SOUTH AFRICA’S R2-million effort to help Rwandan refugees — seven Air Force flights carrying 136 tons of food and medicine — was but a drop in the ocean.
It was not even enough to sustain for a single day the 250 000 destitute Rwandans at the Tanzanian border town of Ngara, where most of the South African supplies were destined.
When Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad last week stepped off the first of the flights into Mwanza, Tanzania’s second largest city and staging post for the operation, relief workers and Tanzanian officials welcomed him enthusiastically.
Underlying the enthusiasm may have been a belief that South Africa was emerging as the saviour of its continental partners.
But Pahad had to disillusion them; South Africa would not be the fireman of Africa, he said.
And perhaps justifiably so, as not all voices back home support Operation Mercy Rwanda, as it is called. Apart from the tremendous budgetary demands of the Reconstruction and Development Programme, South Africa itself has nine million people in need of food aid, as Operation Hunger executive director Mpho Mashinini pointed out this week.
“Charity begins at home,” he said. “We are not condemning the philosophy of international aid, but we are saying there is a great need in South Africa that must be fulfilled before we get involved.”
Not the whole picture, retorted Operation Mercy representatives. “At the end of the day we should ask ourselves: Where there is a tremendous need, what should we choose — starvation or poverty? It is only right to assist others in other parts of Africa,” said Yusuf Seedat, whose Africa Muslim Agency, together with the Islamic Relief Agency, donated 32 tons of the supplies airlifted last week.
Reverend Ron Steele of Rhema Church pointed out that none of the religious organisations involved in Operation Mercy had diverted anything from existing local relief programmes. Ordinary citizens had responded beyond expectations to a low-key collection drive. “The people of South Africa gave the answer.”
Positive spin-offs, said Steele, were the inter-denominational structure now in place, which planned to involve itself also in relief work in SA, and the international prestige.
That South Africans were new to the game of international aid was illustrated clearly by Operation Mercy. Among the donations were tons of canned foods too heavy to transport by air; sweets, potato chips, a tennis racquet and even some old cigars. Much of it had to be held back.