Beitrag vom 01.12.2009

THE AFRICAN COURIER, December/January 09/10

The Aid Debate!

For some time now, there has been a brisk debate going on about the merits and demerits of
aid to Africa. Our Senior Contributing Editor and UNESCO honoured writer Jojo Cobbinah joins the fray by examining the various standpoints and adding his own thoughts

If the statistics we get are reliable, about US$ 500 billion aid money has flowed to Africa in the last 40 years! Nobody can really say where that money went. What we can safely say is that Africa has got very little to show for the huge amount. What has gone wrong?

Yes and No advocates Efforts at trying to answer this question have led to all kinds of qualified and unqualified statements from all kinds of people and from all walks of life. In the last few years, the controversy has led to a fundamental question: Should aid go to Africa at all?
There are those who emphatically say yes: Jeffrey Sachs, Bob Geldof, Bono, Hollywood stars and starlets like Madonna, George Clooney, Katja Riemann, and simply good people like Henning Mankell and Karlheinz Boehm. These do not only support the idea,
but have actually been pleading for more of the same in the hope that it will help to alleviate
poverty in the whole world.
The other side of the debate says: enough is enough. Western intellectuals like William Easterly and Lord Peter Bauer are good examples. Lord Peter Bauer holds that
"development aid is the distribution of the money of poor people from the rich world to the rich of the poor countries.”
In Germany, people like Rupert Neudeck und Volker Seitz are leading the bandwagon
for a change in aid policies at home. Mr Neudeck describes development aid as "charitable business” (Business der Barmherzigkeit) that only helps the kleptomaniac elite of Africa. Herr Seitz, long-term former ambassador to several African countries, claims that the continent is being governed towards poverty. Both recently joined a group of concerned people to issue the Bonn Declaration (Bonner Aufruf) that calls for a radical end to how aid is administered
to Africa today.

What Africans say
There has also been a change in tone on this debate in Africa. Intellectuals there are increasingly stating their stand on the question and more and more of them are saying that development aid actually prevents development and only renders our countries dependent. They keep asking why every third African is living under the poverty line if aid is so good?
Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, Andrew Mwenda of Uganda and James Shikwati of Kenya
are the most prominent of those pleading for an end to the largesse from overseas. Without
it, they say, our corrupt leaders would be forced to introduce effective reforms, democratise
society and look for other means of financing their dubious programmes. "We are to blame for it,” says Shikwati.
Dambisa Moyo, an economist from Zambia, is the most recent addition to the phalanx
of opposition to aid. Having worked at the World Bank, we must assume that she knows what she is talking about. In her recent book Dead Aid she recommends a gradual weaning from the aid bottle and explicitly shows how this can be achieved.

Why give aid to Africa?
If we want to understand why Africa receives aid from the West, it will not be easy to answer the question without looking at the whole discussion from a historical perspective. As with most questions, there is not just one and only answer.
As I see it, development aid, as managed today, is the product of guilty conscience.
Our European brothers and sisters loaded it upon themselves after not having been very
humane to us in the past. It is the same with Europe's relationship with Israel. Development
aid is therefore the price that is being paid to Africans for the centuries of cruelty and exploitation of their riches.
The benefactors also know about the lopsided terms of trade in the post-independence era that always favours them. Speaking bluntly, we can describe aid in its present form as an instrument to soothe emotions. It is a distribution of breadcrumbs from the master's table so that he can sleep in peace.
But there are past interests, too, to safeguard in Africa. That is why the colonial
period was ended with such sweet nothings like Commonwealth, Comminauté francaise,
Francophonie, ACP Group, Lomé and Cotonou treaties and now EPAs. The sole purpose of these organisations was and is to eternalise the servile bonds between former colonies and their old metropolises. So that the unbalanced world trade regime can continue to flourish in favour of the West. Always.
Anytime the agitation for changing this bogus relationship becomes stronger, Africa's
elite is generously bribed with increased aid. It is the only class that profits from aid money. Our honest farmers, fishermen and petty traders see no traces of it. Who cares in London,
Paris or Washington, if our small-minded leaders waste the aid money on jet planes, mansions on the Côte d'Azur, on fat wives or whatever.
Michaela Wrong, a one-time Financial Times correspondent in Kenya, amply illustrates this in her book It's our time to eat when she remarks that officialdom in London,
the World Bank and the IMF continued to dole out money to a corrupt Kenyan government even after it became evident that the cash was flowing into dark channels.

Aid and Development
We can deduce from past actions that aid was never meant to be an agent for development.
In fact, it has often been used to destroy viable structures. Ghana's poultry and textile industries went bust in an attempt to exchange free trade for more aid. It is largely a question of semantics if the whole thing is called development aid, because no country on earth has ever developed on account of aid infusions.
Beggars, as we know, hardly become rich by sitting on the wayside and waiting for
others to throw pennies into their hats. Everybody in the business knows that developmental
aid is an exercise in futility. It is not done out of largesse, but used to water fertile grounds, keep pastures green and clients happy. If this were not the case, why would such an inefficient disbursement of money continue in the way it is done? Why would Europe support Africa's corrupt regimes? How come notorious dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Jean Bokassa and even Idi Amin could secure substantial sums from Western aid agencies for years, while they were killing, subjugating and cheating on the very people meant to enjoy the fruits of the aid?
In fact, we have cases where the truly dedicated leaders of the people were removed
from power, with tacit or active support of the West, for being exactly what they were - true leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara and Samora Machel. Even Nelson Mandela, hailed today as a hero, was actually delivered on a silver platter to the racist authorities of South Africa with the help of the CIA. In fact, they even gave Apartheid South Africa the nuclear bomb via Israel. We know of the machinations of Mark Thatcher and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand. So if we are told of the Chinese menace in Africa today, we laugh. Because the Chinese at least do not try to hoodwink us with dubious aid programmes that everybody knows will lead to nothing. They offer vigorous trade and Africans seem to like it.

What Africa should do
But the current debate is not about whether aid is bad, yes or no. Direct aid from churches
and civil organisations that provide help in times of real need is good and necessary. Even America needed AID after Katrina! However, governmental aid is almost always bad, because it hardly comes with no strings attached.
It does not mean that good governance is unnecessary. We need it more than ever before. But it will not descend from the heavens like manna. It will take decades of hard
work and dedication. We cannot and do not want to transform ourselves into Chinese,
Koreans, Vietnamese and Thais, as always suggested by our friends. The Asian successes
did not happen by magic or biological superiority. It happened because they believed in themselves and could attract the billions of foreign direct investments which all countries need to propel them.
Our success will come when we have created viable organic states with established
languages, religions, cultures and identities. When we send all our children to school and give them proper education. When we wake up and hit the road running, just as our athletes
do and our footballers are doing on the international plane.
All of these nice things will happen when we have a dedicated leadership with a clearly defined agenda. A leadership that will challenge Europe to simply stop the aid regime
and see if Africans will begin to disappear from the face of the earth. It is only when this happens that Africans will be capable of facing the myriads of problems facing them. Ignoring the challenge and opting to receive the kind of aid offered today will see us sitting on the roadsides of the world for millennia to come.