ADDRESS DARK HISTORY OF AID ORGANISATIONS

 
Sir,

A week ago, a volunteer of an aid organisation accosted me on the streets and asked me to donate money to charitable causes. The ardent volunteer of the aid organisation which shall remain unnamed concluded his speech with an emotive appeal.

“Donate,” he said, “your contribution, no matter how big or small, will make a lasting difference and save a life.” As a dedicated anti-poverty advocate one would assume that it would be easy to elicit a positive response from me without the need for a compelling and borderline guilt-tripping speech. To the volunteer’s disappointment, I did not agree to his request; this was but one of many donation appeals from aid organisations I have declined.

Aid organisations have the ardours task of helping the world’s most vulnerable people as they try to save them from human accelerated entropy. In their noble and admirable endeavours, they come across children battered by the ravages of the seven-year long civil war in Syria, civilians dying from Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and ethnic groups fleeing from Myanmar to escape systematic and organised killings.

However, these organisations, which have committed themselves to protecting and assisting people, have caused irrevocable harm to the world’s most vulnerable.
Earlier this month, reports surfaced that Oxfam workers raped and sexually exploited children as young as six years in exchange for food and other necessities. Days after the Oxfam reports emerged, Doctors Without Borders confirmed it received 146 reports of misconduct in 2017, of which 24 were for sexual harassment or sexual abuse.

After six years of refusing to claim responsibility, the United Nations admitted in December 2016 that its peacekeepers were the source of a cholera outbreak in Haiti which killed over 10 000 people. In November 2017, a year after three World Vision workers stole E11 million worth of food and construction material in Liberia. Red Cross workers colluded with banks, embezzling over E67 million meant to combat the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa.

Consistent footprints of grievous harm, traces of fraud and embezzlement of funds meant to rebuild devastated communities, scars of rape and human rights violation inflicted by those we trust to protect the world’s most vulnerable, have become a consistent and reoccurring stain in the history of aid organisations.
The full scale of abuse, fraud, theft and collusion is unknown; a third of the 25 largest aid organisations declined to make their fraud data public.

The insatiable appetite for PR aesthetics has culminated in deliberate lack of transparency concealing rape, corruption and misconduct by aid organisation workers. The vulnerable and defenceless suffer in the hands of those meant to protect them.

Faced with danger, they have no choice but to trust aid workers and hope they will not take advantage of them in their moment of despair.

Nathi Mzileni

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