By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah
Ten years ago, a local newspaper in Sierra Leone reported that Ernest Bai Koroma, then president of Sierra Leone, had called on international organizations to account for millions of dollars they had received on behalf of Sierra Leone for the fight against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Koroma’s statement was published on February 17, 2015 by the Concord Times in Freetown under the headline, “President Koroma Urges International Accountability of Ebola Funds.”
Koroma’s statement came a week after a national audit stated that his government could not account for over a third of the national Ebola budget. An 84-page report released by the Sierra Leone Audit Service, which covered the first six months of the national Ebola response, discovered that over US$5 million allegedly spent on public procurements for ambulances, construction of a treatment center and other logistics could not be substantiated. The audit report put the Koroma government under severe criticisms by local and international media over its handling of the outbreak.
In Sierra Leone, the audit scandal followed persistent accusations that national authorities were using the epidemic to enrich themselves. Some in the international community said the audit scandal was evidence of why the several millions of dollars sent to international organizations engaged in the Ebola response could not be handed directly to the Koroma government.
“We would not only limit the accountability demand to local players because the bulk of the Ebola funds that were taken for and on behalf of the people of this country were channeled through international NGOs and others. We are also going to demand equal transparency and accountability from the international community,” Ernest Koroma responded to his international friends as he spoke at an event in Freetown held by the Sierra Leone Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA) to discuss a post-Ebola economic recovery program for the country.
Koroma’s statement was a direct response to the criticism he was facing for the corruption that surrounded his national response to the Ebola outbreak. His statement raised a fundamental issue: the actual motives of international humanitarianism. To what extent can international organizations, involved in disaster response and crisis management, be held to account for the millions of dollars they raise in the name of helping victims of crises and disasters?
During the war years in the 1990s, the influx of international organizations in Sierra Leone changed the character of the country’s cash-based economy. The influx of foreign aid workers meant a sporadic circulation of foreign currencies in the country. The results became unbearable on the local population: landlords charged exorbitant rent payments in dollar amounts, a near relegation of the national currency occurred and inflation digits climbed uncontrollably. The experience of the war years left an unbearable legacy about international aid and its work force: almost everyone in Sierra Leone, and much of the crisis-prone countries in the region, have not forgotten how the international funding that came during the civil war years was also taken away by the international staff who accompanied the donations.
In the wake of the West African outbreak, various governments and other private philanthropies donated over US$3 billion dollars to the Ebola response. But the funds were largely sent to western international aid organizations, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Many of these international organizations are no strangers to the region. They were involved in the aid operations and humanitarian work during the civil wars in the 1990s. They had departed from the region fifteen years earlier when the wars were declared over. They returned in 2014 with their usual four-wheel drive convoy, contending for space in a humanitarian disaster created by the outbreak. The staff of these international organizations got a monthly hazard pay of US$1600 and annual salaries between US$153,825 to US$187,904, depending on their rank in the global aid organizational system. Sierra Leone and the two other affected countries in the region were witnesses to the lavish spending attitude of international humanitarian staff.
In late September of 2014, then United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, announced the establishment of the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) in Ghana. This was a few days after the UN Security Council declared the Ebola outbreak a threat to international security. The WHO officials stated that a total of US$490 million was needed to halt the transmission of Ebola in the affected countries within a nine-month period.
A week later, the WHO’s projected budget was increased to US$600 million. The United States reportedly gave US$423 million of its Ebola response money to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. The British also pledged a total of £205 million budget for its response. And the European Union added another €500 million. Then the same troops of aid forces, from organization who departed the region after the war years, instantly resurfaced on the West African scene in 2014. Within two weeks of these funding announcements, an assortment of over a hundred non-governmental organizations immediately deployed their aid troops in Sierra Leone. The European Union alone sent about two thousand personnel into West Africa. Each of these organizations, including USAID, struggled for a piece of the millions of aid dollars announced by various governments and independent philanthropies in the name of dying Africans.
Aid workers arrived in West Africa in a much more lavish environment than during the war years. In Freetown, USAID booked all standard rooms at the Radisson Blu, a five star hotel on the coastline of Freetown, for a cost of US$270 per night over a six-month period. All business suites in that hotel cost US$350 a night. International aid workers said the Ebola crisis required expensive security measures: new four wheel drives, newly built hotels with air conditioned rooms in the affluent westend of Freetown, and modern communication equipment; all this meant that more than half of the aid budget would go towards the upkeep of the international workforce that constantly arrived in the country.
