Africa, Aid and assistance!

I don't think you can live in the Third World without being almost constantly aware of poverty; of how much you have compared to how little most others around you have.

Perhaps some people get used to it but I don't. I never got used to lepers and child beggars on street corners in India; or people living, giving birth and dying on the street. Africa is not as bad as India, at least the bits I have seen are not as bad but it is bad enough.

And Africa is a place of contrasts. Where we live and how we live, power outages and surges aside, could be anywhere in the First World. The suburb, Area 43, is truly lovely with beautiful gardens and nice homes. It is where most of the embassies are so that is not surprising. And where a lot of expats live.  But Lilongwe is one of the prettiest and cleanest African cities I have seen. The Old Town is a bit raddled and worn but in general, it is safe, clean and functional.

Karonga, an eight hour drive to the north, where the mine is, has much higher levels of poverty and looks very different to here. Although there are also pleasant places to be found there as well. But whatever the good bits may be, the reality is that Malawi, like most of Africa, is poor.

No doubt it is the Virgo in me which maintains a level of 'guilt' along with the awareness and one does what one can but it never seems much. I bring clothes for Limited and Andrew's children when I can and want to collect some for the local orphanage.

When I throw paper away, if it is not personal (when I tear it into small pieces) I do not fold it in cause Limited wants to collect it so his children can draw or write on the unused back. We pay good salaries, provide money for taxis to the hospital .... Andrew was sick on Friday and needed money to get to the hospital and back and something extra  for any medication... money for funerals and money for unexpected crises.

It doesn't seem much but it is better than nothing and it is just the way things are around here. I am not sure what was wrong with Andrew but it sounded like dysentery. It doesn't take much to push people over the financial edge in Africa; they live so close to it most of the time.

I suppose it is the day to day issues which one sees which makes me ponder more deeply the absolute failure of international aid to Africa. That is at least how it seems to me after some 14 years of travelling and living around the continent.

When I was a child Africa was poor and now, fifty years on, it is still poor. How many of us can remember our parents, encouraging us to eat our dinner,  saying: 'Think of the starving children in Africa.'  And by Australian standards we were also poor but I knew the African children were much, much poorer. The image of starving children was very real and remains so in various parts of Africa, even today.

Images such as that above have been with us for generations. Most of us in the developed world know that people in Africa are, in the main, terribly poor and in need of help.

That's why when the clarion call comes, as it does so often, to give aid to Africa, people dip into their pockets and support the cause. It is noble, generous, considerate, compassionate .... and generally ineffectual.

Anyone who lives in the Third World can see, if they are prepared to look, that aid does not actually achieve its goal. Or more to the point, despite the billions if not trillions poured into the problem, the goal remains distant if not unattainable.

Perhaps we have reached a point where instead of giving we need to start to demanding. That is if we really want to help Africa. If aid doesn't work then we need to find out what does and start demanding that our own government and the international community start thinking outside the square and doing what needs to be done to help Africa in ways that actually make a difference; a lasting, enduring, functional difference.

The bandaid business of international aid has had a long history of failure. Of course there are success stories; of course there has been some programmes and assistance which have actually helped, but, in the main, the goal of helping Africans rise out of poverty has failed miserably. If any 'business' had failed in such a monstrous way it would have been done away with long ago.

Not so aid to Africa and the question we need to start asking is Why? Why does this keep going on when it is not doing what it is supposed to do? Why do we keep giving more and getting less, or rather, we keep giving more and Africans keep getting less. Well, most Africans keep getting less. There is no doubt the money goes somewhere but not where it is needed and most definitely not where it is meant to go.

We all know that quite a few African leaders, over the past half century  that the international aid tap has been turned, on have become immensely wealthy. The facts are published in the media. They are frequent and far from unusual.


The latest revelation, after the Egyptians finally rose up against tyranny and poverty, was that their 'leader' Hosni Mubarak, may well be the richest man in the world with some $70 billion dollars in his 'pocket.'  And Angola's president, Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, who has been in power for about the same length of time as Mubarak, is often referred to as the 'richest man in Brazil!' Well, his money is salted away in Brazil that is while most of his people fail to benefit from the massive oil and diamond wealth of that small nation.


Where do they get this phenomenal wealth and why is aid still being poured into those countries because most people who live there, do so in abject poverty?  People are shocked, horrified and railing now about Mubarak but his wealth was common knowledge before the Egyptian people decided they had had enough. No-one cared then about the disparity between his egregious wealth and his nation's terrible poverty.


India is another case in point. While most Indians live in shocking poverty and literacy levels are appalling, the government still has the money to fund a nucler arms programme; a space programme and a massive military. Logic suggests that Indians need housing and education long before they need a space programme even if one does take into account the 'ego soothing' which comes from being armed with nuclear weapons and having a massive military complex at the nation's disposal.


At what point do people need to take responsibility for their own poverty? That question needs to be asked even more strongly after countless decades of international aid have achieved so little. It is a question some have asked and more will hopefully ask in the future.

In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, in 2009, written by , Dambisa Moyo and titled, Why Foreign Aid is Hurting Africa, made the point that:

‎'Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population -- over 350 million people -- live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.'

LEFT: Billions of dollars in aid and slums in Africa keep growing.

That is a lot of money, which has gone somewhere, but not where it was and is needed. As the saying goes: 'Only a fool keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different result.'

'Throwing good money after bad,' is the next one.

Of course people want to help but if the help which is given does not help then what purpose does it serve except to fill the pockets of some and fund yet another inefficient aid agency?

And yet even in the face of such clear and abject failure the calls grow louder for a doubling of the $50billion or so in international aid which is poured into Africa every year. Only a few float on the sea of money which washes through Africa annually.

