More foreign aid
will pour into Africa, but is the money part of the problem?
The following op-ed appeared in The Austin American-Statesman on July 9, 2005
During a trip to Africa last year, I brought along Paul Theroux's vivid travel memoir of his solo journey from Cairo to Cape Town, the book "Dark Star Safari." My route briefly retraced Theroux's, on a long, bleak and dusty road in central Kenya that he rated the worst road in the world.
I was surprised by Theroux's anger toward aid workers in East Africa, since his love affair with that part of the world began when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi in the 1960s. But 40 years after that experience, Theroux loathes the workers of the "aid industry" in Africa. He describes them as arrogant, ignorant and misguided, a plague of white do-gooders in white Land Rovers. After reading Theroux's blast of bitterness, I watched those Land Rovers race by, in clouds of dust, with a newfound skepticism.
This week, there has been worldwide attention to the problems of Africa, with world leaders from both government and entertainment calling for massive increases in financial aid, over many years, in order to "save" Africa. The Live 8 concerts last weekend featured repeated calls from rock stars and movie stars for more aid money and debt relief. At the G-8 summit this week in Gleneagles, Scotland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair won a key victory, announcing that aid to Africa would rise from the current $25 billion annually to $50 billion by 2010. World leaders have already pledged to cancel $40 billion in debt owed by 18 of the world's poorest countries, most of them in Africa.
There is no question that Africa is in dire straits. Its multiple problems — poverty, AIDS, other diseases, war, corruption — are increasing the tragic gap between Africa and the rest of the world. Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan have argued with passion and urgency that unless the world reacts forcefully now, the problems weakening Africa will still be with us a hundred years from now, and will likely grow much worse. Nearly half the population of sub-Saharan Africa is under the age of 15, and the population of the region is expected to almost double by the year 2025. Much of the continent has no economy to speak of and large areas are essentially lawless, trapped in violent anarchy.
As one development expert put it, Africa is like a "raft in the night," drifting away from the rest of the world.
But the chief dilemma facing the developed world is that conventional financial aid is not working. Rich countries and international institutions have poured between $500 billion and $600 billion into Africa over the past 40 years, and the continent has gotten worse. The "Live Aid" concert that activist musician Bob Geldof put on 10 years ago raised $100 million for Ethiopia, but Ethiopia is much worse off now than it was a decade ago.
Increasingly, one hears from both Western and African experts that aid is part of the problem, not part of the solution. But it is also the way aid has been delivered to Africa that needs rethinking and retooling.
Critics of aid to Africa, which include many leaders from the sector of independent development organizations, have long pointed out that much of donated aid is lost to corrupt officials and vast networks of bribes, fraud, kickbacks and various other unproductive schemes. Even emergency food donated during famines has wound up on the market, enriching some petty tyrant or local warlord. Dictators have used aid as a means of reinforcing their control over their abjectly impoverished subjects.
Western governments have repeatedly criticized corrupt African leaders, but turned a blind eye to Western practices that abet these thugs, such as money laundering by banks, bribes paid by corporations and contracts that leave debt- or aid-funded projects as unfinished ruins. African governments have been huge customers for arms merchants. In many cases, Western investment has been limited to the extraction of natural resources, rather than industries that can sustain and enrich the local populations.
There is a huge web of aid organizations in Africa. In rural towns their headquarters are often the only substantial buildings in sight, and their employees are the only people with vehicles. But in many cases, they are pursuing programs that perpetuate dependency. Theroux observed that people whose roads are fixed by volunteers from Japan or Italy had little motivation to maintain their roads themselves, so they don't. Farmers who manage to assemble a small crop of corn or millet can be wiped out, financially, by a shipment of free food from a donor nation.
What many Africans say they need are fair trade and investment, not aid. They need sustainable development that is internally and incrementally achieved, not massive, top-down, flash floods of money that distort their societies. Like many reformers in the Middle East, African reformers say they need Western governments to take Africans seriously and to stop treating their leaders as means to an end, or as mere pawns in schemes to exploit Africa's wealth in natural resources.
Liberals in the United States have been too reflexively supportive of increasing aid to Africa, in part because the right has always been opposed to foreign aid. But if aid is part of the problem, we need to rethink our attachment to donations and dependency. If Africa is indeed on the world's agenda as a top priority, there is no better time than now to start that new thinking.
Chapman can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
Related Links:
Ethnic Conflict and Humanitarian Intervention, fall 2005 course description
Globalization, Development, & Crisis, fall 2005 course description
Housing Policies and Public Policy in Latin America, fall 2005 course description
Social Policy Evaluation: Brazil Program, fall 2005 course description
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14 July 2005
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