The lords of poverty

 Kenya

I met Dr Tom Catena in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains — the site of an African war and famine few have even heard about — in a hospital overflowing with children. I saw bombs had ripped away their arms, flying shrapnel had taken out a baby’s eye, anti-personnel mines had shredded legs to jagged bone and ribbons of gangrenous flesh, infants suffering kwashiorkor and the other horrors of malnutrition. Inspired by St Francis of Assisi, ‘Doctor Tom’ has worked almost every day, all day, since he arrived as the only surgeon for the Catholic hospital in Nuba nine years ago. I asked him: ‘Why do you stay?’ He replied: ‘There’s no other option. You leave and abandon everyone here or you stay and keep going.’ Heroes like Catena convince me that giving to charitable causes in Africa is the right thing to do, because at least some of what you donate will help rescue children like those in Nuba. But we know nothing much is going to change. Six years ago we were told Africa faced the ‘worst drought in 60 years’. In 2015 Ethiopia faced ‘the worst drought in decades’. This year the aid mandarins once dubbed the ‘Lords of Poverty’ by Graham Hancock have upped their hyperbole yet again to claim that wars and droughts across the Horn of Africa, Nigeria and Yemen have generated ‘the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations’ 72 years ago. Certainly nothing will change if we do not object to the fact that Yemen was heavily dependent on United Nations food aid even before the current civil war — and that this was because two thirds of its cultivable land was devoted to growing khat, a vegetable narcotic on which Yemenis spend most of their daily household income. Nothing will improve unless we acknowledge how across Africa people are fighting over scarce resources, while environmental destruction and corruption are crises that fuel the jihadist insurgencies of Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab — and drive the exodus of migrants to Europe.