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  Snowplows for Tropical Guinea: How We Can Learn from Failed Development Aid in Africa

Snowplows for Tropical Guinea How We Can Learn from Failed Development Aid in Africa

By Bartholomäus Grill

Part 3: Paralyzing Aid

Foreign experts and local elites are united by a common interest: they live off aid. Development funds, which donor countries now prefer to transfer as direct budget subsidies, are the only liquid assets with which kleptocrats can grease palms in order to preserve their power. It only reaches the needy in dribs and drabs. The World Bank discovered that just 13 percent of funds earmarked for a Ugandan educational program actually made it to the schools. Most lined the pockets of ghost teachers. Many glorify NGOs as a civil society alternative to corrupt state apparatuses, but they are also known to embezzle funds. A well-documented case is that of BOMA, a self-help initiative serving Massai herdsman in Tanzania. After becoming the darling of donor organizations, it garnered hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid -- much to the delight of its leading staffers, who bought a fleet of land cruisers, lived it up in the local town, and financed their private careers as local politicians.

But the worst consequence of this aid is that it paralyzes self-initiative and encourages a true mendicant mentality among the powerful and the powerless. Everyone expects an outside force to solve the problem; everyone is waiting for alms to rain down upon them in a kind of modern cargo cult. A few years ago, I was approached by the mayor of a Mozambican town who handed me a list and demanded: "I need five trucks, a bulldozer, and a few tons of cement." This attitude is produced by the good Samaritanism, and it can be observed in all strata of society, from street children to presidents. Paradoxically, it is reinforced by successful measures. A padre in Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, told me a typical story. After his church aid organization had a water main and public taps put in, an old man complained: "So who’s going to pay me when I carry the full buckets of water back to my hut?"

Now we have the Millennium Project under the supervision of Jeffrey Sachs. It is a new "big push," a new shock therapy, yet it is driven by the same old paternalistic fantasies of saving the world. It is a simple, universal formula that comes with the mantra "more aid, more trade." Acclaimed experts of North-South relations such as Robin Broad of American University criticize its "backdoor" rehabilitation of dubious neo-liberal salvation doctrines. After all, as proof of these doctrines’ success, Sachs likes to emphasize that the number of extreme poor have declined from 1.5 to 1.1 billion since 1981. Yet what he neglects to mention is that this trend is above all a result of the rise of China and India, two economic giants that by no means apply "pure" doctrine. Hardship has increased dramatically in Africa since the millions of poor have nothing they could possibly sell on the world market. Sachs’s sermon is that they will automatically reap the fruits of modernization once they are given modern technologies: "a laptop in every hut." The only question is: What are children supposed to do with laptops if they can neither read nor write?

Jeffrey Sachs, the most powerful aid consultant of our age, regards the world from an ethnocentric perspective. He confuses poverty with misery, and is unwilling to see that people can lead dignified lives even in modest circumstances. "West is best" is his unflappable belief. There is no use objecting that our resource-hungry and environmentally destructive patterns of production and consumption are unsustainable. The Millennium Project perpetuates a mistake inherent in all aid concepts: it ignores the real power and ownership structures in recipient countries. The greatest impediment to modernization is not the poor, but the rich, the corrupt power elites and their repressive and predatory methods. These elites can now look forward to a threefold increase in aid, for as things stand now an external system will continue to transfer money -- a system that, for 50 years, has done more harm than good. This is why the unorthodox Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto urgently warns that people like Sachs are detrimental to efforts to solving the poverty problem.

So what can be done? There is no master plan, but it is high time we regarded development policy as a global structural policy that goes beyond humanitarian commitments. The obscene inequality in the world is the cause of war and terrorism. It increases refugee flows and destroys the basis of life. Only a just world can be a safe world. Ever since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the centers of power in the North have at least recognized the relevance of development issues to security policy. At the same time, they are feeling the shifts in the aid landscape: Their interventionist powers are on the wane because of the growing influence of confident new donor nations like China, India, and Brazil. Overly ambitious goals aside, a great deal would be accomplished if the 107 industrial and developing countries that endorsed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 would consistently implement its principles, which are not at all new. The first goal must be to radically reform the obsolete institutions, instruments, and methods of cooperation in the field of economic development. Only then should aid be increased. We must start in the North, with our criminal economic and trade policy, our alms industry, and the money-burning machine that goes by the name of the United Nations. But this new orientation would be useless if elitist groups in the South, with their victim mentality, refused to accept that they themselves are responsible for the well-being of their nations. Greater pressure must be applied on the powerful, for they are not victims, but accomplices, and they are by no means poor. In Africa alone, 75,000 millionaires have accumulated a collective fortune of over 700 billion dollars, and an additional 400 billion dollars is controlled by Africans outside the continent.

Despite all the criticism, we must not forget that there are thousands of committed aid workers and sensible projects. Without these, many crisis regions would be a lot worse off today. We could learn as much from them as, say, from the creativity that poverty engenders and from the entrepreneurial spirit found in the informal economy of the slums. We could broaden the foundations of the successful system of small loans or strengthen the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative for effective resource management. As in the world of soccer, we could introduce a "transfer fee" for top talent that is recruited from the South. All of this would be possible if we had the will, if we were only prepared to expend the same amount of creative energy as was needed to invent and develop the Mars probe.

Bartholomäus Grill is the head of the Africa desk of the German weekly Die Zeit and a consultant for the German president, Horst Köhler. His latest book is "Gott, AIDS und Afrika" (Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2007).

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