The Hand of God in Uganda - IMF & World Bank's Role in the NGO Explosion
Joe Biden recently denounced Uganda's new Laws on Homosexuality, but is there a
In part 1, we discussed the Uganda’s newest law against homosexuality and traced its history to understand who empowered them.
The twin institutions of destruction (IMF and World Bank) were not yet done with ways in which they enacted further misery upon an already impoverished population, now struggling with the epidemic of aids. In 1993, the World Bank released their plan for healthcare in developing countries. In this plan, they actually praised the efficiency of “unlicensed providers.’ Private providers mainly religious nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Africa and private doctors and unlicensed practitioners in South Asia are often more technically efficient than the public sector and offer a service that is perceived to be of higher quality, but they are not supported by government policies.” More gruesomely, they suggested that governments “decentralize” and bring in more private actors for their healthcare system.
After independence, Uganda had one of the best healthcare systems in all of Africa. The ministry of health provided centralized healthcare services for the whole country, by having state-run hospitals provide healthcare to everyone with no charge. But, thanks to the structural reforms imposed upon Uganda by the World Bank, Uganda embarked on a project of “decentralization” and as the World Bank itself admitted:
“In the case of the MOH, the shift of roles has been described as a change from a ‘ministry for hospital services’ to a ‘ministry for health policy development’ ”
When the hospitals were in the public realm, the central government oversaw the building of them to ensure that they were some modicum of standards, from a government who was nominally accountable to its people (even if it is to avoid pitchforks). There doctors with medical degrees. Most importantly, data was gathered and centralized, so that they could be mobilized for pandemics. When these services became privatized, NGOS, especially Faith-based ones took over, delivering healthcare services in a fragmented piecemeal fashion. The government’s role became relegated to licensing these medical facilities. While all the important decisions about these health facilities were relegated to unaccountable boards of directors located continents away.
Some of these hospitals provided and continue to provide excellent services and care, on par with the best agreed upon scientific medical practices. Others not so much!
Perhaps the most egregious case involves Renee Bach, a young adult from Virginia who was homeschooled. Brimming with ideas from Rudyard Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, she set out to volunteer in Uganda, on a journey of self-discovery. She said, “ I was really trying to seek out what school I was going to go to, what career path.” But, soon, she claimed she had, “an almost supernatural experience. It became really clear, as if God was, like, ‘You’re supposed to go back to Uganda.”
With her “mandate from God,” she returned to Uganda with money collected from members of her local church, she opened an NGO called “Serving His Children” which was supposed to help feed malnourished children. But, she did not merely provide aid to malnourished Children. Without a medical degree, she started to practice medicine. According to the website “No More White Savior’s
Renee Bach would “take children from actual hospitals and medical centers, Renee and her team would bring children back to the center in Masese. Renee herself would openly talk about how much she enjoyed “hands on medical care”.
In her own blog, she said, “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work….As I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count… I was attempting to diagnose the many problems that could potentially be at hand…After doing a search for blood around Jinja town, we found her type and it was a match! We started the transfusion…” And thanks to her arrogance, an unknown number of children have died. Some reports say up to 100 children died in her care!
But, that is not the whole story! These NGOs were a perfect vehicle for the pharmaceutical industry to reap unimaginable profits from the HIV anti-retroviral drugs. In the next section, we will understand how these NGOs filled with White Saviors were used as a tool by the pharmaceutical industry.
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(Part 3 is coming soon)