At a time when Americans are worried about Russian penetration in Africa, even blaming the Kremlin for worsening the food crisis in the region due to the invasion of Ukraine, a bigger “invasion” is coming to hit Africans: corruption.
The international community has focused on the wars in eastern Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, but Washington’s recent decision to suspend humanitarian aid to Ethiopia will turn things upside down.
The suspension comes as Africa’s second most populous nation struggles to feed some 20 million citizens – about 1/6 of the population – after a civil war, drought and rampant inflation.
The US, through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), provides the vast majority of food aid to Ethiopia through two programs, one run by aid groups and the other by the UN. Medical aid is also provided, which drastically reduces mortality rates.
But why would the US make such a move?
In both food and medicine, huge amounts never reached the beneficiaries. USAID provides all kinds of aid, including life-saving medicines, to poorer countries. It contracts with huge corporations to buy and transport these supplies around the world. In April 2015, Chemonics won the bid, immediately becoming USAID’s largest contractor.
The supply chain served as the backbone for the US government’s most famous global health programs, including the HIV/Aids initiative that saved 25 million lives. However, this project aspired to bring supply chains to the point where recipients could manage them themselves. Thus, an extensive supply and transportation system that provides life-saving products such as AIDS drugs, mosquito nets and contraceptives to millions around the world would be transformed. It’s a mammoth $9.5 billion program — the agency’s largest — that reaches numbers reminiscent of defense spending.
Something is wrong
In the joint investigation of the Devex platform and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), which made the revelation, it is stated that within the first two years the project was in crisis.
The stench began to emerge shortly after Bill Steiger, George W. Bush’s godfather and a Bush administration official, was named USAID chief of staff in May 2017. He was hearing rumors that worried him.
Colleagues warned him that vital supplies of HIV test kits and AIDS drugs, provided as part of one of the government’s flagship international health programmes, were running low. Others said orders for mosquito nets were seriously delayed, threatening to undermine malaria prevention.
Steiger had a reputation for being straight-talking. In the chaotic first months of Trump’s presidency, he was the first political appointee to begin reviewing USAID’s global health programs. Steiger said he soon discovered that the company that managed USAID’s global health supply chain was losing control.
Unlike any other USAID contract, this one was “too big to fail” – and the stakes could hardly have been higher. “People would die if this thing really failed,” he told Devex and TBIJ researchers.
The project marked a recent overhaul of USAID’s approach to delivering health supplies around the world. Multiple supply chain projects will be consolidated into a single overall. An official said in 2013 that if this contract was done right, the agency might never have to fund another project like this again!
Only 7% reached their destination
In the project’s worst quarter, 2017, only 7% of USAID shipments reached their destinations on time and in full. A former official claimed that Chemonics and USAID made the project’s performance look better than it was by adopting easy targets and erasing poor results.
There have also been dozens of arrests and charges related to illegal activity surrounding the project. None of these people were project personnel, although on another occasion the Global Fund claimed to have uncovered a multimillion-dollar fraud perpetrated by a Chemonics subcontractor in Nigeria.
In the project’s worst quarter, 2017, only 7% of USAID shipments reached their destinations on time and in full. A former official claimed that Chemonics and USAID made the project’s performance look better than it was by adopting easy targets and erasing poor results.
There have also been dozens of arrests and charges related to illegal activity surrounding the project. None of these people were project personnel, although on another occasion the Global Fund claimed to have uncovered a multimillion-dollar fraud perpetrated by a Chemonics subcontractor in Nigeria.
A report found that Chemonics’ “controls were poorly implemented by negligent staff who failed to respond to alarming alerts” and that an unnamed senior project manager “was essentially living beyond his salary at Chemonics.”
Devex’s reports at the time contributed to increased scrutiny of the project, including a bipartisan investigation by the US Congress that led to an investigation by USAID’s own watchdog. Both found significant errors and mismanagement by USAID and its contractor.
Over time, the project may have been improving, with Chemonics today gloating and USAID saying the project has strengthened countries’ supply chains, but research by Devex and TBIJ that raises big questions about performance of the project, as talking to officials paints a completely different picture.
Scandal in food aid: Empty warehouses
But beyond the medical supplies, a mega scandal was revealed in the issue of food aid, with the culprits being found in the Ethiopian state apparatus, even in its army. That is why, in the summer of 2023, USAID made the decision to suspend food aid.
Leaked documents given to donors and revealed by the Washington Post indicate the plan was coordinated by officials from both Ethiopia’s federal and regional governments.
Officials diverted aid from those who needed it to feed the military and ex-combatants and sold it on the open market to millers who re-exported the flour, a USAID investigation found.
“After a country-wide review, USAID determined, in coordination with the Government of Ethiopia, that a broad and coordinated campaign is diverting food aid,” USAID said. “We cannot proceed with the distribution of food aid until reforms are implemented.” Ethiopia’s foreign ministry announced that “the two governments are conducting investigations so that the perpetrators of such a diversion are held accountable.”
“Extensive monitoring shows that this diversion of donor-funded food aid is a coordinated and criminal program, which has prevented life-saving aid from reaching the most vulnerable,” said a report by the Humanitarian Resilience Development Donor Group, an organization donors. “The plan appears to be orchestrated by Ethiopia’s federal and regional entities, with military units across the country benefiting from humanitarian aid.”
It is not clear exactly how much food was stolen, but the donor report said the research team visited 63 flour mills in seven of Ethiopia’s nine regions and found “significant diversion” in all seven regions. Food from the US, Ukraine, Japan and France donated to the UN’s World Food Program has been stolen, the report said. He invited all donors who sent food aid to check how it is being used.
An aid worker with knowledge of the program said it appeared that local officials responsible for creating beneficiary lists had inflated the number of households in need and prevented food from reaching hungry families.
Concequenses
The aid cut would further roil the volatile Horn of Africa region, already wracked by Sudan’s civil war that has displaced more than 1.3 million people in six weeks and after continued fighting pushed drought-stricken Somalia on the brink of famine.
It may also push Ethiopia further into Russia’s arms, after a period of frosty relations with the US over massive human rights abuses committed during a two-year civil war in the north. Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch released a report saying ethnic cleansing continues in parts of the northern region of Tigray.
