Africa's AID Problem

Campus Report ^ | April 10, 2008 | Bethany Stotts

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Africa’s AID Problem

by: Bethany Stotts, April 10, 2008

William Easterly’s 2006 book, White Man’s Burden, places the amount of aid sent to Africa over the last 50 years at over $2.3 trillion dollars—yet poverty, corruption, and the AIDS crisis continue to be insurmountable problems there. Foreign aid’s ongoing failure to spark change recently incited Edward Luttwak to declare that things would improve if only the international community would leave Africa alone. “If anybody cared about Africa what they really would want to do is to do the very opposite: do everything possible to bring about the disappearance of the state,” Luttwak said at a CATO institute event.

(snip).....Luttwak attributes the current African crisis to the structural limitations left behind by colonial powers...

(snip)

....Other policymakers at the conference roundly criticized Luttwak’s suggestion to induce a state of nature in Africa. “Now remember this, it is exactly the same international community which will be called upon to help the refugee problems in neighboring countries,” Professor George Ayittey said, continuing, “So in other words, if a failing African government…collapses, in the end we are the same international community which are asked to come and pick up the pieces.”...

(snip)

The American University professor, a native of Ghana, pointed to the contrast between the international community’s intervention in Somalia (which eventually cost $3.5 billion) and their ensuing reluctance to intervene in Rwanda. In the case of Zimbabwe, he noted, the ensuing “turmoil” drove out investors and has “caused more than $35 billion in economic damage to the economies of the surrounding countries.”

Mauro De Lorenzo, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out how hubristic it was for the other speakers to assume that Western government aid was keeping African governments viable....

[USMCGunnut]

Don’t we get it? We need to thrown more money at a disease that is completely preventable.

[ViLaLuz]

Very little of the aid money we send around the world is actually used for the suffering. Most of it ends up in the pockets of corrupt leaders. This is why I’m against our sending our tax dollars as “aid”. It’s the same in Africa, Afghanistan—everywhere. It’s really just a big global wealth redistribution program that gets stolen by the elite.