Dead Aid: The Wrong Prescription for Africa

Ms. Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid takes the approach of lumping together all of Africa's 50 years or so of post colonial history and its troubles and blaming it on only one thing -- Western aid. I was born in Uganda 50 years ago and have studied, lived and worked as a physician in Africa all my life and can clearly and honestly state that Western aid, if provided in a smart way, will literally awaken the dead -- the Lazarus effect seen with antiretroviral therapy. There are 2 million Africans alive today because of ARVs provided by Western aid who would take offense at the title of Ms. Moyos book!

Ms. Moyo has a clever writing style using anecdotes and largely unproven statistics to justify her central theme, that aid is bad and that Africa will not only survive but thrive with no further aid. Furthermore all of the countries of Africa receive a simplistic broad brush approach from Ms. Moyo with a naive and frankly insulting message that those of us who have chosen to live and work in Africa and serve its peoples, exist in corrupt, dead beat, donor-driven economies and states which are a heartbeat away from civil war and chaos.

While there are several countries both inside and outside Africa that have that characteristic, I am happy to say that overall the recent scorecard for Africa is good, with steady economic growth in the majority of countries, increasing democratic governments and better education and health. In fact the current economic turmoil is a very immediate concern for Africans with anticipated reduced aid but more seriously reduced remittances from Africans like Ms. Moyo who live and work outside of Africa!!

While we continue to have serious problems here in Africa, the alternative solutions provided by Ms. Moyo from her perch in the USA, of mimicking India and China reflect a shallow analysis of the real challenges here in Africa. In addition the open endorsement and justification of undemocratic methods to achieve economic progress would not go down well in modern Africa -- ask any African who lived in apartheid South Africa! Frankly I would rather be free and poorer than rich, but living in an oppressive regime. As for the naive assumption that China or the Middle East would line up to invest in Africa, particularly in these times of economic turmoil and low oil prices, smacks of a daydream.

Africa's problems are predominantly those of a systematic failure to harness the full potential of its people. Countries that first invest in their people by educating them, protecting their health and providing opportunities inside and outside their countries are those countries that have progressed, with stable economies, a higher GDP and "happiness factor." In addition countries like India and China have huge internal markets which give these countries considerable insulation from export-driven economic vagaries.

Africa needs to focus on social development -- health, education and job creation, while at the same time developing its production capacities and as large an internal market as possible. The other necessary ways forward are, of course, visionary leadership, eradication of corruption, good stewardship of natural resources and, for a while at least, management of Africa's burgeoning population till generated resources can support larger populations.

I do share the same aspiration for a prosperous Africa that is not dependent on crumbs from the rich. Nonetheless we are now in an interconnected global economy and global destiny and the solutions to underdevelopment do include aid -- albeit aid that is linked to social welfare and development, rather than aid to build up armies or aid in return for mortgaging the natural wealth of a country to another "model" development partner.

Ms. Moyo you are not the sole voice of Africa and yet your voice is currently being listened to. Use that voice responsibly and spend more time at the grassroots in Africa and see where we have come from, where we are today and where we would want to be tomorrow. For the vast majority of Africans, our priorities remain food security, health, education and economic self sufficiency. We do not aspire to have flat screen televisions or even holidays -- we just wish to live in dignity with our families and continue to hope that with each passing generation life will get better and there will be more opportunities for our children and grandchildren.

Comments

[WilliePilgrim]

As a medical doctor the poster has focused on the area of medicine, neglecting to mention that if the aid packages given hadn't gone towards the support of corrupt governance, which it unarguably has, perhaps the public's health wouldn't have been so bad as to require western medical doctors to treat the situation as the genuinely dire circumstance it is.
There is an element of "chicken and egg" in the trying to assess why Africa has been so unfortunate, but to think that it's solution is to continue giving aid the way it has been done and is still being done is to blindly ignore how aid as it's given today is not directed to where it is needed effectively and it is under the controll of governments whose objective is the further entrenchment of their power at the expense of the developement of its people and resources.
I don't suggest we end aid, but we end our self-serving approach to it and make further aid dependent on oversight that sees the aid actually get to the people in need and not into the pockets of politicians and racketteers, though telling the difference between the last two might take a large degree of circumspection.

