generalspeaking

Brilliant Solution to Inadequate Governance

Canada's Governor-General travelled to her birthplace to lament its latest misfortune. She assured Haitians that Canada acknowledges their plight, and they are not alone. Nor were they alone, given the international response to the aftermath of the dreadful destruction that poor country suffered after an earthquake struck a month ago. As Michaelle Jean departed Jacmel in a military helicopter, her face radiant, having concluded her visit, she blew a celebrity-kiss to the military personnel at the base she was leaving.

Haitian President Rene Preval has called upon the international community and the humanitarian aid organizations to halt their shipments and distribution of food aid, insisting that Haiti must itself provide food and drink, that the international provisions "undermine Haitian national production". How odd is that? How utterly peculiar, when indeed, hundreds of thousands of Haitians are still without adequate food and potable water, some complaining that they had not received food in weeks.

And while President Preval expressed his gratitude to the international community for their swift and direly-required response to his country's catastrophic need, he also criticizes what he terms a lack of co-ordination between the various aid providers. While expressing his gratitude for the humanitarian effort launched by the international community, characterizing it as being "commensurate with the disaster", he yet deplores the problems inherent in the insufficiently co-ordinated rescue efforts and delivery bottlenecks.

The fact that his government was nowhere to be seen throughout, to speedily respond and dispatch their obligations to their own, is another matter entirely. The fact that his government overlooked the need to ensure that infrastructure itself was commensurate to the need of the earthquake-prone geography is also another matter entirely. That despite promises that the hundreds of thousands of desperately needful homeless will have adequate shelter has not become reality is another strike against the government of Haiti.

"We must draw the lessons from what occurred in Haiti", President Preval declared in his visit to Washington. "The massive, spontaneous, generous help was a good response to the disaster. However, its effectiveness must be improved, because effectiveness depends on the quality of co-ordination." Just as, he is presumably aware, effectiveness of governance depends on the quality of legislative and administrative efforts to ensure that adequate standards are met in architectural engineering.

For the simple fact is as acknowledged by all outside parties, looking onto the scene of such awful destruction from without the country, the painfully inadequate infrastructure of the county was responsible for the hundreds of thousands dead, the million people displaced and made homeless with the collapse of public buildings and private homes alike. Not to mention highways, the seaport and the airport, also not meeting adequate quake-resistant standards and whose collapse added to the difficulties facing international rescue teams.

President Preval's recommendation is that the United Nations should be called upon to form a humanitarian force that would respond to such environmental catastrophes as his country suffered under. Not that he recognizes an obligation to use the vast sums of international aid that pour into the country's coffers to good use through responsible engineering of buildings built to withstand earth tremors, like his neighbour, the Dominican Republic has successfully done.

But no, the solution to what befell Haiti, and what, presumably, will eventually befall other countries, in tsunamis like the one that hit Indonesia, the tremors that hit Chile and Turkey and other such natural disasters, is to have the United Nations - whose UN-directed peacekeepers, and World Food Program, both delivering what can only be characterized as problem-laden services in desperate existential situations - produce yet another body, one that would be called upon to respond to natural geological or weather-driven events.

There is nothing quite so pathetic as those who do little to help themselves, who criticize the best efforts of others to alleviate their pain and need, and who offer recommendations that deny their own responsibility while calling upon the world order to stand perpetually on guard for them.

Labels: Environment, Nature, Societal Failures, World Crises

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 11, 2010