A hand up, not a hand-out, part 1

This, we are told, is Africa’s year, the year in which Africa will top the agenda in the councils of the world and be the keynote topic of the G8 meeting in Scotland, the year of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa Report and U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s campaign to cancel much of Africa’s debt. The developed world, we are told, can no longer sleep while Africa suffers.

No one who aspires to any sort of morality, to any feeling for his fellow man, could quarrel with those sentiments. Indeed, we must welcome this new-found focus — except perhaps to remember, somewhat uneasily, that we have been here before, and before that for the past 50 years, and recall that over those 50 years, sub-Saharan Africa has received more than US$1 trillion in aid, and that many African countries are today poorer than they were 50 years ago.

And so I want to start with two assertions: first, I may not look it, but I am an African, and proud to be so — indeed, a third-generation African married to a fourth-generation African, and with grandchildren who extend my family’s connection to the continent to the sixth generation. And because I am an African, I claim the right to say that Africa does not exist simply to make people in this country — or anywhere else in the developed world — feel good about themselves. It is much more than just a suitable case for charity.

Africa is not a place only of appalling poverty and deprivation, of uncaring despots and wars of unimaginable cruelty, as the public perception would have us believe. The emblem of this Africa is the starving child with a belly swollen by malnutrition and huge eyes covered with flies, a child whose plight demands our attention and rightfully commands our charity. But in a continent of nearly 700 million people, 50 very different countries and hundreds of languages, there is another Africa, vibrant and full of potential, that also demands recognition. The countries of Africa may seek a Pan-African voice through the African Union and sport a number of regional and sub-regional multilateral organizations, but the dreadful civil wars of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Great Lakes region are no more symptomatic of Africa than the troubles that plagued the Balkans in the 1990s were symptomatic of Europe. Africa is much more than simply a handy metaphor for poverty. Africa is much more than a palliative for those Western consciences pricked by sweeping generalizations of how much help Africans need. There are countries in Africa where people are taking their future into their own hands, where success is beginning to supplant simple survival as a suitable goal in life, where innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit are flourishing (albeit often in the most difficult conditions). There are countries whose governments acknowledge the rule of law, the demands of transparency, and fiscal prudence, and who govern in the interests of all citizens, not only the elite, and who have recognized that business, not aid, is the spur to growth. There are some whose economic management has secured double-digit growth rates, and there is one I know particularly well, which is recognized by Transparency International as not only the least corrupt country in Africa but one of the least corrupt in the world. In these countries, success has been achieved either without the benefit of aid or in spite of it. Sadly, these success stories seldom register on the public’s radar screen and appear to be of little interest to departments of overseas development. This is insulting to those African countries that set such a good example for others. Instead of being largely ignored by governments, civil society and the media, these successes should surely be celebrated.

The donor community, however, finds it easier to see and portray Africa as a whole, rather than to draw a proper distinction between disparate countries. Some, certainly, are wracked by civil war and destroyed by corruption and rapacious leaders, but there are those that have thrown off the mental shackles of colonialism and decades of post-colonial misrule, and whose people are demanding the benefits of democracy. There are some, such as South Africa, Botswana, Mauritius, and Ghana, that have established themselves as proud countries increasingly, or completely, independent of aid and with a clear and distinctive voice in the councils of the world.

We have heard a great deal in recent years about international campaigns to “make poverty history,” and so-called “donor fatigue” appears to have been cured, at least temporarily. But I would suggest that people in many African countries are suffering from donation fatigue. It’s probably a surprising thought, but many are growing increasingly weary of being seen merely as recipients of Western largesse, especially largesse that expands dependence on the donor or that makes them hostage to the passions and prejudices of foreign non-government organizations (NGOs). They may not admit this openly, but that does not mean that they do not feel resentment at being seen simply as a charity case, offering easy balm to Western consciences. And they have learned to distrust the missionary zeal with which new generations of Western politicians “discover” Africa as a suitable case for treatment, a means of ascending the moral high ground as their domestic political fortunes and timing demand.

This zeal to “save Africa” is not new. Generations of missionaries from Europe and America have yielded to that impulse, not always with benign results. I recall Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s immortal quote: “When white men came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They taught us how to pray. When we opened our eyes; we had the Bible and they had the land.”

The impulse that drives the NGOs, intellectual descendants of those Victorian missionaries, and their supporting cast of celebrities and political leaders, is certainly not as base as the motives that unleashed the 19th-century “scramble for Africa,” but it is often just as misguided and, in some cases, as arrogant in its unstated but evident belief that when it comes to curing Africa’s ills, the West knows best. Why, for instance, was it necessary to launch an “Africa Commission,” even with its positive African participation, when a program devised in Africa, namely the New Partnership for African Development (or NEPAD), was already on the G8 table? The Kimberley Process, in which African governments, so ably led by South Africa, working together, and with NGOs and the diamond industry, took control of the issue of conflict diamonds and resolved it in a remarkably short time, is surely a prime example of Africa’s ability to take charge of its problems. I acknowledge the supportive role of the British government and the European Commission in the Kimberley Process, the speed with which the U.S. government moved to enact enabling legislation and the role of the World Trade Organization. All of this was an excellent example of how the West can help Africa solve its own problems. It is also too rare a demonstration of realpolitik. Western politicians and commentators should not be surprised therefore at the irritated insistence of African leaders that African problems require African ownership of the solutions if they are going to be solved at all, if once again the developed world’s boundless charity is not to meet with boundless failure. Equally depressing is the fact that when it comes to Africa, Western governments appear to have only one answer: aid, and in monstrously vast amounts. But aid is the one commodity Africa has never been short of, and it has failed dismally time and time again.

