When kindness kills

Aid to Africa is stifling enterprise, feeding corruption and keeping oppressive governments in power.

Visitors to big cities in Africa notice that people live in the streets, partly because of the climate, partly because of the gregarious nature of the people, partly because of the poverty of their homes, and partly because outside is where things happen, especially where people earn their daily bread.

Such is Kibera in Nairobi, one of Africa’s largest slum settlements, made of shacks, some of baked mud, others of zinc sheets and cardboard. The informal sector, “jua kali” (in Swahili means “hot sun”) operates outdoors: food, clothes and all household items are on inviting display, and for sale. You can watch men making simple stoves, grills for your windows, hub caps for your car; you watch, you buy and you take home. Without the informal sector, the close to one million inhabitants of Kibera would either be unable to survive, or would rush down into the city centre, about two or three kilometres away, and start a riot.

On the outskirts of Kibera, safely close to a major urban highway, stands the headquarters of the United Nations agency for human settlements, whose mission is “to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all”. It has an annual budget of millions of dollars to carry this out. Yet its headquarters is just close enough to catch the acrid smell of open sewage that permeates the slum. Its inhabitants live with it every hour of every day.

Foreign aid, especially to backward, suffering Africa has become one of the favourite activities of the last 30 years especially. It really kicked off with the Ethiopian famine in 1984, which was caused by drought, Marxist politics and mismanagement. Kenya is an NGO haven; yet local people see these organizations as mixed blessings. The day before the US elections last year, I was in Kibera, driving behind a van filled with white NGO staff. A local youth saw them and shouted: “Obama no win, we kill you!” A case of biting the hand that feeds, or something different?

Perhaps an intuition that, despite all the money that is pouring in, somehow life is no better. Young people are still unemployed and unemployable; there are no proper roads, no proper sewage, no money for school uniforms and textbooks; people are still surviving on less than a dollar a day; the rulers are taking everything; and the only improvements to be seen are the ones initiated by Kibera residents. So, what are the NGO bureaucrats doing with their expensive four-wheel drives, generous salaries and two-year service stints? To say this is the whole reality would be unfair, but it is the perception of many impoverished slum-dwellers.

On the same occasion I met with a youth group that needed ideas, encouragement -- and money to get started. It was the first time I met them. One strong young man asked me: “Have you come to bring us money?” No, I told him, so he got up and left. Reliance on foreign aid has left much of Africa poorer and growth slower, more sunk in debt, more exposed to the vagaries of the currency markets, and less attractive to overseas investors. Zambian economist Dambiso Moyo recently claimed in the Wall Street Journal that “aid (to Africa) is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.”

Sometimes aid is needed in Africa, as anywhere else, to deal with the aftermath of tsunamis, earthquakes and famines. But these are one-off events. Aid can alleviate immediate suffering, but treating it as the launching-pad for long-term growth is problematic.

Over the past 60 years, at least US$1 trillion of development-related aid has reached Africa from the wealthy countries, yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was 30 years ago, and still more than half of Africans live on less than a dollar a day. Even after the debt-relief campaign of the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, as if to remind us there is no such thing as a free lunch! To keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of education, health care and infrastructure.

Moreover, aid is linked with rampant corruption. Aid for poor Africans supports obese bureaucracies instead. In 2002, the African Union, an organization of African nations, estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year, as many international donors were apparently looking the other way if aid money went into graft. The political and business elites get richer, while more and more poor people slip down even further to the level of bare subsistence.

Often with no strings attached -- or when there are strings, they are the wrong ones, such as an aggressive birth control policy, complete with equipment and lavishly-paid local staff -- it is easy for funds to be used for anything except real development, such as getting people started in business.

Examples of graft abound: Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko is reputed to have stolen at least $5 billion during his 32-year reign. Zambia’s former president, Frederick Chiluba is in court to answer for millions of dollars taken from healthcare, education and infrastructure to his own private account. Kenya goes from one major scam to the next, with no one called to account, no one put in prison; rather, the suspects are shuffled around in ministerial posts.

Young economies need transparent, accountable governments and an efficient civil service, that is, civil servants who serve the interests of their people, not their own interests. Yet doing business in Africa puts off the average businessman. In Cameroon it takes a potential investor 426 days to perform 15 procedures to get a business license; in Angola, 119 days; in South Korea, only 17. No surprise few investors come to Africa. Ordinary citizens need employment or self-employment. Endless flows of aid do not achieve these goals. In fact, a continuous stream of “free” money – presently 70 percent of public funding comes from foreign aid -- only manages to keep inefficient governments in power. A government like this is accountable to no one, and merely needs to pay its army to keep dissatisfied citizens in their place.

Some types of aid should be prohibited in order to develop local economies. For example, when a foreign government supplies 100,000 free mosquito nets, it immediately puts out of work a local mosquito-net maker who perhaps employs ten people to manufacture 500 nets a week. Each of these ten employees supports fifteen relatives each. When the nets tear and are useless, there’s no longer a local manufacturer to go to – he will have moved to an urban slum or given up on life -- and so more aid will be needed from outside, keeping foreigners employed and local people deeper in poverty.

Aid and politics are intertwined. In Africa civil clashes (often called tribal clashes, ethnicity being the convenient conflictive factor) are invariably motivated by the thirst for power. The winner will have unlimited access to the aid package that comes with power. Aid-financed efforts to force-feed democracy to precarious African economies generally do not work. Long-term political stability can only be achieved on a solid economic base. Africa needs fair trading partners, not an endless cycle of aid, especially from the West, that keeps it dependent and oppressed.

Martyn Drakard writes from Kampala, in Uganda.

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