Uganda; the tale of Okello

A few years ago, part of an interview of a job asked me to draft a speech for the Emergency Relief Coordinator as if he would be addressing himself to the United Nations when Uganda was a true forgetten emergency as DRCongo is now... This is what I came out with...

Mr. President,

A recent study on donor accountability described the links between donors and beneficiaries as indirect. Let me introduce Okello to you. Okello is 12, he's skinny and one of his front teeth is missing. I met Okello in Kitgum district, Northern Uganda, last November. His story made such an impression on me that I decided to be his spokesman.

· Okello comes from a region in Northern Uganda where, after renewed fighting between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army, some 800,000 Acholi people, half of them children, have been displaced. They are now living in so-called protected camps. But the camps themselves are now targets for attacks, just as the villages once were.

· Now I want you to imagine Okello joining me on this podium, from which you will hear his testimony.

· You will see he has no shoes. And if you are close by, you may notice an odour. Please understand, my young friend doesn't have access to soap.

· These are Okello's words: "I remember one night in June, the rebels attacked Karimojong district. They burst into our home and raped my sister Agwaki. My father refused to let me go with them, so they torched our hut.

· So my parents had no choice - we had to flee. We left everything behind, our land and our goat. My father lost his job, my mother the land where we grew our food. My sister hasn't recovered from the rape. That night, we were all sent to hell.

· Ever since, I have felt hungry. But my three-year-old brother suffered most. My mother took him to a clinic run by muzungu, white people. They told her he would have to spend a month there, but he had to stay much longer - the clinic didn't always have the food it needed, and even the muzungu could not work properly.

· As for me, I worry every day that the rebels will come back and take me away to be a soldier. So like most of my friends, I go to sleep in the grounds of the local hospital. For now, that is the only safe place to sleep.

· In the name of my people, I want to thank you for letting me tell you my story. Please help bring peace back to our country.
[pause]

· Ladies and gentlemen, Okello's fate is not unusual. On the contrary. There are about 45 million people in countries such as Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Somalia, Sudan or Chechnya, where there are children with similar stories.

· Like so many others, Okello is being denied his most basic needs and human rights. It's hard to know what to say when you are confronted with this reality, as I was on my trip to Uganda.

· Our first reaction, our instinct, would be to go to Okello and comfort him. To reassure Okello that the world has not forgotten about his daily nightmare. We will get out our check books, we will commit the funds needed to put an end to such misery.

· But if I tell Okello that the international community has been trying to help in the past years, would he believe me? Especially if I tell him the truth, that last year's appeal did not win funding for sectors as important as agriculture in his country?

· Can you think of a way to explain that lack of funding means that the so-called protected camps offer no protection from diarrhoea and intestinal worms, and no treatment for respiratory diseases including pneumonia?

· Remember the Balkans. I don't wish to downplay the horror of what happened there, but in some ways, the people there were the lucky ones - they got blanket media coverage and resources, while for long-running African crises such as those in Sudan, Angola, aid agencies struggled to find funds.

· That is why OCHA has reinforced its media strategy to focus public attention on its
annual Consolidated Appeals. OCHA knows that sustained media attention, is important to creating political movement. Its Flash Appeals keep abreast of every “forgotten emergency” with their concise overview of life-saving needs. Sad to say, most of these "forgotten emergencies" are in Africa.

Mr. President,

· A recent study underlined that foreign policy interests or, rather, a lack of thereof, are to a large extent responsible for the phenomenon of “forgotten emergencies”. The good news is that donors have recognized their shortcomings. They've started the Good Humanitarian Donorship process in Stockholm, to make aid more responsive to needs. They have selected Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as pilot Consolidated Appeals for the implementation of good humanitarian donorship. I am convinced this will help raise the level of funding for countries with daunting needs which last year only received 28% and 37% of their aid requirements.

· Let us hope that the donor community will be ready to finance this year's appeal in full. If we raise $128 million dollars for the estimated 1.2 million displaced in forgotten Uganda, that would mean $106 dollars per person. Surely that's not too much to ask.

· I made myself a promise not to let Okello down. I can remember his voice. I can still picture the skinny boy near Kitgum's district hospital, holding his piece of bread. I would like to go back next year, and look him in the eye, and tell him that we care and that we have not let him down.

Thank you, Mr President.