received that day from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Our previous article expressed the irony of Kenya exporting food to the USA as Kenyans starved, only to receive it back in food aid. All that food aid that was received by the Kenyan government and USAID officials was loaded into trucks and the convoy flagged off by the deputy president to go to the hunger- stricken people in different counties in the country.
Our investigation found that as of the time of publishing this article, those food aid trucks have not reached their intended destination. The people are still starving to death, almost three weeks in. We have been looking for answers and trying to find out from the government officials in Kenya, the WFP and USAID in an attempt to find the ‘missing’ food aid convoys. We will be updating this article when we find these answers. Notably, our previous article described a similar scheme in Ethiopia, where 428 food aid trucks that were sent by WFP went missing in the midst of the Ethiopian war two years ago. So has this food been stolen, sold or delayed in transit?
Additionally, the Ethiopian federal government restricted humanitarian aid from getting into the Tigray region, through a ‘de facto humanitarian aid blockade’. This led to thousands of people starving to death and adding to the more than 600,000 lives lost during the last two years since the war began.
‘Food Aid Laundering’?
Is this another case of ‘food aid laundering’? Food aid laundering is a common practice in Africa, where they flash the world with pictures of starving children and horrific images of drought, once the food is donated to Africa, it is then resold to the same starving people who cannot afford it. Creating a cycle of hunger, malnutrition and death. These malnourished and emaciated bodies are then showed to the world again to get more aid and this continues due to corruption and greed.
Corrupt government officials and organizations receive the international food aid, then it goes ‘missing’ through theft, where it is re-sold and the politicians then offer little ‘hand-outs’ to the starving Africans. Very little food aid if any has been reaching the starving population.
In northeast Uganda, more than 600 people died last year and more than half a million faced starvation due to bad governance, poor leadership and corruption not just from drought alone. The same incidents happen in other countries facing armed conflict in Africa and they claim that the ‘harsh drought caused by climate change’ is responsible.
Kenya’s government has not opted to airlift food to the starving Kenyans, even as government officials fly around the country, and lavishly spend on frivolous events. The Kenyan government was criticized for extravagantly spending $40,000 a day on ‘hospitality and entertainment’ in the State House. This amount can feed villages for a month! Climate change should not be blamed here.
The same government just announced that it cannot afford to pay salaries for its public service workers, for last month’s work. We found out that some Kenyans have been working for almost five months without receiving any pay. Given the high cost of living, most Kenyans are struggling to make ends meet due to government’s wasteful expenditure, corruption and greed and not necessarily climate change!
Destruction Natural Water Sources in Africa.
In a previous article, we explored the various ways that governments, multilateral lenders and donors were destroying water bodies such as lakes and rivers that provide free water to poor Africans and pastoralist communities. In a nutshell, Kenya’s government has been proposing the construction of dams but these projects end up siphoning funds from Kenyan taxpayers. The corruption and greed by government officials has seen a lot of cash embezzled, misappropriated and stolen from these projects yet nothing tangible to show for it but shells of the proposed projects. The Crocodile Jaw dam is among many of the projects that would destroy the rangelands in northern Kenya, that are already struggling with water scarcity from diversion of the major Ewaso Nyiro river for irrigation purposes.
Our previous article exposed how the conflicts in these regions have escalated due to the increase in number of ‘Conservancies’ in Kenya, that choose to ‘save the elephant’ but ‘not save the pastoralist or his cow’. The grabbing of land and water rights has displaced African indigenous communities and pastoralists from their land. Wildlife Conservancies have been criticized for their ‘green projects’ that have seen the blockage of movement routes for pastoralists for grazing their herds of livestock. The conservancies have taken up large tracks of land in Africa, and continue expanding and fencing it off from African pastoralists.
This has led to a lot of bloodshed and some of these innocent pastoralists have been deemed as bandits by the government officials. They have been accused of trespassing through their ancestral grazing fields and this conflict has wrongly been attributed to climate change. Pastoralists in Kenya have referred to the ‘Con’ in conservancies as an attempt to hoodwink the world about these organizations’ conservation efforts, while they are hideous booming tourism businesses. These conservancies have not transformed the lives of their local communities, even after earning so much revenue from the global carbon markets last year!
We noted that there is an aquifer in Turkana Kenya that if tapped would supply the whole country with enough water for at least 70 years. Additionally, Turkana is an oil-rich county too, and the oil exploration activities are not benefiting local communities. The government deemed the desalination of this aquifer too expensive, yet the same government has lost more money through corruption and funding of unsustainable dams.
Some dams constructed upstream of rivers are privately owned and they have contributed to the diversion and choking dry of rivers and lakes downstream. Siltation and poor workmanship has also seen these dams overflow during the rainy season, and they burst out causing flooding and deaths. These heavy ‘floods’ have been attributed to climate change as well.
Our investigation found that the ‘Package of Reforms’ required of Kenya by the World Bank showed that Kenya has to ensure collection of fees from water supply by reducing free water. Most of the free water comes from rivers and lakes and is beneficial to many poor Kenyans.
Lake Albert that is located in Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo is a large source of free water to many households. However, installation of hydropower projects and the discovery of 6.5 billion barrels of crude reserves on this lake has attracted commercial production and drilling that has destroyed the lake. The destruction of Congo’s rainforest that helps the water catchment areas have also been destroyed through corruption and greed.
In Uganda’s Karamoja region, at least 600 people died from hunger even as lawmakers lamented that ‘others were waiting to die’ due to the famine. This was wrong in many aspects, as very little was being done to improve the situation as the world blamed the deaths to climate change. The incomplete Karamoja dam in the region is also evidence of Uganda government’s wastage of funds and destruction of the river.
International organizations claim that they are not receiving enough donations and funds to address the hunger crisis in Africa. The real problem is that these organizations receive food from abroad and not buy from local farmers who ironically cannot find a ‘market’ for their harvests. African governments have been weaponizing hunger and the drought to pursue their own selfish interests as expressed here. The Kenyan government was mocking farmers to sell their food cheaply claiming that once the government imported food from abroad, the farmers would suffer bigger losses. The government chose to import food than buy from the same taxpayers!
Notably, these are the same officials that cannot account for the ‘Grain from Ukraine’ shipment that has gone missing in Kenya. Looking at this bigger picture, the real problem is not climate change! These leaders are deliberately starving Africans, so as to exaggerate the effects of climate change, and demand climate justice in monetary form. This is timely given that the United Nations has just adopted a resolution on climate justice, where developed countries would potentially pay for their climate ‘offenses’ to compensate less developed countries for their ‘suffering’ ,given that these developing countries have lesser Green House Gas emmissions.