[Danjuma]

All foreign aid is in the perceived interest of the donor country. Otherwise it wouldn't be given. Think about Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan. The US didn't give $billions to the USSR because we thought Joe Stalin was a nice guy who was doing wonderful things for his people. We did it to defeat Hitler. We didn't give $billions to rebuild western Europe after the war because we're nice people. We did it because if we didn't, Joe Stalin was going to march in with tanks and take over.

Why does the west give foreign aid to Africa? During the Cold War we did it to prop up friendly dictators, just like we gave Lend-Lease to Stalin. The USSR did the same thing to their friendly dictators. That's life. It's the lucky African country where the people themselves actually see any results from foreign aid.

Foreign aid is never going to develop Africa. If the west wanted Africa to develop they would open their markets to African manufactures. If Africa wants to develop and the EU, US, and Japan won't open their markets, Africans will have to make their market big enough, by combining into a United States of Africa. It really has little to do with foreign aid one way or the other. That issue is basically a distraction.

[jinsei]

Oh, last point, my mom would have to buy food from the "black market" and guess what many of the packages were imprinted with: USAID. Hmm, wonder how it got there?

[jinsei]

I may be reaching here, but I think you're missing the point- the aid you speak of is to limit the damage of short-term­/long-term calamities. That's all aid is really supposed to do. The real problem is that Colonization forced Africans to skip hundreds or even thousands of years of organic evolutionary modernization, and forced opposing tribal factions to live under the same roof of a country under the legal principal of uri posseditis.

I was born in Zaire, although I am American, and people would drive around in cars until they broke from not having changed the oil or understanding the maintenance that would need to go into them. Trains and factories built by the French and English are either abandoned or not well-maintained at all in most countries. Political systems are in shambles in so many countries, and there is no true concept of a proper legal system necessary to have real FDI.

[Doc0976]

"As for the naive assumption that China or the Middle East would line up to invest in Africa, particularly in these times of economic turmoil and low oil prices, smacks of a daydream."

Although I understand the opinions of Mr. Coutinho and Ms. Moyo, I have to strongly disagree with the statement made in Mr. Coutinho's article. My mother is the Mayor of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/ellen-johnson-sirleaf-afr_n_182000.html) and can personally attest to the vast numbers of Chinese and Lebanese business people that have chosen to move to Africa and invest in its future. They have prospered because they have filled a gap that has been an issue for war torn Liberia - a suffering and poorly trained labor market. Hundreds of Chinese have come over to build schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure initiatives. The Lebanese have been in Liberia for decades, running local shops and restaurants in the bustling cities seldom see in the mainstream media.

The Chinese have tapped into a market that has been long neglected by Western countries. Oddly enough, the Chinese model is the antithesis of the Western model as it pertains to dealings with Africa: China realizes that both parties must benefit in order to promulgate a healthy and profitable relationship. The Western model was often take, take, take and hope no one figures out that the aid model is a stop gap at best.

[papapj]

Alex, you say Africa's problems are 'predominantly those of a systematic failure to harness the full potential of its people'. I disagree vehemently.

Africa's problems are the result of an inability to conform to a zeitgeist which judges all on the ability to conform to Western values and abandon her own - that's all.

[unitron]

I'd be more inclined to blame Western explotation, and corrupt governments of various African nations.

[Renee27]

Dambisa Moyo In Her Own Words (Video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD8o30b63bg (on Fox Business)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aE_iJq4prs (Al Jazeera)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtpiuQ0uR7s (on Bloomberg)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1072086447&play=1 (on CNBC)

[RightWingMarine]

William Easterly wrote White Man's Burden which also deals with aid to third world countries and sounds like he came to the same conclustion as Moyo that we should reduce or end aid and get our of the way of the free market.

[papapj]

There's no such thing as a 'free market'.

It's a myth perpetuated by free-loaders who seek hand-outs from the Treasury when things go t**s-up, and tax-breaks from the countries whose markets they monopolize and exploit.....

[papapj]

Oh dear...

The White Man's Burden" is a poem by the English poet Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published in the popular magazine McClure's in 1899, with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands. Although Kipling's poem mixed exhortation to empire with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States latched onto the phrase "white man's burden" as a characterization for imperialism that justified the policy as a noble enterprise....

[RightWingMarine]

http://www.amazon.com/White-Mans-Burden-Efforts-Little/dp/0143038826/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238677662&sr=8-1

While the title is undoubtly based on the poem, this is the book I was referring to.

