United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived on Tuesday in Niger to ”see for myself” the impact of a devastating famine in the largely desert West African country after the United Nations was accused of bungling aid action.
He said he would discuss with Prime Minister Hama Amadou measures to deal with the massive crisis gripping one of the world’s poorest nations.
Accompanied by his wife, Annan visited the paediatric wing of a provincial hospital where starving children were being treated, and a village nutrition centre run by Médécins Sans Frontières (MSF), which earlier said UN food aid was ”not making it to those who need it most”.
The charity said ”neither in quantity or quality, was [the United Nations] responding to the gravity of this epidemic of desperate malnutrition” and food distribution ”was not helping priority victims such as children under five years of age in the most ravaged areas”.
Speaking in the village of Madara after visiting the nutrition centre, Annan told reporters, ”I have come here to see for myself what is happening and to discuss with the president and the prime minister what we can do together in the short and the long term.”
After visiting the Zinder region, which has been badly hit by the famine, Annan travelled to the capital Niamey for talks with President Mamadou Tandja and members of his government.
He also met with officials of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) as well as with representatives of relief charities. MSF lamented a lack of coordination in UN relief action.
Jean-Herve Bradol, who heads the French chapter of MSF, said: ”We expect Kofi Annan to put some order in United Nations agencies that are major actors in this crisis, the World Food Programme and Unicef.”
MSF, a French-based specialist charity, was among a number of bodies to draw the world’s attention to the deadly scale of famine in Niger, a country already hit by desertification and by locust swarms that this year have wreaked havoc on crops across a wide swathe of northern Africa.
The Zinder region, once the breadbasket of the country for staple crops, has become one of the hardest hit by drought and encroaching desert, as well as locust swarms that devastated crops.
According to the United Nations, more than 2,5-million people are ”in a vulnerable situation” in Niger, including 32 000 children in ”deadly danger”.
Annan made no direct reply to the criticism by MSF, whose work he praised.
”I had the chance to talk to mothers and their children,” Annan said after his visit to the nutrition centre, which is run by MSF-Switzerland. ”I was very happy to visit this centre, the work is very valuable and they deserve to be given support.”
MSF emergency official Thierry Allafort de Verger said on Tuesday that in the big southern Maradi district, ”only 10% of the population gets aid, while in areas under control, 90% of them get aid.”
The relief operation ”puts the question of intelligence about distribution at stake”, he said.
In Paris, Bradol said the WFP and Unicef had initially called for food aid to be distributed in exchange for money which impoverished populations did not have.
The UN agencies had since come around to the idea of free aid, he added, but the food provided lacked enriched flour needed by children and was being handed out in the wrong places.
The MSF director also said UN agencies had initially erred in taking into account agricultural data rather than information based on what people were actually dealing with, such as the number of cases of severe malnutrition.
In addition to the United Nations, Bradol charged that the European Union and the government of Niger had accepted a situation in which malnutrition had become endemic and marked by seasonal peaks.
But Giancarlo Cirri, the WFP’s director in Niger, said ”the early warning system proved efficient, even if agencies were incapable of responding with the appropriate proportions”. ‒ Sapa-AFP