The aid leeches feeding off a rotten system
FAR too many people end up doing well by seeming to do good. As soon as any activity is seen by the public as charitable or benevolent, everyone assumes it is entirely above board. Oversight is weak. Few dare to probe.
This was what happened for years in Britain’s foreign aid sector.
But The Mail on Sunday’s successful campaign against the foolish squandering of such aid has exposed astonishing levels of cynicism.
Most shocking of all is a deliberate attempt by a huge private sector aid contractor to orchestrate evidence in its favour, so influencing a parliamentary inquiry into its performance and ensuring that it continues to add to the hundreds of millions it has been handed by the Department for International Development (DFID) in the past few years.
Adam Smith International (ASI) is officially a private undertaking, but is almost wholly dependent on taxpayers’ money, willingly handed to it by DFID, anxious to meet its spending targets.
Aid recipients were pressured to help. Staff involved in concocting testimonials were actually warned not to be too blatant. Such activities would not be acceptable in any normal business. They are especially shocking among people who make thumping profits and dividends, and pay themselves fat salaries, while posing as purveyors of mercy and human kindness.
This is not all. ASI also managed, by nefarious means, to obtain confidential Government documents which could have helped it bid for new business. And Mail on Sunday stories pointing out that British aid money often finds its way to terrorists and their sympathisers have now been graphically confirmed by official documents noting there is a ‘certain’ risk of cash sent to Somalia being diverted to terror groups such as Islamic State.
The whole system is not just bloated but rotten. DFID’s Secretary of State, Priti Patel, must clean up this sordid mess once and for all. It is quite improper to spend public money on this scale, unless it is done honestly, fairly and openly.