The figures bear repeating: in the decades since the departure of the colonial powers, Africa has received more than $1 trillion in aid — or more than US$5,000 in today’s terms for every man, woman and child on the continent. Now, as an African, I am delighted if Western taxpayers are addicted to charity. But I am worried not only that so much aid has not achieved the in
tended good, but that it can have a positive capacity for harm.

Rapacious leaders who find it difficult to distinguish between the public and the private purse, and who have been responsible for the re-export of billions of dollars from Africa into European and British banks, have not been converted to probity and virtue by the availability of aid. If anything, it has simply fed their greed and expanded opportunities for corruption. Extraordinarily, however, the debt cancellation plan currently proposed does not distinguish between responsible and bad governments. As a result, the plan will make it more difficult for responsible African governments to develop instruments to fund their own development. Debt relief — like aid — in this way “shorts” African economies.

For all the talk of partnership between Africa and donor nations, aid develops dependence on the donor to the extent that, in some of the poorest countries, where it constitutes more than 50 per cent of the national budget, it has surely become a form of neo-colonialism.

This dependence raises another concern: at the time of independence, many African states had a higher per-capita income than much of South East Asia, yet today more than 300 million Africans are living on less than a dollar a day, while a country such as South Korea, once poorer than many African countries at the time of their independence, is 37 times richer. Many reasons have been advanced for this anomaly, some persuasive, others patronizing to the point of racism. How often, however, is the negative role of misguided aid and aid dependency examined in the light of these depressing statistics? If the West were serious about what it sees as Africa’s plight, one would have imagined that the thought would have crossed its collective mind that perhaps aid is not the only answer. It is as though a doctor, having discovered that a particular drug failed to cure the patient, simply increased the dose to ever-larger amounts rather than look for different ways to treat the disease. Once again, aid is presented as the sovereign remedy for Africa’s ills, only this time in amounts even bigger than anything Africa has seen before.

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, in a report for the United Nations on its Millennium Development Goals, calls for developed nations to boost their aid budgets from 0.25 per cent of their gross national product to 0.7 per cent in the next 10 years. The Africa Commission proposes doubling aid to 50 billion from 25 billion a year over the next five years, and Chancellor Brown is advocating not only debt cancellation but an international finance facility to front load development funds to Africa.

But money by itself is only a part of any solution; long-term involvement is much more important.

Debt cancellation itself is merely aid by another name. It is also, to put it kindly, an example of the triumph of hope over experience. It may be unkind, but nonetheless true, to suggest that the West is not seeking a real solution to Africa’s problems, but an excuse, swathed in the highest motives, for not doing the really difficult thing, that is, working with African leaders to find solutions that work. Aid, after all, only costs money. Real solutions, such as the abolition of domestic subsidies, which impoverish Africa’s farmers, and tariff barriers, which penalize its producers, cost votes.

Aid guarantees the political headline, but the search for real solutions takes time, commitment, a willingness to face difficult domestic dilemmas, and a readiness to engage properly with Africa, its people, and its leaders. And that means all its leaders and all its countries, the successes as well as the failures.

Of course, aid plays an important role in relieving endemic poverty. But if we are really serious about helping the poor out of poverty, we must accept that aid cannot be the only, or even the most important, remedy in what must be a suite of solutions. Blanket aid — such as the wholesale cancellation of debt, irrespective of the capacity of the recipient country — could have the effect of sweeping away good practice in those countries struggling to achieve it, and rewarding those leaders of failed and failing states who have never aspired to it. It will also, inevitably, take responsibility for the solution to Africa’s problems away from Africans themselves. There is also a tendency in all those who espouse the Big Aid concept, to adopt an ever-expanding wish list of target problems that, it is assumed, can be resolved by ever-bigger injections of aid.

The needs of many African countries are indeed as varied as they are great. But I fear that if everything is regarded as a priority, nothing will be a priority, and once again, the good that aid might do will be lost in a muddle of competing claims. There would be, I suggest, a greater hope of success if aid were to be targeted instead on a few critical goals. At the top of this list must be capacity building.

It is perhaps wise to remember that even in South Africa, the most sophisticated country in the continent, much of central-government funding budgeted for public services such as sanitation and roads (services essential if people are to be lifted out of poverty) remains unspent by hapless, over-stretched local government. Capacity in South Africa was eroded by the appalling apartheid education system. Elsewhere in Africa, the capacity crisis can trace its roots back to a patchy colonial inheritance, to conflict, and to corrupt governments that destroyed their intellectual elites or simply failed to pay their teachers. Nor has Africa’s capacity to look after itself been much helped by Britain’s eagerness to recruit Africa’s own nurses, doctors and other medical personnel to prop up the National Health Service. I acknowledge that the mobility of labour is an essential part of the global market, but the good intentions of donor countries cannot be free of the charge of hypocrisy when, at the same time, they are willing to drain Africa of the skills it so desperately needs.

In the ongoing debate about Africa, much has been said about the absence of good governance and the prevalence of corruption as major stumbling blocks on the road away from poverty; less is said about the close connection between capacity failure in government structures and a culture of corruption.

But bribery tends to flourish where resources are scarce, and in many African countries, no resource is scarcer than administrative capacity — the “soft” aspect of infrastructure essential to improved governance. Help with primary, secondary and tertiary education, as well as skills training, is essential if Africa is to be equipped to help itself out of poverty, rule itself effectively, and compete on equal terms in the global market. The old adage “give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him how to fish and he eats for life” has never been more true. But these solutions are not quick fixes; they require sustained commitment and involvement.

— The preceding is the first excerpt of an edited speech presented recently at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, U.K. The author is the chairman of De Beers.