Audits of international relief in the Nigerian Civil War: Some political perspectives

Information from four audits, or audit-like reviews, of international relief programs in the Nigerian-Biafran war sheds considerable light on the financial sources, scope, timing of flows, and cost-efficiency associated with that complex operation. Beyond their intrinsic interest, which is heightened by two of the documents remaining unpublished, such economic data bear heavily on many political aspects of the relief effort. For example, they permit examination of the relationship, and partial disjunction, between dominance in contributions (which was mainly governmental and particularly American) and leadership in administration (which was chiefly continental European and private). They also facilitate an assessment of the massive or token proportions of these endeavors, their capacity to anticipate rather than just respond tardily to predictable catastrophes, and the extent of their entanglement in the domestic and international power fields that characterized the Nigerian conflict. For all their rather divergent modi operandi, the leading role in the relief process of the two private umbrella organizations is clearly apparent; but so too is the limited ambit of even such comparatively massive relief work within the context of an on-going civil war.