Aid pirates: Somalia fails to account for millions in assistance

As the nation's leaders seek ways to reduce the budget deficit and slow growth in the national debt, they should look at the U.S. role in Somalia.
The African nation has not had a government since 1991, and America's efforts to help the Somalis address their problems began a year later. Piracy off its shores has been added in recent years to other maladies such as hunger, lack of health care and education, and almost non-stop fighting.
Somalia has cost the United States billions in military and humanitarian aid. Among other U.S. enterprises there is a military base in Djibouti, formerly French Somaliland, just up the coast from Somalia, the only such facility of the U.S. Africa Command. From there, the United States supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 which ended in failure.
The country is ruled, in principle, by a provisional government. It was constructed by the international community in 2004 in Nairobi, Kenya; was dropped into Mogadishu, the Somali capital; and has had constant changes of leadership as Somalis seek control of it and its resources. It is kept in place by an 8,000-man African Union peacekeeping force. The United States and others have trained Somali government forces, but without the foreign troops, the few blocks of Mogadishu controlled by the government would be overrun by opposing militias.
The latest outrage was revealed in a new report by a public finance unit in the provisional government. It states that, of $75 million provided the government over the past year or so by Arab states, only $2.8 million can be accounted for. About $300 million is also missing from revenues the government collected from the seaport, airport, drug trade and telecommunications. Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo is a prime candidate for having pocketed some of the loot, but who really knows?
The fools in the affair are the international donors, including the United States, which keep sending aid with no assurance that it's being put to good use. Why do they keeping doing this?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


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