Dead Aid: African Economists versus Bono & Other Rich White Western Dudes

Posted: November 7th, 2009 | Author: CB | Filed under: politics | Tags: celebrity industrial complex, class fisticuffs, god save the patriarchy, LOLpolitics, race matters, stuff white people like, sustainability | 2 Comments »

The newest addition to the bastard bookshelf!

Dead Aid is written by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian woman who holds a Bachelors of Science from Lusaka, Zambia, an MBA in finance from American University in Washington, D.C., a Masters from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a PhD in economics from Oxford.

Moyo was a consultant at the World Bank, then head of economic research and strategy for sub-Saharan Africa at Goldman Sachs.

She’s has been dubbed by superlative Western journalists as the ‘the Anti-Bono’ – and not just cause she’s highly educated.

No, it’s because — rather than fall in step and fawn over mass media celebrity admonitions to buy ipods and swag made by children dispersed on one foreign continent in order to benefit children on another — Moyo calls for the cutting of global, systemic aid to Africa.

Via the Guardian:

[Moyo] makes it clear at the outset what kind of aid she means. She does not mean humanitarian or emergency aid, mobilised in response to calamities; she does not mean charity-based aid, given to specific organisations and people on the ground, in order to achieve specific things (she sits on the boards of several charities, one of which distributes antiretrovirals); she is hopeful about a new attitude to food aid, whereby the money is used to buy food from farmers within a country, and then distribute it to those in need, instead of flooding the place with foreign food that undercuts local growers. What she means is “systemic aid”, the vast sums regularly transferred from government to government, or via institutions such as the World Bank.

She paints a dismaying picture of the history of that aid, beginning with the realisation, at Bretton Woods in July 1944, that Europe would need massive injections of cash to get back on its feet (and the concurrent establishment of the World Bank and the IMF). The Marshall Plan did a similar job. Both were so successful in Europe that it seemed sensible to assume that the same paradigm could apply in Africa. But these capital injections, she argues, worked in Europe because they were limited in scope, and Europe had the institutions to make the most of them; this was not true in many African countries. And there were other, not particularly altruistic imperatives: the cold war had begun, and “aid”, writes Moyo, “became the key tool in the contest to turn the world capitalist or communist”. Geopolitics trumped sense, again and again.

Paul Collier, one of Moyo’s old professors, reviews Dead Aid here:

Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam.

…Way to compare apples and chainsaws there.

Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa’s problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she heads the Africa strategy of a major bank. Nor can she be dismissed as a renegade who has rejected her roots. She is deeply wounded by the lack of development in Zambia, her home country. So what is she saying?

Yon bastard is left to wonder how this Ivory Tower patriarch, with his FAIL analogies and barely concealed consternation at women who happen to be brilliant, attractive and brown, could possibly come off as more clueless and/or condescending.

Scroll down and check out the comments section.

And just to provide an academic counterpoint – Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor at Columbia and director of the Earth Institute:

The “reformed” aid architecture has actually deprived aid of its political support in the rich countries. Aid reformers have generally argued for “budget support,” meaning money to the treasuries of the poor countries, rather than “tied aid” in the form of investment projects supplied by industrial and construction companies, or targeted support through specialized global funds for disease control, education, agriculture, and so forth.

…The most successful aid in recent years has been for targeted purposes through global funds – to provide immunizations for children, or to fight aids, TB, and malaria. The public then clearly understands how money translates directly into lives saved. Aid can be counted in bed nets, antiretroviral treatments, doses of measles vaccine. The results can be counted in the dramatic reductions of deaths from malaria, measles, polio, and other diseases now strikingly evident. These funds have won public backing and increased financing.

The second reform should be to “re-tie” aid, in part, by encouraging national donor agencies to support infrastructure projects provided by national companies.

China is doing this by the investment of billions of dollars throughout Africa, to notable benefits on the ground throughout Africa. Japan has a history of success of this kind of aid in south-east Asia. With a deep recession in the high-income world, direct financing of companies to build vitally needed roads, power plants, port facilities, and the like in the poorest countries would be a triple win: for development, for macroeconomic stimulus, and for building a domestic political base for meeting aid commitments.

(Photo credit: Chris Floyd for The New York Times)

FIERCE.

Now watch some white, Western upper-middle-class feminist snipe behind palms that she’s unemancipated for having the gall to wear heels and modern clothing.

Q: …”Dead Aid,” as your book is called, is particularly hard on rock stars. Have you met Bono?
I have, yes, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. It was at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me.

What do you think of him?
I’ll make a general comment about this whole dependence on “celebrities.” I object to this situation as it is right now where they have inadvertently or manipulatively become the spokespeople for the African continent.

You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.
Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Maybe that’s because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans.
Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

What do you think has held back Africans?
I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

If people want to help out, what do you think they should do with their money if not make donations?
Microfinance. Give people jobs.

But what if you just want to donate, say, $25?
Go to the Internet and type in Kiva.org, where you can make a loan to an African entrepreneur.

Do you have a financial interest in Kiva?
No, except that I’ve made loans through the system. I don’t own a share of Kiva.
(Source)

 
Also:
‘For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid,’ German interview with Kenyan economist James Shikwati.

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