For decades, the lands of the Horn of Africa States region have been kept in a state of artificial dormancy, despite being capable, if worked, of feeding more than the current 170 million population of the region. It is, indeed, an irony when such a region, being a goldmine of agricultural potential, is led by a class of people who were sourced through international NGOs and humanitarian ecosystems. They know no better than waiting on the breadlines of international donors instead of developing their own lands. This aid industry which has taken over the region is a sophisticated process, which has effectively replaced sovereign leadership with a class of professional beggars.

When a person’s entire worldview is shaped by grant proposals and feasibility studies, they lose the ability to see a field of soil as anything but a site of future distribution center for food aid. They were hired because they served the NGO industry, speaking he language of the donor and not the language of the Horn African farmer. No wonder one sees them running to the Gulf countries when things get more difficult with the traditional Western donors. The disruption of USAID, once the primary benefactor for many NGOs, has forced a shift in the humanitarian landscape. This funding gap has led many leaders to seek support from Gulf nations, often finding themselves in newfound dependencies.

Obviously, the region’s leadership is primarily skilled in the begging business as one often observes them travelling to other countries to ensure the flow of aid and the political patronage it buys, remain uninterrupted. They are probably not villains but they know no better. They are, indeed, products of a specific manufacture – the aid industry managed by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, the WEFP, the now defunct USAID, and the many others from Europe and the Gulf States.

One often reads and actually observes the reports that come from these institutions towards the end of the dry season or early spring of the region, which habitually foretell of potential hunger on the way in the region. It is when cheap subsidized grains from the West are dumped into the Horn of Africa States to discourage local farmers to grow their own food. 

This is often presented as emergency relief, which actually is a predatory pricing mechanism that bankrupts local smallholders. It is how an Ethiopian farmer or a Somali river lands farmer cannot compete with free food. It is why the small local food markets collapse and the farmers end up in internally displaced camps to become metric measures in the next NGO fundraising campaign. It is how the leaders of the region reinforce their positions as the essential middlemen between the starving population and the foreign providers, pawns whose power are derived not from harvests but from begging.

Most people have forgotten that the vast fertile plains of the Juba and the Shabelle, the lush valleys of the Omo and the rest of the Ethiopian highland plateaus can produce more food than needed by the region’s entire population. It is perhaps time, the region looked inward and worked on developing it own agricultural industry to feed its population in the place of waiting for foreign aid. This would require a shift from leaders born out of the aid industry to those who can truly lead the region to a better food security and peace.

The current aid-bred leaders who run the region have contributed immensely to the region becoming food-insecure. They made the region import dependent instead of growing its own food and/or processing it. If only they realized that by utilizing its own soil, blockades of the Red Sea and other chokepoints would only have been no more than a maritime nuisance but not a death sentence as is being the possibility in the current ongoing Middle East war. 

The rising youth of the region are beginning to see through this pawn dynamic. They are realizing that as long as their leaders are former NGO directors, their lot is not going to change much and that their countries would remain projects in the place of being actual sovereign countries. They will have to dismantle this entire machinery of dependency, which treats one of the most fertile regions of the world as a permanent charity case. They will need to make the aid industry obsolete and in particular this year when there are elections throughout the region. They may have to throw the current leaderships out to make place for real sovereign leaders of the lands of the Horn of Africa States.

Shifting from a humanitarian management phase to an industrialized agriculture and food self-sufficiency will not be easy. The aid industry and their major supporters including the World Bank and the IMF would not allow this. However, it is often said that charity begins at home. Governments of the region, and not only the leaders, should stop acting as clearing houses for foreign grains and encourage indigenous seed banks. Farmers must be encouraged to grow their own food instead of being forced to flee their lands by militias most probably financed by the NGO industry, and possibly also involving the aid-bred leaders.

The Horn of Africa States region needs to build its own path as its ancestors used to do. They must bury and block the aid-to-politics pipeline, the way the current leaders have forced themselves into the seats of power. People who worked for the aid industry must be barred from running for elections in any form of authority be it municipal councillors, parliamentarians and/or senators. They must obviously be barred from holding ministerial positions if the region has ever to gain its dignity and sovereignty. 

© Eurasia Review