Tuesday, February 25, 2014

$1,000,000,000,000 down the African drain

In case you missed it [As if you could, with all the negative stories in the lamestream media! Ed.], Ugandan President Yoweveri Museveni yesterday signed into law a statute criminalizing homosexual behaviour in his small African country. Click here to see a short report and video clip from BBC News. Fudge-packing and other gay things can now get you up to life in a Ugandan jail -- not a pleasant prospect.

What does this have to do with the headline above? Well... in response to the Ugandans' refusal to bend over for political correctness and the LGBT agenda, Prez B. Hussein Obama (who does a lot of bending in that direction) announced that the Excited States of America would "review" its programme of foreign aid to Uganda.

So what?! Well... in Walt's humble opinion [!!! Ed.], cutting off aid to Uganda and the rest of Africa would be doing the Dark Continent a huge favour! Before you accuse me of being callous, uncaring and racist, let me point out that the same opinion has been voiced -- very eloquently too -- by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden (Penguin, 2007) and Dambisa Moyo in Dead Aid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). Walt recommends both books highly.

Both Dr. Easterly and Dr. Moyo are economists. Both have worked for the World Bank, one of the chief dispensers of "development aid", which is one of the three types of foreign aid extended by the West to the Rest (as Dr. Easterly puts it). In the last half-century, over a trillion US dollars in aid has been doled out to Africa. That's US$1,000,000,000,000 -- a thousand billion or a million million bucks, dear taxpayers, of your money and mine.

What do we have to show for it? Are the countries of Africa better off today than they were in the bad old colonial days, 50+ years ago? Errr, no. So say both of the esteemed doctors. Dr. Moyo tells us that her best friend, a Zambian who was educated and working in America, returned home to find "that her country continues to flounder in a seemingly never-ending cycle of corruption, disease, poverty and aid-dependency."

Why so? Dr. Moyo explains. "Aid has failed to deliver the promise of...poverty reduction.... [Instead] it perpetuates the cycle of poverty and derails sustainable economic growth."

Dr. Easterly takes up the same theme at considerably greater length. The White Man's Burden is replete with the charts, graphs and tables so beloved of economists, which suffer from being over-simplified to print in black and white, but the statistics are there. And both authors reach the same conclusion, that all this well-intentioned "aid" has been largely wasted.

Dead Aid suggests five possible reasons for the discrepancy between the promise and the result. One possibility -- and it's significant that Dr. Moyo says this -- is "the largely unspoken and insidious view that the problem with Africa is Africans -- that culturally, mentally and physically, Africans are innately different. That, somehow, deeply embedded in their psyche is an inability to embrace development and improve their own lot in life without foreign guidance and help."

Dr. Easterly wouldn't touch that one, and neither will Walt.

Part of the "problem with Africans" -- that's me speaking, now -- is the corruption which is endemic to every single African country with the possible exception of Botswana. Dr. Moyo returns us to our point of beginning. "In Uganda, for example, aid-fuelled corruption in the 1990s was thought to be so rampant that only 20 cents of every US dollar of government spending on education reached the targeted local primary school."

Quoting now from Niall Ferguson's foreword to Dead Aid, "Despite the widespread Western belief that 'the rich should help the poor, and the form of this help should be aid', the reality is that aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower. In Moyo's startling words: 'Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster..."

Both Dr. Moyo and Dr. Easterly offer alternative sources of funding for the economic and humanitarian help Africa so badly needs. Dr. Easterly's remedy requires the people he describes as "Searchers" -- those in need of help and those looking for a practical way to help -- to find their own solutions, rather than holding out the begging bowl yet another time.

Walt suggests this paraphrase of a much-used cliché: don't give them a fishing rod; make them go and find one! And before you can do that, you have to stop giving them fish!

Further reading on WWW: "Jeffrey Sachs and the great Ugandan donkey fiasco".

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