A cloud up in the air, aid workers and arms dealers and the world seem oblivious to the root causes of Somalia's famine, concludes Gamal Nkrumah The world is worrying about the yo-yoing of the international stock markets and 15 million souls face starvation in the Horn of Africa. As for governments, they have generally been slower than international organisations to measure their progress in dealing with pressing problems and setting priorities. In the case of the current catastrophic famine in the Horn, governments have made disturbingly slow progress in averting disaster. Political chivvying has revealed tremendous differences among the donor nations and among the countries of the Horn clamouring for aid and humanitarian assistance. Ethnic Somalis, who are also Kenyan nationals -- there are two million of them in Kenya -- are suffering from exactly the same deadly challenges as their kith and kin across Kenya's northeastern frontier but have failed to secure the medical and food supplies earmarked for Somalis. All malnourished children are important. Are a select few deemed more important than the others are? All the malnourished masses, however, depend disproportionately on social networks -- familial, tribal and clannish -- and increasingly on humanitarian assistance. The distribution networks are as critical for the survival of the famine-stricken as the social networks and the two not surprisingly are inextricably intertwined. Beyond international humanitarian organisation, assistance and support are motley and mediocre. The World Food Programme is currently feeding more than 300,000 people in Mogadishu alone. Militant Islamist groups affiliated to Al-Qaeda such as Al-Shabab are desperately trying to stop Somalis from fleeing desolate rural areas to cities such as Mogadishu or to the nearest refugee camps. The world's largest refugee camp, however, is Dadaab -- a complex of three refugee camps in northeast Kenya close to the border with Somalia. Children traumatised by the drought, famine and social upheaval are blindly following disparate groups of adults on their own volition partly because they have no other option. Psychiatrists and counsellors have a difficult job re- orienting children who suffered this physical and psychological ordeal. It is against this grim backdrop that the African Union is arranging a donor's conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa next week to discuss the deplorable humanitarian disaster in the Horn. The AU, alas, has never traditionally given much aid to member states in dire straits. Muddled though the Pan-African body clearly is, some of the countries' concerned could yet turn out to be in more of a mess. The rains have finally fallen and coastal showers have raised hopes that regular weather patterns are back in place. Torrential rains, though, have temporarily halted the transport relief supplies to the worst affected areas even though humanitarian agencies insist that relief assistance is on its way to the most vulnerable and neediest groups. There is a certain irony in the gathering monsoon clouds heavy with rain at this particular moment. Too little, too late. Exhausted and malnourished, the people negatively impacted by drought cannot even till the once arid, now moistened land. The most predictable thing about the rain is the uncertainty it will generate. If peasants plant their crops and sow the seeds now, it will take at least six months before they can harvest the first fruits. Two much-quoted estimates for the regional cost of the devastating drought in the Horn, calculated in different ways, come to a similar order of magnitude. The spectre of millions of livestock dead and dying and the appalling images, widely televised, of severely malnourished children dying of hunger and destitution hounded by ruthlessly corrupt cutthroats have stirred the world. Somali President Sheikh Sherif Ahmed The region effected by famine sprawls over an area the size of Western Europe. The inventory records reveal that more than half the country's livestock was lost in the drought. Moreover, some 70 per cent of Somalia's population are unemployed or underemployed and that 90 per cent live below the poverty line. Agriculture constitutes about a third of the GDP of Somalia and employs three quarters of the workforce in the country. Yet farming provides a meagre income that most Somalis are incapable of eking a living out of subsistence agriculture. At the centre of Somali economic life is a world body almost everyone in the country has heard of -- the United Nations. The other equally questionable organisation is a continental body -- the African Union. In the Somali public imagination, the figure of the UN/AU peacekeeper is still shaped by all those gung-ho tales of heroic soldiers risking their lives to free the country from militant Islamists. The realities on the ground is somewhat different. "In the past three years the UN/AU army has laid waste to over half of Somalia's capital Mogadishu. Some 30 square miles of Mogadishu have been obliterated by heavy artillery mortars, tanks and helicopter gunships operated by the Ugandan army," observes author Anthony Mountain. "Crocodile tears have begun to run down the faces of the likes of Anthony Lake, CIA director nominee turned Executive Director of UNICEF, as some 15 million people starve in the Horn of Africa," Mountain notes. His remarks become most intriguing when he strays from the battlefield and killing fields of the Somali savanna. "So the crocodile tears will flow and hundreds of millions of dollars supposedly meant to feed millions of starving people in the Horn of Africa will once again end up paying for the Ethiopian military's latest arms purchases," concludes Mountain. He makes his point by demonstrating that policymakers and humanitarian workers operate around the margins of respectability. It is against this grim backdrop that two AU peacekeepers were reported killed after two suicide bombers were shot dead near Mogadishu's largest market Braka. AU and Somali government forces superintend 60 per cent of the Somali capital. Al-Qaeda and its affiliate organisations such as Al-Shabab hold sway in the rest of the city. The irony is that tens of thousands of famine-stricken Somali refugees were drenched after torrential rain pounded their makeshift shelters. And the internecine fighting continues unabated. The UN is seeking funds to fill a $1.4 billion aid shortfall. The details matter. However, the burning question is did anyone really believe that Somalis were not flesh and blood under those rags? "Food aid is not addressing the causes: drought is the easiest thing to blame. The narrative of famine is owned by outsiders," James Shikwati, director of the Kenya-based Inter- Regional Economic Network. He chose not to place too much reliance on inspired guesswork when the skeletal remains of Somalis would serve to embody his thesis.
