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Audits of international relief in the Nigerian Civil War: Some political perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Morris Davis
Morris Davis
Affiliation:
Morris Davis is a member of the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Extract

Information from four audits, or audit-like reviews, of international relief programs in the Nigerian-Biafran war sheds considerable light on the financial sources, scope, timing of flows, and cost-efficiency associated with that complex operation. Beyond their intrinsic interest, which is heightened by two of the documents remaining unpublished, such economic data bear heavily on many political aspects of the relief effort. For example, they permit examination of the relationship, and partial disjunction, between dominance in contributions (which was mainly governmental and particularly American) and leadership in administration (which was chiefly continental European and private). They also facilitate an assessment of the massive or token proportions of these endeavors, their capacity to anticipate rather than just respond tardily to predictable catastrophes, and the extent of their entanglement in the domestic and international power fields that characterized the Nigerian conflict. For all their rather divergent modi operandi, the leading role in the relief process of the two private umbrella organizations is clearly apparent; but so too is the limited ambit of even such comparatively massive relief work within the context of an on-going civil war.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 1975 , pp. 501 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1975

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References

1 ICRC, Annual Report: 1969 (Geneva, 1970), pp. 105–7.Google ScholarPubMed

2 A single bare table, with only eight separate figures stipulated, appears in ICRC, Annual Report: 1970 (Geneva, 1971), p. 122.Google ScholarPubMed

3 Folkekirkens Nφdhjæip, (Copenhagen), 1972.Google Scholar

4 Reprint from Ninth Report, Fiscal year 1969, Foreign Disaster Emergency Relief, issued by Disaster Relief Coordinator, Agency for International Development.

5 Even the unpublished memorandum on Relief and Rehabilitation occupies 26 pages.

6 Computed from Relief and Rehabilitation, Section IV. All figures in this article will be rounded to millions (of dollars or of Swiss francs).

7 The remainder came from the United Nations (nearly $7 million) and from the internal resources of Caritas Internationalis and the World Council of Churches (together, nearly $2 million). See AID Reprint, pp. 76–77.

8 Nordchurchaid Report, p. 69.

9 Peat Report, p. 32. “Traditional activities,” as applied to the ICRC, is a semi-technical term that refers to ameliorating the condition of prisoners of war, operating a tracing service, arranging prisoner exchanges, and so on.

10 The ICRC's per diem staff allowances, ranging from 65 to 150 francs (approximate $15 to $34.50), were certainly not exorbitant, especially given the high charges that non-resident expatriates are typically saddled with in Nigeria.

11 Thus, “It does not appear that the [ICRC] supply department in Geneva was really able to obtain the information necessary to enable it to fulfill an efficient controlling role until April 1969.… The notification to the supply department in Geneva of shipments from donors are incomplete in relation to the first three or four months of the operations in the Federal Territory (July—October 1968), to a large extent because relief agencies which were working under the ICRC co-ordination appear in some cases to have forwarded consignments to their own organisations without taking account of the ICRC's overall co-ordinating role. In the case of some consignments of cereals this situation continued until February 1969.” (Peat Report, pp. 15 and 21.)

12 Peat Report, Appendix V. Such an appeal was made in mid-April.

13 Nordchurchaid Report, p. 4.Google Scholar

14 AID Reprint, p. 45.

15 Peat Report, Schedule IV.

16 Ibid., p. 8.

17 Nordchurchaid Report, p. 76.Google Scholar

18 St. Jorre is persuasive on this point. See Jorre, John de St., The Nigerian Civil War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972), ch. 12, especially pp. 317–20 and 331–39.Google Scholar

19 These figures are very rough, but not (I think) substantially misleading. They are derived from the data in Nordchurchaid Report, ch. 9 (pp. 51–56).

20 The evaluation is reproduced in Nordchurchaid Report, Appendix 32. Quotations are from pp. 184, 185, and 189. Nordchurchaid was not itself responsible for the contract between JCA/USA and Flight Test Research or for most C-97 activities, flight schedules aside. The inclusion of the critique in the Report, however, makes Nordchurchaid-directed endeavors seem more efficient by comparison. This effect may not have been entirely unforeseen.

21 Peat Report, p. 16.

22 Ibid., p. 11.

23 Ibid., p. 6.

24 Computed from data in Ibid., pp. 10–11.

25 Nordchurchaid Report, pp. 41, 78–79, 132–3, and Appendix 17.

26 Ibid., p. 56.

27 Ibid., p. 81.