By Mulengera Reporters
The Trump Administration’s policy of stopping funding to refugee operations, among other humanitarian causes around the world, has hurt Uganda in ways ordinary citizens can’t immediately realize. In Uganda, roughly 10,000 refugees flock in every week-chiefly from DRC and South Sudan.
Mostly children and women, they arrive hungry, dehydrated and exhausted having walked hundreds of kilometers. They are fleeing war and political persecution back home. The World Food Programme (WFP) and United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) are the key UN agencies involved in refugee support operations.
The GoU, whose leader YK Museveni has won global praise for the generous refugee policy, receives refugees (without limit on the numbers) and avails them with where to stay inside the refugee settlements on condition that their feeding and other material needs will be provided for by the international community through the relevant UN Agencies referenced above.
The GoU also permits refugees to have access to land to engage in cultivation and other economic activities. The refugees are also enabled to access education and health services while in Uganda.
They are also benefiting from anti-poverty GoU programmes such as the Shs813bn GROW Project, which is a grant provided by the World Bank. This is something that has won kudos for the veteran Ugandan leader.
However, the Trump decision to halt US funding for such humanitarian causes has left the relevant UN Agencies constrained like never before to the extent that they will soon be unable to feed refugees.
According to Justine Kasule Lumumba, an influential Minister at Uganda’s OPM, the donor partners have already notified the GoU that effective 1st July, they won’t be in position to provide feeding and other welfare requirements for the refugees.
She says that as Cabinet, they intend to discuss this matter and take a stand whereafter they will come to Parliament to officially publicize the crisis to the rest of the country.
Minister Hillary Onek, who is responsible for refugees in Uganda, says there will be a crisis once UNHCR and WFP stop feeding the 1.8m refugees we currently have in Uganda, and still counting.
Onek says that $10m (roughly Shs37bn) is required to feed the 1.8m refugees per month. This becomes $120m or Shs434bn per year to feed the same number of refugees. Onek is doubtful that the GoU, which is already struggling to provide for its own citizens, will be able to find this money.
There are already fears that refugees are going to starve and become malnourished or even die from hunger. Others will resort to crime commission, including stealing food from refugee hosting communities which in most cases are also full of starving natives.
There is hardly anything to be stolen from such impoverished people is such poverty-stricken Ugandan communities. District like Yumbe are refugee-hosting and home to some of Uganda’s poorest native communities.
The other option is for Uganda to let refugees move on to other places where life can potentially be better. These destinations will include European countries for whose governments refugees have previously created huge political problems at election time.
In fact, desire to prevent refugees from crossing over to Europe explains why countries like Germany or even USA have for long been providing funding to facilitate refugees’ stay in Uganda whose strongman YK Museveni has been able to host them here without exposing himself to any political risks.
Onek says he doesn’t see how the GoU can depend on borrowed funds to sustainably keep looking after 1.8m refugees. He says the GoU’s priority is to borrow for its other projects and not for humanitarian causes. It’s simply not feasible. Neither is it sustainable.
Saying that global governments have had to adjust their priorities to be able to focus on other global problems, the WFP officials in Kampala say they have become so constrained to the extent that currently they are feeding only 663,000 refugees down from the 1.6m they had been feeding in Uganda before the Trump Administration halted the refugee-related funding that had for years been coming through the USAID.
If no new funding sources emerge, the WFP in Uganda will only be able to keep feeding the same number (663,000 refugees) for the rest of the year. A recent joint statement signed by Onek and the Uganda Country Representative Mathew Crentsil indicated the funding situation isn’t any better at UNHCR.
The cash-constrained UN Refugee Agency has also had to consider restructuring and rendering redundant not less than 100 staff out of the 600 humanitarian aid workers they have been having. This creates need for hundreds of millions to be paid out as termination benefits.
Onek says even when all these constraints are in place, the GoU doesn’t intend to diminish its refugees-related relationship with UNHCR and WFP too. For many years, the US government through USAID had been the biggest funder for WFP operations in Uganda.
As a way forward, New York is considering merging some of the UN Agencies to diminish wastage and rationalize financial resources, which are increasingly becoming scarce.
As if he saw this Trumpian situation coming years ago, Gen Museveni in 2017 convened a donors’ conference in Kampala to discuss innovative ways to raise cash to sustain refugee operations. Whereas the target was $8bn, only $358m was pledged at that conference!
The GoU unsuccessfully made a case at the conference that there was need to raise up to $8bn to create certainty that as the host country, Uganda would be in position to keep receiving and hosting refugees for the subsequent four years. The organizers were disappointed that not even a quarter of what they anticipated was pledged.
The Kenyan government, having seen all this donor fatigue towards funding refugee operations, made it clear years ago, to the international community that they wouldn’t be in position to keep shouldering the burden because the refugees’ crisis is a problem of the international community as opposed to being left to small poor African countries like theirs.
Working with Somalia, the biggest source of refugees into Kenya, the Uhuru Kenyatta government prioritized voluntary repatriation of refugees so that those interested would be facilitated to move on.
The Kenyan government involved both the government of Somalia and the UNHCR. As early as 2013, the Kenyan government demonstrated its fatigue and demanded that the international community does more if it were to continue taking in refugees.
As per now, WFP has scaled down on the number of refugees it can feed, prompting the Kenyan Line Minister Belio Kipsang to threaten dramatic steps by the Ruto government now that the US and Germany governments have moved towards closing the taps. (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [WhatsApp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).
