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Developmental Aid Workers Are Killing Africa

By Thilo Thielke

Part 2: A Planned Economy -- without a Plan

Development aid is a planned economy, even if it doesn't have a plan. The belief that food shortages can be overcome in a planned economy is one that has already proved disastrously wrong in the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba. One has to feel sorry for the Africans for their continued role as human guinea pigs.

Oscar Wilde once quipped that "Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity." It looks like he has been once again proven correct.

But one could now argue that the Africans have themselves to blame. They didn't have to accept the aid. But that's an insidious argument. The majority of African countries are bitterly poor. For example, even Mexico's GDP is up to 50 times larger than that of oil-rich Sudan. And, of course, hardly any African is going to turn down any of the so generously offered donations. In the end, they put the money towards building football stadiums or beautiful boulevards that the military can parade down to celebrate the anniversaries of their seizure of power . And you can use it for limousines and to take trips to UN conferences, where you can mull over the world's hunger problems with other heads of state.

The main reason that there is starvation in Africa is that there are no profits to be made in cultivating or trading foodstuffs. Either developmental aid ruins the profits or corrupt leaders rob their people blind. There's hardly a country in Africa where private ownership rights are enforced; everything belongs to either the clan or the state.

And in the places in Africa where commercial agriculture has functioned -- such as in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia -- the spread of white settlers has ruined it. Ironically enough, the land reforms in Namibia, a former German colony, were even financed with the money of Germany's taxpayers. And it won't be long before these countries are also on life support paid for by the rest of the world.

Dirty Politicians Cause Hunger

It's a fairy tale that hunger is simply just part of life in Africa. The lion's share of Africa is sparsely populated, and many countries enjoy a climate in which anything can thrive. There was even a long period when people believed that the biggest hunger problems would surface at some point in the densely populated Asian countries, such as China and India. In the meantime, however, those countries are now even producing surpluses. And the same holds true in the very densely populated countries of Europe, where there are often massive surpluses despite the fact that only around 3 percent of the population is involved in agriculture.

Where there is hunger, it results from unethical leaders who steal from their people and let them either starve or rush them into wars. Ethiopia's former socialist leader Mengistu Haile Mariam did this, as did Robert Mugabe, his counterpart in Zimbabwe, whose protection Mariam would go on to enjoy while in exile. And this is also the case these days in Sudan, Chad or among the neolithic communists in Eritrea. But the rest of the continent would benefit much more if people would put a little faith in Africa's power to heal itself instead of constantly bumping up the dose of harmful medicine.

A series of African intellectuals is currently calling on people to finally just let Africa be and stop treating its inhabitants as if they were suicidal. Trade, they say, is a much better solution to the problem than aid is. They also say that property and land need to be privatized and that subsidizing dictators needs to come to an end. They see the cure in the opposite of development aid. It would be a very valuable effort.

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