[orangepetal]

I doubt the aid Ms.Moyo speaks of is the Aids aid. I can't imagine anyone doubting the incredible need and good that that has done. I think some perhaps question aid to goverment or organizations that could better be used to offer capital to the people who may then create business with a potential for growth. I think most people just want good, and they feel that by questioning these methods, progress and empowerment in peoples daily lives will continue, so Africans, just like all people, can one step at a time fulfill their own potential and dreams.

[EgyptianMysterySchool]

Since "aid" from the WHO is the reason A.I.D.S. was spread though out Africa I have to agree that it's been a poison.

Under the guise of benevolence, aid has been used to supplant Africa of its mineral rights, self-sufficiency, self-determination and sovereignty. Africa is the most resource rich continent on earth, it's only a de facto colonialism that keeps it from being the financial center of the planet. It's things like France's control over the currency of most of west and central Africa that is a backdoor to keeping Africa poor under the guise of helping.

Just last year "they" (western scientists) found a forested area of land in the D.R.C. the size of Switzerland that contained over 125,000 low land gorillas that were previously unknown to exist. There's more land, culture, history and resources in Africa than the mind can imagine, these are the markers of true wealth so there's no financial reason for Africa to be so weak.

It's only politics and religion and the CIA (colonial hold overs in most cases) that keeps Africa infighting and lacking significant progress.

While outright revolution or it's threat may have wrestled direct control from empire building colonists, the de facto control over currency, minerals and politics has left the colonists in power. Not every aid group seeks to keep Africa weak, but the overall effect has been to kill the real power of Africa. Africa should take unconditional control over its destiny.

[stell]

Outstanding post EMS. You are dead-on on all points. The issue has always been sabotage from the West. Ghandi said that poverty is the worst form of violence. If Africa had a bombs they would act deterrents, that's the only way in the current climate to control it's destiny. I would add that the idea that Africa owes the West or IMF/World Bank like institutions anything in the way of debt is absurd. Who really owes who?

check out this link:

http://skepticalbrotha.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/barack-obamas-fantasy-island/

ALL of the debt MUST be cancelled, NOW, and within a decade you would see a double digit growth rate year to year. Much of the diagnoses of HIV/AIDS are simply a result of lack of clean water, food, etc. But this is all by design. We know that with enough food to go around the planet food prices are kept artificially high. Africa would be the world financial center as you say, and while the West blames corruption, it all depends on the leader and the country involved. Charges of corruption from the West? That's like the post calling the kettle black.

The book by Ms. Moyo is written with Niall Ferguson, who beneath the veneer of refinement and sophistication has nothing but contempt for the average African. And now she is given a platform on C-Span this Sunday to spew this paternalistic, patronizing nonsense.

[EgyptianMysterySchool]

Crushing debt is definitely a form of slavery.

I don't excuse Africans from their plight though, they don't have to be economic slaves - just as our ancestors didn't have to be slaves, they could have all been Nat Turner or Cinque.

Many African nations are rampant w/ the self-hatred they learned during colonialism/slavery and this manifests itself as greed, genocide and war/crimes over "isms" - sexism, tribalism, christism, muhammadism, etc. The history of this country shows how fragile young democracies can be (Civil War) and the IMF, global banks, multinational corporations and even countries take advantage of this when they deal w/ Africa.

Ultimately there are two truths to this matter:

1. These crippling outside entities won't change their practices of yoking Africa to unfair contracts unless they are forced to by economics or by the demands of the African governments they deal with.

2. Ultimately Africans are responsible for themselves and nothing will ever change that.

[Ben Dixon]

I think you are missing the point of Ms. Moyo's arguement. What she is really saying is that donors (ie. the West) need to not just give aid to give aid but focus that aid to where it will do the most good of lifting all boats. At the same time the receipents of the aid need to have greater accountability, both to the donors and to thier own populace. The question is how to acheive this.

[papapj]

Exactly.

Giving aid for the principle reason of building infrastructure boondoggles which serve only the interest of exploitative multinationals is the biggest con going.

Read Perkins 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man'

[Flavor]

Mr. Dixon you hit it. Do you not know that most food, money, healthsupplies etc... hardly get to the suffering people. Africa definitly need the help but it's the power in control that keep the people in the conditions their in. We have a habit of just giving money without making sure that the right things are being done for the people of Africa. Had it not been for the generous giving of America the Africans would have suffered even worse. Africans need a help up not a hand out.