This week’s Live 8 and G-8 events have generated a great deal of comment, but much of it is shallow rhetoric that hurts rather than helps Africa’s poor.
Policy debates about how to help that impoverished continent would be more meaningful if both advocates and critics of increased Western aid or debt relief for Africa were more honest about our history there.
The problems of poverty, malnutrition and disease in Africa are complex and deeply rooted in history.
In recent days, many conservative commentators have argued along the following lines: “Africa has gotten billions of dollars in aid over the past 50 years and it is still poor. Much aid has gone to already rich, corrupt dictators and government officials. Therefore aid is a failure. It does not and cannot help African people. Giving further aid or even forgiving debt is a waste of resources.”
Africa is, of course, still poor. Cumulative aid to Africa from industrialized countries does total billions. Many African leaders and bureaucrats are corrupt.
That is only part of the picture, however.
The argument carries the implicit assumption that donor countries sent funds to Africa out of altruistic compassion, and that corrupt leaders somehow defrauded them.
In reality, the bulk of aid from countries such as the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union went to a handful of countries precisely because their leaders were corrupt autocrats.
Western governments knew that Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko was corrupt and power-hungry from the time they began dealing with him 45 years ago. He was, however, a reliable anti-communist agent in a large, strategically important country. He would not flirt with communist sponsorship the way his post-independence predecessors had.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid went to Mobutu over 30 years because he quashed any communist elements in his country. He also allowed the United States to use Zaire as a conduit for covert U.S. assistance to forces such as those of Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, who fought regimes the U.S. wanted out of power.
Similarly, France supported a string of dictators in its former colonies, including Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Sekou Toure in Guinea and Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Cote d’Ivoire. French officials knew that all were corrupt and often brutally repressive, but funded them because they were loyal supporters of French foreign policy interests. The United Kingdom similarly aided reliable agents in its former African colonies.
Geopolitical and foreign policy objectives — not concern for the poor or hungry — drove industrialized aid to Africa for decades. Rich nations not only turned a blind eye to venality and brutality on the part of African leaders, but actively supported their efforts to cling to power.
To imply now that aid to Africa constitutes some failure of pure-as-driven-snow altruism on the part of innocent, beneficent wealthy nations is not only hypocritical but an out-and-out lie.
The practice continues. In many years, Egypt, an African country, gets more U.S. foreign aid than all the rest of the continent combined. This support continues, despite the fact that the Egyptian government is a corrupt dictatorship. U.S. aid to Egypt and Israel is an ongoing bribe we committed to in the 1978 Camp David Accords. Its purpose is to maintain that agreement, not relieve African poverty, disease or hunger.
At the same time, advocates of debt relief and increased aid should acknowledge that these measures, by themselves, will do little to bring prosperity to the continent.
Africa was not, as some celebrities imply, healthy, happy and prosperous until Western nations somehow forced its nations to accept exploitive loans. Other poor nations, particularly in Asia, have gotten far less aid and serviced higher levels of debt while still achieving much higher levels of economic growth. In 1960, the average Malaysian or Korean was about as poor as the average African. Africa has stagnated for 45 years while much of Asia has grown.
Neither aid, nor debt forgiveness, nor lower barriers to African exports are sufficient to improve the lives of African families. Perhaps they are not even necessary.
All can be highly useful measures, however, that can do much to relieve day-to-day poverty and suffering. The long-term issues of sustained growth will depend primarily on policies African governments choose to pursue.
© 2005 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.