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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 May 2009
In the closing months of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War and for about two and one-half years thereafter, the American voluntary agency CARE (Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere) operated a rehabilitation program in Nigeria's East-Central State. With funds largely provided by USAID, it concentrated on rebuilding or extending basic structures, like bridges and water systems, and on distributing badly needed planting material. During much of that period, while the war for Bangladesh's independence still raged, the British voluntary agency Oxfam also sought, in timely fashion and on its own initiative, to improve the condition of refugees who had fled to camps within India. Its major emphases were on supplementary feeding, medical assistance, sanitation, shelter, and clothing.
1 The present commentary is part of a larger project on international relief as a political process, which has been facilitated by National Science Foundation Grant GS-31333. The writing was done while I was Killam Senior Fellow at Dalhousie University. I am grateful to Mr. Alvin G. Edgell and to officials of Oxfam for allowing me to summarize and quote from the two studies (see footnotes 2 and 3). I also deeply appreciate their having critically reviewed an earlier draft of this article. Neither they, NSF, nor Dalhousie bear any responsibility, of course, for my interpretations.
2 My copy contains 68 pages of text, 24 of appendices, and is accompanied by 31 further pages of “Observations on the Problem of Providing Emergency Sanitation Facilities in Eastern India—May to December 1971; and Recommendations on the Measures Which Could Be Taken by Oxfam towards Providing a Sanitation Service after Disasters.” Each page contains approximately 40 lines.
3 The manuscript is 279 pages long but has only about 28 lines per page.
4 Support from the Ford Foundation, the Center for International Comparative Studies (University of Illinois), and the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities enabled me to visit Nigeria, shortly before and a few months after the war there had ended, and to speak with various relief experts in Lagos at that time. However, given the topics I was then primarily investigating, it seemed inopportune to journey to the East-Central State.
5 Quotations in this article are mainly intended to convey something' of the flavor in the Taylor and Edgell manuscripts. While, obviously, they are being lifted out of context, they are not, I think, misleading in their implications. (No comments that reflect upon specific individuals, however, will ever be directly quoted.) Since the manuscripts are not available to most readers, I have not bothered with footnote citations to the pages from which material has been taken.
6 That is, rather than in the wake of natural calamities, like tidal waves and earthquakes, or direct “big” power incursions.
7 Only rarely, though perhaps increasingly, is a hospital staff faced by organized opposition from its clientele; and this is usually a consequence of the poor who live adjacent to a burgeoning hospital complex being mobilized by outsiders expert in such tasks.
8 The federal government interpreted many activities of the agencies during the war as indications of support for the Biafran regime. The agencies, by contrast, habitually saw their endeavors as reflecting a desire purely to save human beings of any affiliation from needless death and suffering. The agencies understood their own intentions correctly, but the consequences of their activities were sometimes not all that far removed from the way Lagos was judging them.
9 The agency was receiving medicines with still useful shelf lives, while the manufacturer, in the United States, England, or elsewhere, could donate, and consequently deduct for tax purposes, inventory that would soon be totally written off. To government officials overseas, however, it might well seem that they were being asked to approve tainted merchandise.
10 Taylor consulted officials from many voluntary agencies besides Oxfam in the course of his re-examination.
11 The agreement was one between USAID and CARE, which, together with one between USAID and the Federal Military Government, gave CARE its standing in the East-Central State. There was no direct agreement between CARE and either the FMG or the ECS. I will not comment here on the problems this raised.
12 The one exception is material illegally siphoned off. In an analogous fashion, food relief sent into federal Nigeria during the war was subject to waste through improper storage, transport inavailability, and bureaucratic snarls. Food relief sent into Biafra, by contrast, was almost immediately and totally consumed by a starving population.
13 For example, about the number of persons assumed to have benefitted from various projects.
14 In Bengal, cholera epidemics typically affect about 1 in 1,000.
15 On this point: It was considered well worthwhile spending time in selecting and testing suitable drivers and in paying them what was, by local standards, a high salary. Where organisations tried to economize on salaries the drivers were encouraged to make money in other ways and often failed to respect and take care of the vehicles for which they were responsible. The OXFAM transport section ruling that whoever dented a vehicle lost his job immediately proved to be a very sound one and, in the refugee relief operations, enabled OXFAM vehicles to travel the equivalent of 15 times around the world while suffering only three dents.
