Africa too needs emergency aid mechanism, says Bongo

Africa should follow in the footsteps of Asia and launch its own emergency humanitarian intervention mechanism, Gabonese President Omar Bongo has said.

He launched the idea at a summit of the AU’s 15-nation Peace and Security Council in Libreville on Monday.

Bongo also urged people across the continent to join an effort to raise funds for survivors of the 26 December tidal wave that devastated Indian Ocean nations.

Inspired by Asia’s lead in moving to launch an early warning system for natural disasters in the Indian Ocean basin, Bongo said it was time for a continent systematically hit by famine and disease to think about launching an Africa-wide system to deal with its own catastrophes.

“The humanitarian drama under way in Asia, and which affected Africa with all the consequences it has had on societies, economies and the stability of regions, should give us cause to think,” he said.

“In this context,” said Bongo, current chairman of the Peace and Security Council, “I would like once again to raise the idea of creating a humanitarian intervention mechanism under the aegis of the African Union.’

Relief officials estimate the tsunami killed about 150 people in Somalia and made thousands of people living in coastal villages homeless. But Africa escaped lightly. In Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, about 158,000 people perished as waves up to 10 metres high destroyed coastal communities, leaving several million people without food or shelter.

Bongo said that while Africa lacked the means to invest in a large-size disaster preparedness project, “we could at the very least in the first instance try to organise our own system of response.”

International aid officials have repeatedly reminded donors since the tsunami that Africa’s woes are less talked-about but just as extensive as those being currently faced by Asia.

The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, said in Geneva on Tuesday that some 1,000 people die each day in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where around three million people have perished in the last five years. “You could say it is a tsunami every five months, year in and year out in the Congo,” he told a news conference.

The UN agency headed by Egeland, the Office for the Coordinaton of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), plays a key role in coordinating international relief efforts.