Posted on 05/13/2002 8:31:38 PM PDT by What Is Ain't
IT is Christian Aid Week and the cry has once again gone out for the West to send more aid to Africa. On this occasion the appeal has come from two of our most politically engaged pop stars - Bono and Bob Geldof - who visited 10 Downing Street yesterday in an attempt to persuade the Prime Minister to exert his influence at the forthcoming G8 summit in Canada and increase the West's spending on the beleaguered continent.
Their motives are without doubt noble: they clearly expect an infusion of Western capital and further debt relief to reduce the suffering and economic misery in which most of sub-Saharan Africa's citizens find themselves mired.
No doubt they will have received a sympathetic hearing from Tony Blair, for only last week his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, criticised the world's economic leaders for wasting aid budgets on countries in the Middle East and North Africa instead of increasing spending on those with desperately impoverished people in sub-Saharan Africa.
At what point will it dawn on these well intentioned aid activists that throwing vast sums of Western capital at Africa has failed dismally over the past 40 years and will continue to fail? The cause of poverty in Africa is not insufficient aid but the way in which almost all of these countries have been mismanaged since their supposed liberation from the colonial yoke.
An example was reported in last weekend's Daily Telegraph: Sierra Leone receives £1 billion of international aid annually - more per capita than any other country in the world - and still it is bogged down by economic, political and social calamity. Most important, there is no end in sight, however much money is spent.
Among the most articulate critics of never-ending aid as a solution to Third World poverty was Lord Bauer, the economics professor who died earlier this month. He held that it was the character of a country's institutions and the aptitude of its populace that determined its success. "Where people's abilities, motivations and political institutions are favourable," he wrote, "material progress will occur. Where these basic determinants are unfavourable, development will not occur, even with aid."
In Africa, political mismanagement, corruption and disregard by the authorities for the bulk of the people have prevailed, indeed flourished, in the half century that has followed the first withdrawal of colonial rulers. What African leaders such as Amin, Mobutu, Mengistu, Moi and most recently Mugabe have created in their countries are conditions that are distinctly unfavourable for the development of people's abilities, motivations and political institutions.
They have ruled their countries like medieval fiefdoms, looting their faltering economies and through shocking mismanagement creating hardships and famines for people who do not get the opportunity to vote them out.
And yet the West has continued to pour in the aid, which has almost unerringly found its way into Swiss bank accounts. Today, there is not a single example of an African country in recovery from post colonial chaos. (Some argue that Mozambique and Angola are on the road to recovery after devastating civil wars, but that is really stretching the point.)
Mr Blair said after his recent whistle-stop tour of the continent that we can't afford to walk away from Africa. Equally we cannot afford to continue ignoring the problem that is central to Africa's collapse: corrupt leadership. There is no better example during Christian Aid Week than Zimbabwe, a country where all the basic tenets of Christian decency have been abandoned for the benefit of one megalomaniac and a handful of cronies.
Zimbabwe has become the recipient of United Nations food aid and, as its agricultural crisis deepens, so the famine will harden and the need for food aid will intensify. As was the case with the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s in which Bob Geldof so famously intervened, the Zimbabwean crisis has been created by a political leader who had jumped the rails.
For Mengistu (now, strangely enough, residing in Harare) read Robert Mugabe. The collapse of the country's agriculture can be traced directly to Mugabe's desperation to hang on to power. A country that once had a strategic grain reserve of a million tons now finds itself without maize or the foreign currency to buy it.
While farm invasions by so-called war veterans have gathered momentum in the post-election period when the world turned its attention to other international crises, maize supplies are pouring in, but are, according to most observers, failing to reach ordinary Zimbabweans, who are starving.
According to Paul Themba Nyati, a leading Zimbabwean opposition parliamentarian who is visiting London this week, most of the food aid is being distributed to government officials, "which means it is either being sold for profit or it is going to Mugabe's supporters. I know that it is not reaching supporters of the MDC [Movement for Democratic Change] in the rural areas.
"There seems to be confusion [in the West] about what to do about Zimbabwe," he says. "The MDC's position is that until there is an agreed upon distribution network which brings in independent bodies like the Church, food aid should be withheld. If food aid is being used to legitimise Mugabe's party, it serves no useful purpose to Zimbabwe."
The fact that Mugabe was able to attend the UN General Assembly Special Session on Children in New York last week and that his government was recently elected to the 15-member UN Commission on Human Rights suggests that a deaf ear will be turned to the pleas of Themba Nyati.
As long as we continue to bestow legitimacy on the destructive dictators who have for so long been at the centre of Africa's ruination, and then bail them out with tranches of aid when their countries collapse, so the downward cycle will continue. As Lord Bauer said, aid goes no way towards righting past colonial wrongs. Only the overthrow of the despots will do that.
LOL!! That sums it up, don't it?!
The word is getting out, but is anyone listening ? Blair knows better; however , ot seems as though he'll cave.
As long as we continue to bestow legitimacy on the destructive dictators who have for so long been at the centre of Africa's ruination, and then bail them out with tranches of aid when their countries collapse, so the downward cycle will continue.This is how we trounced Russia in the early nineties, through aid and bail-outs that enriched their wildly corrupt political class. What evil geniuses we are, making the world safe for market capital by financing maniacs.
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It's only one of the baby steps of the third world consuming the second and first worlds later....sort of like those Darwin fish eating fish on the back of Atheists/Randian Volvos.
We'll be damn lucky to escape the same fate in a few centuries.
-- George B.N. Ayittey, in Africa Betrayed (St. Martin's Press).
Issues & Views: Resolving Africa's Crises
... - George Ayittey has won the HL Mencken Award for Africa Betrayed, his first book
about despotic African leaders and black neo-colonialism. Africa in Chaos ...
www.issues-views.com/index.php/sect/2005/article/2071 - 18k - Cached - Similar pages
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