Why we should stop giving Africa aid

[StormShadow]

Why we should stop giving Africa aid

Thompson Ayodele, he’s from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer. The statistics he produces are jaw-dropping. They suggest a direct correlation between the receipt of development assistance and low growth. This is true whether you compare neighbouring countries, or whether you look at different periods within the same country. Foreign aid, he suggests, isn’t useless; it’s actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes. A similar correlation exists between debt remission and insolvency: countries which have their bills periodically written off become re-indebted more quickly than countries which don’t.

It’s quite a dilemma for Western governments – especially those of the Centre-Right. Socialists have a tendency to emphasise motive over outcome. Never mind that aid shields recipient governments from the consequences of their policy failures: the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you’re a caring person.

Fair enough. But if we genuinely wanted to help Africa, says Thompson, we wouldn’t give one more penny in direct grants. Instead, we would scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, open our markets and build infrastructure directly in situ: in other words, we’d fund (say) a new highway across Sudan and hold competitive tenders for local companies to build it.

The trouble is that if conservatives announced that they were going to cut overseas aid budgets, not everyone would believe that they were doing so as a result of Thompson’s cogent philosophy. They would be accused, rather, of doing it because they were selfish or because they didn’t care about people whose skins were darker than theirs. Hence, perhaps, my party’s determination, at a time of general economic retrenchment, explicitly to guarantee the international development budget against future cuts.

As Thompson puts it: “The Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result”. Yup: but at least we’ll have shown everyone how nice we are.

Obama says Africa should take responsibility not aid

Western aid must be matched by good governance and urged them to take greater responsibility for stamping out war, corruption and disease plaguing the continent.

“Development depends upon good governance,” Obama said in a speech to Ghana’s parliament. “That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.”

“The future of Africa is in the hands of Africans,”

Addressing the young people of Africa, Obama said: “You have the power to hold your leaders accountable and to build institutions that serve the people.”

Obama’s roots as the son of Kenyan immigrant. He laced his speech with tales of his background and the struggles of his forebears in the face of poverty and colonial rule.

“As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that sadly still exist in our world, not just on this continent but in every corner of the globe,” a somber-looking Obama told reporters at the white-washed fort.

Dead Aid

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth.

In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid.

Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance.

Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.


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