Disaster Aid Mismanagement and Fraud

Nearly five months after the devastating Christmas tsunami in Indonesia, survivors in South Asia are still suffering. They are being denied the benefits of millions and million of donated dollars through widespread fraud, theft, and waste. Graham Johnson reports on conditions in Sri Lanka for the Sunday Mirror:

An estimated 50 per cent of food and health aid donated to the worst affected areas in Sri Lanka is ending up on the black market.

Not one of the million refugees left homeless has been rehoused.

Warehouses are full of clothes, food and medical supplies - which the Sri Lankan government has decided NOT to give its people. It believes giving these to survivors would affect local businesses and hinder the country's rebuilding efforts.

Victims are still living in tents in rat-infested camps where illness is rife and food deliveries patchy - while relief workers lounge in luxury air-conditioned villas and eat at fine restaurants.

Tsunami victim and former UN aid worker Kamal Ratha Malli said: "We know that the British people have been very generous - even David Beckham helped us - but where is the money?"

A major complaint is that some aid workers arrived to help, but they do little. Aid money sits in the bank likely to be drained away to the black market or to be given to unscrupulous agencies which then quit helping and move away to fancy offices. According to Preshan Dissanayake, chairman of an aid group in Sri Lanka,

"A lot of the aid workers are here to party and have a good time, to save money from their high wages and go home."

[ ... ]

"I know of medical agencies that spent millions of pounds on drugs that we can get for five per cent of the cost. It's a rip-off."

Of course, lured by mountains of donated cash, the world's most adept opportunists, speculators, thieves, and price gougers abound. Examples are: local charities producing phony receipts to scam thousands from disaster relief; landowners doubling rent fees; local officials and aid bosses simply stealing disaster funds; and, sadly, undertakers quadrupling the price of aid-funded burials. All in all, the refugees are left with rotting food, no housing, and little hope. As a result, everything they do receive goes to numbing the pain, spent on whisky, cannabis, and heroin.

Graham Johnson's report deals with conditions in Sri Lanka, but it's not a stretch to imagine that similar incompetence and criminality exists in the other nations affected by the tsunami. Historically, the only certainty to giving relief aid to impoverished regions prone to corruption is that the aid accounts will likely be bled dry by thieves and incompetence, long before any baby gets one drop of milk. It happened in Somalia in the 1990s when the U.S. military was sent in to keep the aid from being stolen by warlords. The thieving frenzy is predictable and exactly as Graham Johnson observed in Sri Lanka.

My guess would be that only a very small percentage of donated aid funds is actually allocated to the intended purpose. The balance, along with the good intentions of many donors, is stolen or wasted.