As most of you already know by now, Mirriah is one of my favourite places in Niger. It is an old village with an ancient heritage, rich in century old Baobab trees and known for its vegetable gardens. Situated 20km from Zinder, it is a place I love to go to for a Sunday excursion, visiting the colourful marketplace and then spending the afternoon in the amazing Boabab forest.

Concerning Mirriah, Hilary Andersson of the BBC had the following to say during the Niger Famine Scam 2004-05:

This is the only part of Niger where anyone has even tried to estimate how many people have starved to death. And the indications are, that just in this town and and the villages immediately surrounding it, thousands of people have died in the last few months.

Hilary Andersson, BBC (September 2005)

I have yet to meet a person in the Zinder department (and that includes both Mirriah and Tanout) who knows of anyone who died from not having food to eat. I have not yet met a mother in Niger who would keep her fine clothes and precious jewelry if her child was withering away because it did not have food on the table, and yet this was the picture portrayed by Western media over and over again.

Interviewed in February 2008, Hilary has the following to say about her news stories about Niger:

The BBC has a lot of credibility, yeah. And that puts an onus on us as reporters, to get it right. That’s a huge responsibility. We did get it right! We broke the story!

Hilary Anderson, BBC (The Famine Scam, 2008)

When critisized by Michael Marren for lack of journalism, Hilary Andersson gives the following reply:

I didn’t create the story! I turned up, and reported. And got the credit for opening the eyes of the world for the food shortage in Niger. Yeah, our team did that!

Hilary Andersson, BBC (The Famine Scam, 2008)

Prior to the Niger Famine Scam of 2004-05, I knew nothing of “aid politics”. That one season however made me ashamed of being a Westerner.

I think that when someone creates a story out of the blue, you imagine that person to be mistaken. When other organisations team up and hold the flag together, you wait for them to take a look at reality and realise that things were not as they were portrayed. That would have happened in the world of my expectations, but it didn’t happen in real life. I have learned since that the major forces within the aid industry are “never wrong”, and once a crusade is started, it goes on until it is “settled” or simply forgotten.

But it should not be forgotten. Like I wrote in my chronical to Jan Egeland (former UN Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator):

Despite claims of good pretenses, a great wrong has been done to a people who have had its leadership publicly discredited on the international scene, its sensitive economy disrupted by an invasion of foreign food distributions and its local food culture ridiculed on international television. An excuse from those responsible would be in order, but now that the tide has turned, the voices of the actors previously so fond of the cameras seem to have gone mute.

Esther Garvi in “Apologize, Egeland” published in Bergens Tidende

Jan Egeland will not speak, and so I will keep on reminding him, as I believe that a person who takes it upon himself to speak up for the unfortunate should be the first to admit to any wrong-doings caused by himself. But that requires humility, which I have yet to see within the major forces of the aid industry.

I end this post with my immediate reflections after the Tabloid Debate in Norway on March 5th, the night after the Famine Scam aired for the first time:

There is a time for everything, and tonight was my time to go out on television and speak up for the poor.

There is a whole debate going on about the aid organizations’ handling of “emergencies”, and the thing is, we can never forget that we are dealing with real human beings here. They may be poor, and they may be illiterate (hence they have no access to our studios and no means of putting their foot down when other people belittle them), but that does not make it okay to claim that they are dying of hunger and distribute food, when in fact they are not at all dying of hunger, but suffering from difficult diseases and other things related to their harsh situation.

Having read up on what Norway is left wondering about, I can only say that this from my side is not an issue about whether or not to engage in the poor, because I really commend anyone who wants to do something for the poor. But in order to help someone, you need to know what that person needs and wants; and you can absolutely never go into a situation and start meddling with the marginal coping mechanisms that that society has, only to retreat when your object no longer wins the sympathies of the masses. And believe me, the Western World tires easily of things that lack action.

Please note that Africa is not an experiment field for Western lack of imagination in the field of aid or Western “wonder products”. It is not the property of white people who have fallen in love with the red soil, nor is it a playground for international politics. It is a continent that has been disrupted by colonialism and which stands with half a heritage that they cannot easily restore, and also suffers from a lot of environmental issues.

Death is large part of their lives, but death is never a beautiful thing, whether it be in Niger or in Sweden. We humans are not as different as we often like to think, and if there is one thing that I am happy about concerning this evening’s debate, then it is that the people of Tanout had their voice heard (or at least respected). People in Europe got a glimpse of the fact that there is a different reality to Africa, one that the media is not too fond of portraying.

I am not sad that joyful children do not sell as much as dying ones. I realized today what twenty years of holding on to your integrity really means in the chameleonic atmosphere of the who’s whos of the giant aid industries. We are not for sale, and nor are African children. If you want to go for the emotional blackmail, choose the cows but treat people with the same dignity as you would want for your own children; and do not make a story and create havoc just because you ran out of ideas. Africa is NOT a place for aid experiments or foreign product speculations.

My first debate (March 5th 2008)