BY TOM ODHIAMBO
How and why would anyone want to make money out of other people’s misery, a moralist would ask. What heartlessness would justify cashing in on the victims of an earthquake, war, famine, mass deaths, flooding etc?
Such questions are more rhetorical than injunctions that should shock all normal human beings into indignation and action. Indeed, the natural reaction of most human beings when disaster strikes is to sympathize with the victims and try to help them. But this previously taken-for-granted humanness is no longer available for free. Even humanitarians want to be paid these days.
Disaster, these days, offers opportunities to make money. There are hundreds of business ventures whose main portfolios of undertaking are in humanitarian and disaster management. Nearly every disaster – natural or manmade – is a chance to make a profit. This is the argument that Antony Loewenstein makes in his book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe (Verso, 2015). This is a book that coldly recounts how every moment of suffering today is potentially a business chance. Loewenstein shows how, for instance, the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq are big business.
You need men – and women – to fight other people’s wars these days. Conventional militaries are business organizations that can hire other people to do the dirty war stuff for them. You don’t need highly trained soldiers dying on the warfront when you can hire mercenaries – and call them ‘contractors’ – to fight and die for you. Of course at a premium. This is what is happening in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, among other countries. Contractors are hired, at cost to the state, not only to provide logistics but also guard government and nongovernment officials. These contractors have been known to become a law unto themselves, breaching the laws of the host country with impunity and often killing without being held accountable. In the end, the Iraqis or Afghanis suffer more from people who have supposedly come to help them out of their misery.
But disaster capitalism comes in many shades. As Loewenstein shows, in places like Haiti and Papua New Guinea, foreign aid meant for local development either ends up in the pockets of a few locals and government officials or it comes as military aid. In which case it hardly helps the ordinary people. This is what he writes about the case of Haiti, “The US government constantly talked about being the world’s most generous nation, but its largesse was often intimately tied to military support. Nearly half of the $1 billion in humanitarian aid it provided to Haiti was handled by the Department of Defense. In addition, this money was often directed to contractors that had committed human rights abuses or fraud in Iraq, Afghanistan or domestically.”
In the case of Papua New Guinea, Loewenstein shows how ‘environmental vandalism’ perpetrated by multinationals, supported by the government of Australia, have destroyed the environment in parts of the country. But as usual, Loewenstein reminds the reader, the local political class is always part of the racket. Where the so-called foreign investment is deemed a less effective tool of capitalistic venture, foreign aid can be used to soften the minds of the locals and their rulers. This is a case that is too common in Africa where rulers often hive off some parts of their countries by decree and hand them to foreign companies to mine or farm. These foreign investors thereafter simply pack and leave after exploiting the land, without any significant and tangible benefits to the locals.
But the one subject that Loewenstein presents that is really tragic is the case of refugees. From Greece to England to Australia, Loewenstein shows how ‘investors’ make huge amounts of money out of refugee crisis. This is a problem that has been around for years and won’t go away any time soon. For instance, people smuggles would say that they are providing services that are demanded by clients. Yet the exorbitant fees that the migrants pay to the smugglers are only the beginning of their suffering. If they aren’t thrown into the seas, for the smugglers to avoid arrest, they are dumped into holding centers, awaiting ‘processing’ and consideration for settlement. And this could take years.
In those years of waiting those refugees need to be guarded, treated, trained in skills – in some rare cases, and ‘processed’, of course! And this is where private service providers come in. Because governments are deemed to be inefficient in providing services these days, the trend is to outsource. But who is responsible for poor services or just outright breach of terms of service when the provider is some company with a board of directors and ‘managers’, who might also simply outsource the services to another company.
Refugees, therefore, become subjects of private companies, which must declare profits to the shareholders at the end of the year. Poor services, mistreatment, abandonment or even denial of some services to the immigrants become easy ways of managing the crisis.
Disaster capitalism, however, comes in many shades. It isn’t just about ‘real disaster. It is also about manmade catastrophes like privatization of social services. Market liberalization has meant that profit wins all the time, for as long as there are goods or services to be sold and bought. Today, in many parts of the world, governments are acquiescing to those who shout loud about market efficiency. Ordinary people are told by policy planners, financial experts and supposedly learned economists that allowing the private sector to manage what are otherwise public sector goods and services will deliver all-round benefits to all and sundry. That people have to pay ‘market rates’ for those goods and services. So, schools, hospitals, water, sewerage, housing etc are privatized.
In many cases, the result isn’t efficient services. It is simply ruin that follows. People who can’t pay ‘market rate’ rents, for instance, end up in slums or on the streets. Families that can’t afford potable water resort to using untreated water. When they suffer from water-borne infections, they won’t be able to access medical services and the cycle continues. Ye, you may ask: how and why does disaster capitalism thrive?
It isn’t that capitalism is evil. It is just that it has become a very convenient tool for people whose primary motive in any venture is extraction of pure profit. Or, it thrives because too few people in the world are willing to contest the orthodoxies of capitalism today, which proclaim the mantra of humans in service of capitalism instead of capitalism serving humans.
The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi.
