I thank the members for inviting me, taking the time to listen to what we have to say and taking the report seriously, which some other Parliaments and donor countries have not done.
I will summarise briefly the main allegations in the report, after which I will mention the donor response by the Development Assistance Group in Addis Ababa, which has been the main conduit for the response of donor Governments to our criticisms. I will then draw attention to a letter of 16 December that we wrote to the Development Assistance Group about our concern that its response failed to address the allegations in the report.
Ethiopia is one of the world's largest recipients of development aid. It receives approximately $3 billion in funds annually. Ireland is by no means a major donor but it is one of the members of the Development Assistance Group. As the Chairman stated, Irish Aid allocated €35 million for programmes in Ethiopia in 2010. The problem we found with the programmes Irish Aid supports along with other donor agencies, through the World Bank and pooled funds alongside other donors, is twofold. On the one hand, the money is flowing through Government structures that are highly authoritarian, partisan and politicised, and used by the ruling party in a very aggressive way to shore up its hegemony, marginalise dissenters and, in many cases, jail and torture people who disagree with it. In particular, the regime uses all socio-economic means at its disposal to marginalise people who vote against it. That is the uncharitable characterisation of the Ethiopian regime as we understand it and as many other academics and NGOs have described it, including the International Crisis Group, for example, in its report entitled Ethiopia: Ethnic Federalism and its Discontents.
Into the very authoritarian structure is flowing money that is supposed to be administered by the regional and village-level governments for the benefit of Ethiopian citizens. One must consider the way in which this occurs and the reason it is of importance to donors who give money to Ethiopia. The money comes in at the top and goes down to the regional governments. It then enters five sectors under the protection of basic services, PBS, programme. These sectors are the agriculture, water, roads, health and education sectors. In several of those sectors, we found systematic discrimination in the administration of Government services and business. This results in the selective allocation of seeds, fertiliser and agricultural inputs; partisan and discriminative allocation of land at the expense of people who did not vote for the ruling party or support the Government; discrimination in schools against teachers who are members of trade unions or Opposition parties such that they do not get promoted or receive training, and sometimes lose their jobs; and the use of school facilities, time and staff funded under the programmes for the indoctrination of schoolchildren in the ruling party's ideology. All schoolchildren above the age of 15 are, for two weeks out of every term, given party-political training by members of the party in their district. That is the substance of the main allegations about Government services.
Irish Aid does not support all the programmes we cover in the report. The first programme supported is the PBS programme, a World Bank pooled funding project, and the second is the productive safety net programme, PSNP, which is a food-for-work programme. The latter comprises the second main area that Irish Aid supports and in respect of which we discovered problems. In every area we visited, people said the safety net programme was being used to target opponents of the regime, not just members of Opposition political parties but also dissenters. These include intellectuals or elders who did not toe the line in a particular village.
The safety net programme is administered in some areas by NGOs - particularly an Irish NGO and also several UK NGOs and USAID - and in some areas directly by the Government. In the case of the Government the money goes to the regional governments, which buy food that is distributed to the village governments. The village governments have a system whereby every five households is grouped into a cell, the leader of which is a member of the ruling party. It is a kind of Maoist phenomenon and it is informed by the ruling party's ideology of revolutionary democracy, which involves the mobilisation of the whole of society into a political effort. It is quite similar to China in some cases.
The cells recommend and vet families and households in respect of getting food aid. The problem is that the head of each cell is a member of the ruling party. We interviewed people in and outside the ruling party and people who are responsible for compiling lists of who should get food aid or who is entitled to participate in the food-for-work programme. Across the board, the message was the same, namely, that everybody knows how the system works and that one must have a party card and pay one's dues to get food aid. These are allegations that the Opposition parties in Ethiopia have been making for years, ever since the programme started. Their criticisms have not been taken seriously or investigated. The practice is ongoing. We undertook our research in 2009 before the May 2010 elections. Aid was a key tool used to squeeze the population ahead of the election, which incidentally the ruling party won with 99.9% of the parliamentary seats.