Moyo, a former economist at Goldman Sachs, is the author of, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa,  makes the point that aid has not only failed to help it has made the poor poorer and slowed economic growth. The insidious aid culture, he says, has left African countries more debt-laden, inflation-prone and more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets. In addition it has served to deter top-quality investors and increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest.

With over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's population under the age of 24 with few economic prospects, aid, he says, is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.

It is hard to disagree. A friend who was here some 40 years ago asked me what the basic wage was and when I replied it was about a dollar a day, he said: 'Nothing much has changed then?'

And no, it has not, but it should have changed. And the question the world needs to start asking is why has international aid failed to help Africa and where has the money gone!  How can one trillion dollars just disappear into such a swamp of failure without people asking questions or saying; 'No more, enough is enough?'

Of course politics are involved, of course diplomacy is involved, of course corporate greed and vested interests and corruption and incompetence are involved but the point of all of this was and is to help Africans rise out of poverty. If what is being done is achieving little or nothing then it is a waste of everyone's time, a shocking waste of money, and no more than some hypocritical tinkering  as far as poor Africans are concerned.

Although some questions are being asked, or have been asked, not a lot seems to change. In a United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May, 2004, Jeffrey Winters, a university professor, argued that the World Bank had participated in the corruption of around $100 billion of its loan funds intended for development.

And two years before this, the African Union estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year as international donors turned a blind eye to aid money being re-directed.

We are now, by African life expectancy, a good three generations into serious international aid donations and yet children in the main have little hope of a future where they will earn more than their grandparents earned. That is not just wrong it is ridiculous.

There are few countries in Africa where corruption is not working at the top levels of government and right down through the system.  Some countries are better or worse than others but all share the same sorts of problems and the people suffer because of it.

Bureacracy is a part of the problem, says Moyo. Governments need a functional and effective civil service but such systems are always prone to misuse and red tape. The aid money flow rolling through such systems merely makes the danger of corruption that much greater.

It is easy to criticise people for corruption but in the Third World you are pretty much on your own and without trustworthy government and effective social welfare safety nets, you will always have corruption because people have to look after themselves.

In Africa and India, as I saw, and as is the case in all Third World countries and the less developed nations, when you fall you fall all the way into the gutter. The only safeguard anyone can have is the support of family and friends who either have money or contacts, or influence, or power or all of the above.

It is a vicious cycle where a lack of security in life virtually ensures that the system will be corrupt and a corrupt system will never offer any sort of security. And so it goes, around and around and around and aid money only makes it all that much worse because aid offers a source worth tapping; a prize worth stealing; a chance to get the money that will make you and your family secure.

No doubt cultural attitudes toward tribal affiliations,  those in power, and the importance of demonstrating one's position or power play a part as well.  I remember when I was living in India and discovering that within the culture was a belief that a person who had a position of power would be 'shamed' if they did not use that power to benefit their family and community.

What we in the West call corruption can have many different names in other cultures even beyond the fact that making full use, legally or illegally,  of position or power can be a matter of survival.  That is not to say such attitudes are healthy, but they exist as a part of tradition and make it much harder for people in those societies to resist 'milking the system' for their own ends and for the benefit of those who expect them to share their good fortune.

Foreign aid is the biggest African 'cash' crop and governments expend most of their energy in making sure the harvest is a good one and that it gets better every year. As long as the focus is on foreign aid there will be little time or money spent on developing the local economy. And why would there be? Aid money is 'easy money,' or as Australia's Aborigines first called it; ' Sit down money.'

The only thing you need to continue receiving this money for nothing is to remain poor and in need. Why would you risk self sufficiency when you, and by that I mean those who are in power, are actually doing okay. 

And the aid agencies are no different. While their raison d'etre may be altruistic, the reality is that they also need a continuation of the poverty and the need or they are out of a job. And for most of those who work for aid agencies, it's a good job. They get good accommodation, a decent car to drive, a reasonable salary, an interesting job and they get to feel good about the fact they are 'helping,' even though in reality they are hurting more than they help.

This may seem a somewhat cynical view of aid but having notched up nearly 20 years living in India and Africa it is the result of what I have seen, heard and reasoned. I return at this point to the one trillion dollars of aid in the past 60 years as a reminder of how tragically ineffectual it all is.

Moyo goes on to say that the; 'Proponents of aid are quick to argue that the $13 billion ($100 billion in today's terms) aid of the post-World War II Marshall Plan helped pull back a broken Europe from the brink of an economic abyss, and that aid could work, and would work, if Africa had a good policy environment.

The aid advocates skirt over the point that the Marshall Plan interventions were short, sharp and finite, unlike the open-ended commitments which imbue governments with a sense of entitlement rather than encouraging innovation. And aid supporters spend little time addressing the mystery of why a country in good working order would seek aid rather than other, better forms of financing. No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do.'

There are too many African leaders who rank amongst the world's richest, their money safely squirrelled away in foreign bank accounts,  while their people still struggle in poverty. There are too many African nations with enormous natural resources which produce billions of dollars every year and yet most of their people still struggle in poverty.

No-one would deny that disaster aid is invaluable and more so in the Third World, but country aid, on a regular basis simply does not work.

I don't have any answers and I wish I did but I do know, having lived and travelled in various parts of Africa over the past 14 years that not enough has changed for the better. And it should have.

But it is too easy to point the finger at African governments, aid agencies, corporate investers, international aid donors or even the African people as the root cause of this tragedy. As with most things it is not just the fault of 'one' but a shared problem created by the many.

I just hope it is a problem which can be solved sooner not later. Africans deserve as much and that includes everyone; those at the top and those at the bottom.