Crisis caravan- NGOs are businesses dressed like Mother Teresa

That is not all. In some cases, the funds said to have been released to a country are frittered away and are totally useless by the time they get to the intended beneficiaries.

Clare Lockhart tells this story of what happened in Afghanistan after people had been promised US$150 million for reconstruction.  She quotes a young man, saying:  “We heard on the radio that there was going to be a reconstruction programme in our region to help us rebuild our houses after coming back from exile, and we were very pleased.

“After many months, very little had happened. We may be illiterate, but we are not stupid. So we went to find out what was going on. And this is what we discovered: 

“The money was received by an agency in Geneva, who took 20 per cent and subcontracted the job to another agency in Washington DC, who also took 20 per cent. Again it was subcontracted and another 20 per cent was taken; and this happened again when the money arrived in Kabul. 

“By this time there was very little money left; but enough for someone to buy wood in western Iran and have it shipped by a shipping cartel owned by a provincial governor at five times the cost of regular transportation. 

“Eventually some wooden beams reached our villages. But the beams were too large and heavy for the mud walls that we can build. So all we could do was chop them up and use them for firewood.”

Could the same thing be happening in Zimbabwe? 

Most likely. Two examples quickly come to mind.

Chemonics, which benefited from the aid programmes in Haiti and Afghanistan, was contracted by the US Agency for International Development to supply malaria kits to Zimbabwe. It ordered test kits worth nearly US$500 000 but these had been rejected by the Zimbabwe government earlier.
Population Services International ordered condoms from the United Kingdom when a local pharmaceutical company, CAPS, was manufacturing them and had been supplying the Family Planning Council, the same organisation PSI was ordering condoms for.

Worse. Donors can even change people’s diets. They give you rice, wheat  or yellow maize from their countries when you need white maize.
Graham Hancock, in his book,Lords of Poverty, says USAID operates on the streetwise principle that those who accept free handouts today will become paying customers tomorrow.

“AID’s ethics are very little different from those of a drug pusher when it boasts as it frequently does about past recipients of food aid who are now among the top purchasers of US agricultural exports,” he says.

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