While these troops of international aid workers flooded the region and occupied the many air-conditioned conference rooms and offices in Freetown, Conakry, and Monrovia, in the countryside local health workers who were in direct contact with infected persons and those involved in Ebola burials starved, going months without salaries, failing to receive even their meager weekly hazard payments of US$115. A Newsweek article, published in May 2015, documented tragic stories about local health workers involved in the fight against the outbreak. It reported testimonies of how local doctors, nurses, hospital cleaners, lab technicians, and burial workers went months without payments, tossed around within an unnecessary bureaucracy created by exploitative international organizations and national authorities.
A US$23 million budget meant to address risk payments to local frontline workers was mismanaged with serious controversy and corruption. Protests by frontline workers over non-payments of health workers weekly risk allowances featured constantly throughout the outbreak. These protests continued while international aid workers travelled constantly on a United Nations helicopter across the country at an estimated cost of US$5,000 per trip. In total, the international humanitarian staff spent almost US$100 million on air travel in Sierra Leone alone.
International policy makers in London, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Washington, and New York were aware that the millions of dollars funneled into the Ebola response in West Africa were misappropriated and misdirected. A senior British official, Margaret Hodge revealed a disturbing reality during the middle of the outbreak: out of a €53 million European Union budget for frontline workers in Liberia, only €3.4 million actually reached local workers in the frontlines. The Ebola funds had only created high paying jobs for international aid workers and opened incentives for local corruption to flourish, all at the expense of local health workers who faced the actual dangers of the outbreak.
Towards the end of November 2014, the WHO reported that over 622 health workers in West Africa were infected with the Ebola virus and 346 of that figure had died. In December, the story of West Africa’s Ebola frontline workers reached its apex in the western media: Time magazine named Ebola fighters its 2014 Person of the Year. But what was absent in this glamorized heroism of frontline health workers in western media were the story of how their conditions helped raised funds that went only into the accounts of international aid organizations and local politicians.
In some ways, the stories of local health officials in West Africa resurrected the sad dual tragedy of the thousands of war amputees scattered across Sierra Leone today. Towards the end of the 1990s, images of Sierra Leone’s amputees occupied frontpages of global newspapers and magazines. Global media beamed images of hacked limbs on western television to demonstrate the horrific brutality of wars and the extent of the humanitarian crisis they created. The United Nations and its chain of international aid organizations mobilized hundreds of millions of dollars in response to the catastrophe.
The largest international military mission in the UN’s history was deployed in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. International policy makers rolled out a multimillion dollar resettlement and rehabilitation program in the country to repair the damage caused by the war. But the funds never reached the victims of the war. The United Nations spent several millions of dollars in a transitional justice program to punish key perpetrators of the atrocities. A tribunal structure that cost over US$2 million to build was setup in Freetown for the trial. However, the victims of the atrocities for whom justice was sought were left in subhuman conditions across amputee camps around the country with no proper housing and health facilities
The underdevelopment that predated the war and the sufferings it created were never addressed as part of the agenda of the international intervention. When the multinational military force and its multitude of aid bureaucrats departed the country, they left behind a seriously ruined nation without basic social and economic development. The millions of dollars in aid and donor finance did not solve the pressing social and infrastructural needs of the country. The aid money generated through the deplorable images of war amputees and other victims was largely spent to upkeep the multinational military force and its battalion of international aid workers.
At the time when the international military and aid forces departed, Sierra Leone ranked at the bottom of the human development index with the most horrible health statistics in the world. The huge tribunal complex in Freetown, built out of the aid dollars to punish key leaders of the war, was the only physical structure left behind by the previous multinational aid force that occupied the country towards the end of the 1990s. In 2014, this UN-built structure became the headquarters of the National Ebola Response Center (the agency leading the national response efforts in Sierra Leone).
Billions of dollars were similarly donated in response to the 2014 outbreak in West Africa, but the international aid intervention, similar to the approach of the 1990s, only focused on outreach, public education, mass diagnosis, contact tracing, vaccine development, and clinical trials. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on community education campaigns, construction of makeshift holding centers and treatment facilities made with tarpaulin, transportation services, logistics, salaries, and on similar programs. All of these temporal projects eventually disappeared again as the crisis dissipated.
The international aid force that had left behind dilapidated health centers and hospitals with poor service infrastructure in the 1990s returned in 2014 into the same environment. Today, with billions of dollars already spent in the international response efforts, the international aid work force built no permanent hospitals or health centers in any of the three most affected countries. This international aid workforce eventually departed West Africa, the same way they did in the 1990s, leaving behind the same chronic health infrastructure. Evidence of the millions of dollars of aid money remained only a tale told by victims and survivors of the deadly Ebola outbreak.
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