Financial Crisis, Africa's Permanent Damage, and Aid Effectiveness

Aid is dead:  it is worse than merely useless, since it abets and perpetuates mis-governance and dependency by Africa.  No, to the contrary, massive additional infusions of aid are crucial for all of Africa.  This massive transfer of aid to governments in Africa is particularly urgent right now, in the midst of the financial crisis, which is bound to inflict permanent damage everywhere in the continent.

These blanket statements are nonsense, on both sides.  While they may contain a 'straw man' element, unfortunately in slight variants one often sees such pronouncements in current writings and public debates.  In spite of the practical irrelevance of holding on to such extreme positions, such artificial debates go on and on, pitting the extremes against each other.  The media loves it.  Each side of the argument tends to fit selective 'facts' (and hyperbola) to their extreme cause.  Even reasonable analysts tend to write about one single determinant for the ills of Africa, or just opt to focus on one extreme side of the argument or the other.

Who knows -- perhaps moving away from a single-minded extreme position doesn't really sell?

Related to this, I wrote after interviewing Bob Geldoff at the G-20 Summit in London.  It is far less appealing for a media story to have to report that aid can work effectively and can help, but only under certain conditions -- in particular where there is a serious commitment to improved governance by recipient country government and by donors.  And not otherwise...

Furthermore, this conditional aid effectiveness argument that I am making has another 'problem':  it leads to the politically inconvenient conclusion that much more selectivity in aid is needed.  This is difficult for many governments and donor organizations to accept in practice (rhetoric is another matter).

Take a look at this interesting blog entry at the World Bank on internal debate on aid to Africa, and on whether Africa's damage due to the financial crisis is permanent or not (futurologists?!).

Then there is today's New York Times (NYT) story on corruption in Africa.  In it I am on the record as stating that anti-corruption efforts are sliding.  Related to the the link between aid and corruption, even if only treated briefly, the article ends with a telling anecdote about Zambia today:

          '...anticorruption leaders say they sense less commitment to tackle corruption since the election of [Zambia's] President Rupiah Banda. “I’m inside,” said Maxwell Nkole, who leads a task force set up to investigate the [ex-President] Chiluba-era abuses. “The tempo, the intensity to tackle corruption is dropping.”  The Banda administration vigorously denies that charge, and says it will prosecute officials who stole $2 million from the Ministry of Health. At stake are hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the United States’ Millenium Challenge Corporation [MCC] that Zambia is eligible for.     On a recent afternoon, ambassadors from rich nations, the United States and Britain among them, mingled at a party on the lawn of Mark Chona, the first chief of the Zambian anticorruption task force. In welcoming them, he issued a sharp warning.                                                                                                                                                       “Your money is being stolen,” he said. “Don’t sit silent. You don’t know how much influence you have.” '

For a much longer and opinionated read (yet again very well written and interesting), a new book by Michela Wrong is out, this time on Kenya, entitled 'It's Our Turn to Eat'.  It  focuses on how potent the mix of ethnicity, aid, corruption and violence has been in shaping adverse developments in Kenya.  It is told through the story of John Githongo (the 'whistleblower'), one of the number of courageous anti-corruption czars in Africa who tried to go after the corrupt big fish and were defangled in recent years. Nigeria's Nuhu Ribadu is another such stalwart case, and there are others.