The second part of the substantive problem is that all the donor agencies in Addis Ababa know this is going on. We have had reams of testimony from donor officials, off the record but contained in our report, acknowledging this has been going on for some time. The monitoring mechanisms in place, however, are no good in capturing what is happening. One reason is that they are designed principally from a development framework to see if the moneys are spent as intended, such as reaching villages at the bottom level. The immediate observation is they are. The problem is which villages. Many of the donor officials we spoke to off the record said political monitoring is not part of their mandate or in the structure of their monitoring mechanisms. They confirmed that if the kind of discrimination we were talking about is occurring, they would not know about it. The head of the World Bank is on record as saying we will not find out about this unless an undercover investigation is carried out.
I sympathise with the donors in Addis Ababa because it is difficult to carry out any independent monitoring with the incredibly prickly and proud Ethiopian regime that resists any type of investigation or criticism from anyone. Hardly any foreign correspondents are given access to Ethiopia any more. There are the bare bones of a domestic media but the main independent radio stations and newspapers have all shut down. Voice of America broadcasts are routinely jammed. I was arrested and deported when the authorities discovered what I was doing for this report, unfortunately, on the penultimate day of my research. Other colleagues of mine were banned from Ethiopia. Well-known academics with long records of Ethiopian research can no longer get visas. It is hard to get any independent information. The regime simply will not allow it. The reason the Development Assistance Group Ethiopia in Addis Ababa is reluctant to conduct proper monitoring is that the Ethiopian authorities would more than likely shut it down. No one is willing to test this.
Our original recommendations included a much more robust accountability as to how taxpayers' money from Ireland, the UK, EU, US and Canada was spent. Is it possible to establish an independent international investigation into the politicisation of aid?
All the officials we spoke to said, off the record, it was happening across the board. However, the response Human Rights Watch received from donors was that the systematic evidence of distortion of aid programmes does not exist. Accordingly, they claimed Human Rights Watch was wrong in its claims. This response was based on a July 2010 paper commissioned by the donor groups that focused on the systems and safeguards that donor-supported programmes have in place. The report, however, admitted it was not an investigation and did not seek to prove or disprove allegations of distortion. Nonetheless, this was the principle plank that the donors in Addis Ababa, of which Irish Aid is a part, used to respond to our report and claim it was nonsense.
Moreover, the July 2010 paper stated that to understand how the programmes, the systems and their safeguards work, it would be necessary to go beyond reviewing documentation and to gather additional evidence from the field. As such, this study remains exploratory.
The Human Rights Watch report covered 53 villages with interviews with more than 200 people in 27 districts across three regions in Ethiopia. It is the only independent examination of the politicisation of aid money in Ethiopia. No other organisation has been able to do so. Any investigation in this area must be done in conjunction with and have permission from the Ethiopian Government. Journalists are routinely tailed everywhere they go. These days it is routine for foreign journalists to be interviewed before they apply for a visa as to what they will write about and for them to submit their filings prior to exiting the country. They are tightly controlled and intimidated.
DAG Ethiopia and the donors are resisting examining our report for the obvious reason the Ethiopian authorities would not agree with it. They are in a bind. Do they keep funnelling moneys into the programmes even though these problems are happening? Alternatively, do they ask serious questions about their strategy in Ethiopia? Ethiopia is a classic case study of giving large amounts of money to authoritarian governments without asking too many questions.
We need to step back and ask more fundamental questions. How does one assist a poor population living under a repressive regime that controls a donor's access? In 2005, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front Government, under its Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, killed over 200 people in Addis Ababa protesting against controversial elections. That was at the time of the G8 Gleneagles summit and the Make Poverty History movement. All donors reacted in horror to this event and suspended their direct budget support to the Ethiopian Government.
In six months, they came up with a new plan, the protection of basic services, which Irish Aid supports along with others. Aid was to go to specific sectors in order to avoid the problem of political manipulation. Having acknowledged the problem, they actually set up a new system without any political monitoring and which was open to the danger of manipulation and distortion. They had the fairness test which checked the money was going equally to different parts of the country. They did not check, however, how people were being filleted in each village rather than across the regions. They even acknowledged this was a problem back in 2005.
A much broader debate needs to take place as to how the donors in Ethiopia engage with the authoritarian regime there and elsewhere. For example, Human Rights Watch has concerns about Rwanda.
