Tsunami swindlers
LankaBuzz
worldwide. International agencies and Non-Governmental Organisations
(NGOs) had little trouble in collecting millions of dollars as tsunami
aid for the 11 countries affected by the calamity. Sri Lanka, being one
of the worst-hit countries, received particular attention.
Newspapers reported yesterday that the Parliamentary Select Committee
investigating operations of NGOs has charged that the NGOs had
misappropriated tsunami funds exceeding US$ 1 billion.
This is a vast sum of money by any stretch of the imagination and one
can only surmise as to how many tsunami-hit families could have
benefitted from such largesse.
This has apparently not been the case. The money has never really
reached the intended targets and disappeared deep into the pockets of
some NGOs.
Sri Lanka has a myriad of NGOs, some of which are plainly limited to
nameboards. They exist solely to collect funds from local and foreign
sources ostensibly for various humanitarian projects, including the
tsunami.
It is no secret that several hundreds of NGOs sprang up virtually
overnight after the tsunami to take advantage of the generosity of
people who were moved by the tragedy.
They can get away with such swindles thanks to the lax enforcement of
laws relating to NGOs in Sri Lanka. As the committee has pointed out,
the financial transactions of NGOs in Sri Lanka are not transparent.
There is little or no monitoring of NGO activity, including
fundraising. This has serious implications for a developing country
such as Sri Lanka, as some NGOs have been known to be fronts for groups
that threaten national security or a cover for religious conversion.
It is thus time for the Government and the NGO Secretariat to act fast
to stem the rot. If existing legal provisions are inadequate to monitor
them, new legislation should be passed.
This should cover a monitoring process that begins when an NGO is
registered and scrutinises its transactions every step of the way. The
NGOs' roles and parameters should be strictly spelt out, so that they
cannot step beyond the defined subject areas.
This does not mean that all NGOs are bad. But such legislation will
expose the bad eggs and in the long run, help minimise corruption in
the NGO sector.
Daily News - 31 July 2006
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