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Africa The development assistance business |
DEVELOPMENT
A Zimbabwean-based consultant, John Hollaway,
says South Africa’s President
Thabo Mbeki’s
newly initiated «Marshall Plan for Africa»,
is doomed to
fail because the omens for it are not good
With the help of Nigeria and Algeria, President Mbeki announced a programme late last year, that he tentatively called the «Millennium Africa Recovery Plan» to promote foreign investment, trade and further flows of aid for Africa, and to push for debt relief. The programme is modelled along the lines of the programme for European Reconstruction after the Second World War. Its main aims are to break Africa’s dependence on aid and to allow it to take responsibility for its own development.
«The Africa Plan hopes to move away from the traditional aid concept whereby funds end up paying Africa’s external debt service costs, and make the continent an exporter of capital,» Frank Chikane, a senior aid in Mbeki’s office is quoted as saying. African governments will be called upon to eradicate corruption and commit themselves to democracy and economic reform.
Quoting The Times of London (23 November 2000), Hollaway says: «Three hundred billion dollars of western taxpayers money have been sunk into sub-Saharan Africa in so-called development assistance over the past fifty years, and there is virtually nothing to show for it. Five decades of development assistance have left Africa with a crushing three hundred and fifty billion dollar debt, which takes two-fifths of government revenues to service».
Unease creeping in
This money was supposed to help Africa, not drag it down. Already in September 1999, The Economist had told the terrible truth about aid to Africa: «It has utterly failed».
Hollaway said that every five years or so, the World Bank produces a thick, glossy volume on African development. In 1985, the subject dealt with was: «Sub-Saharan Africa — From Crisis to Growth». In 1995, it was: «Sub-Saharan Africa — In The Mid-1990s». In 2000 it was: «A Continent in Transition — Can Africa Claim the 21st century?».
«A careful look at this series of titles suggests a certain unease creeping in. As we have seen, over the last 45 years or so, about US $300 billion has been spent by the aid agencies in Africa, led by the World Bank’s own International Development Association (IDA). IDA is a means of channelling rich country’s tax-payers money to poor countries through the experts at the World Bank. But a brief analysis suggests that all the money has made almost no difference to the average African. If these experts are wrong, should those taxpayers be paying them their hefty salaries?» asks Hollaway.
Hollaway noted that the general tone of «A Continent in Transition — Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?» is decidedly upbeat, to the point of contradicting itself. By taking the beginning and end of the 20th century as its markers, the World Bank is able to claim triumphantly that «education has spread and life expectancy is increased». As the 20th century progressed, this may have been true, but the fact is, Africa is now on a downward trend.
For example, education — primary school enrolment rates were lower in 1995 than in 1980; health — ever since 1990, life-expectancy rates have stagnated in Africa, mainly because of the HIV/AIDS panacea; economic management — the average per capita income is now lower than in the 1960s.
The World Bank and the success stories
Hollaway says the World Bank likes to offer such examples of success stories as Botswana, Mauritius and Ghana. These three countries are described as being «winners» in the realm of development issues. But when you travel around these countries, the reality is somewhat different. In Botswana, for example, wealth is limited to people living in towns and cities; in the bush, life goes on much as before. True, there are more schools, clinics and wells, but most Botswanans live in thatched huts surrounded by their wives and children. And when Botswana’s diamonds are finished, it will revert to being just one more aid-dependent country. Mauritius’s wealth distribution is off-set by modest incomes associated with cane sugar production.
While the world may want to perceive Africa as the «hopeless continent», Hollaway says the correct perception of Africa should be: «Africa, the unlucky continent». He points to Africa’s rapidly increasing population and the fact that large tracts of its land are infertile and unable to support the population. Another drawback is even more serious — disease.
Hollaway says a grim choice now faces the development assistance business. Behind it, stretches decades of wasted intervention; ahead lies a vista of dwindling support, as donor disillusionment increases. And all the time, Africa is crying out for more food, more jobs, more schools, more hospitals.
So where lies a solution to Africa’s long-term development? Is not the way forward to start from the grassroots within Africa itself — to construct a new African society that has an interest in reforming its own politico-socio system. To leave behind the family-based, semi-nomadic, polygamous cultural survival mechanism that has become the instrument of its impoverishment.
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