Mozambique: Aid, Inequality and Protest

As a background to the recent riots over price rises in Maputo, extracts from an article published two months ago by The Economist:


(...)

At the end of the civil war in 1992, Mozambique was arguably the world’s poorest country. Its transport, education and health systems were in ruins. Many Mozambicans with marketable skills had fled. But now its economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world. In the past 15 years it has swelled by an average of 8% a year, dipping slightly to 6% during last year’s global meltdown, with nearly 7% expected this year, well above the 4% the World Bank forecast for southern Africa as a whole.

(…)

Mozambique’s government is democratically elected and stable, its macroeconomic policies sound, its press reasonably free. Often held up as one of the best examples of post-conflict recovery in Africa, it has become a donor darling. This year international aid will total some $1.6 billion, worth more than half the total state budget. Foreign investment is pouring in.

But the country has a long way to go. In various international rankings, it is still among the world’s worst performers: 129th (out of 133 countries) in the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index; 172nd (out of 182) in the UN’s human-development index; and still in the bottom dozen in terms of GDP per head a year, at less than $1,000 in purchasing-power parity, according to the IMF. Despite a much-aired fall in the poverty rate from 69% in 1997 to 54% in 2003, the absolute number living below the poverty line rose to 11.7m in a population of around 20m. The latest national household survey, due out in August, is expected to show little improvement. Inequality has been growing.

(…)

International donors, keen to point to Mozambique as a rare African aid success, have been getting worried. Earlier this year a group of 19 Western countries threatened a “donor strike” unless Mozambique cleaned up its act. Only after its government meekly agreed to implement the 35 reforms proposed by the so-called G19 did the aid start flowing again. Far from sounding resentful, however, Mozambique’s prime minister, Aires Aly, says the threatened strike was “in some ways good for us, because it made us realise that some issues in our programme needed review.” Without the aid, he knows his country would not be such a star performer.


[Full article here]

As a background to the recent riots over price rises in Maputo, extracts from an article published two months ago by The Economist:


(...)

At the end of the civil war in 1992, Mozambique was arguably the world’s poorest country. Its transport, education and health systems were in ruins. Many Mozambicans with marketable skills had fled. But now its economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world. In the past 15 years it has swelled by an average of 8% a year, dipping slightly to 6% during last year’s global meltdown, with nearly 7% expected this year, well above the 4% the World Bank forecast for southern Africa as a whole.

(…)

Mozambique’s government is democratically elected and stable, its macroeconomic policies sound, its press reasonably free. Often held up as one of the best examples of post-conflict recovery in Africa, it has become a donor darling. This year international aid will total some $1.6 billion, worth more than half the total state budget. Foreign investment is pouring in.

But the country has a long way to go. In various international rankings, it is still among the world’s worst performers: 129th (out of 133 countries) in the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index; 172nd (out of 182) in the UN’s human-development index; and still in the bottom dozen in terms of GDP per head a year, at less than $1,000 in purchasing-power parity, according to the IMF. Despite a much-aired fall in the poverty rate from 69% in 1997 to 54% in 2003, the absolute number living below the poverty line rose to 11.7m in a population of around 20m. The latest national household survey, due out in August, is expected to show little improvement. Inequality has been growing.

(…)

International donors, keen to point to Mozambique as a rare African aid success, have been getting worried. Earlier this year a group of 19 Western countries threatened a “donor strike” unless Mozambique cleaned up its act. Only after its government meekly agreed to implement the 35 reforms proposed by the so-called G19 did the aid start flowing again. Far from sounding resentful, however, Mozambique’s prime minister, Aires Aly, says the threatened strike was “in some ways good for us, because it made us realise that some issues in our programme needed review.” Without the aid, he knows his country would not be such a star performer.


[Full article here]

Poets For Haiti

Lament

(by Gillian Clarke)

For the earth that shivered its skin like an old horse
For the shout of the sun, of the earth as it broke its heart
For the white palace that fell into itself like snow
For the hospital, for its rows of white graves
For the cathedral that folded on emptiness
calling God's name as it went
For its psalms of sorrow, the prayers of the living and dead
For each house crushed with its cots and cushions and cups
cooking pots pressed between pages of stone
For the small lung of air that kept someone alive
For the rescuer's hand reaching into the void
For the slip of a life from its grip
For the smile of daylight on a woman's face
For her daughter dead in the dark
For the baby born in the rubble
For tomorrow's whistling workmen
with their hods of bricks
For scaffolding and walls rising from the grave
over rosaries of bones


When Carol Ann Duffy heard about the cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti, the Poet Laureate felt it was not enough to pull out her credit card and donate some money to those left suffering in its wake.
Instead, she contacted 23 of Britain's most eminent poets to mobilise them for one of the biggest charity poetry jamborees for decades. Two hours after she requested their help, she had received a deluge of enthusiastic replies. Some pledged to write new poems relating to the disaster, while others said they would read verses filled with love, humour, sadness and death, some to music, to mark the moment.
Poetry Life for Haiti, which takes place today at Westminster Central Hall, has been billed as Band Aid for poets. Roger McGough, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, Brian Patten, the national poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Elaine Feinstein, and the Costa-prize winning Christopher Reid will all be taking part, as well as Duffy herself.

[Keep reading here]

N.B.: You can read about Haiti's History in this text which I annexed some time ago to this post. You can also read about the challenges facing Small Islands Development States (SIDS), which include Haiti, here.

Related post:

Haiti Tragedy

Lament

(by Gillian Clarke)

For the earth that shivered its skin like an old horse
For the shout of the sun, of the earth as it broke its heart
For the white palace that fell into itself like snow
For the hospital, for its rows of white graves
For the cathedral that folded on emptiness
calling God's name as it went
For its psalms of sorrow, the prayers of the living and dead
For each house crushed with its cots and cushions and cups
cooking pots pressed between pages of stone
For the small lung of air that kept someone alive
For the rescuer's hand reaching into the void
For the slip of a life from its grip
For the smile of daylight on a woman's face
For her daughter dead in the dark
For the baby born in the rubble
For tomorrow's whistling workmen
with their hods of bricks
For scaffolding and walls rising from the grave
over rosaries of bones


When Carol Ann Duffy heard about the cataclysmic earthquake in Haiti, the Poet Laureate felt it was not enough to pull out her credit card and donate some money to those left suffering in its wake.
Instead, she contacted 23 of Britain's most eminent poets to mobilise them for one of the biggest charity poetry jamborees for decades. Two hours after she requested their help, she had received a deluge of enthusiastic replies. Some pledged to write new poems relating to the disaster, while others said they would read verses filled with love, humour, sadness and death, some to music, to mark the moment.
Poetry Life for Haiti, which takes place today at Westminster Central Hall, has been billed as Band Aid for poets. Roger McGough, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion, Brian Patten, the national poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Elaine Feinstein, and the Costa-prize winning Christopher Reid will all be taking part, as well as Duffy herself.

[Keep reading here]

N.B.: You can read about Haiti's History in this text which I annexed some time ago to this post. You can also read about the challenges facing Small Islands Development States (SIDS), which include Haiti, here.

Related post:

Haiti Tragedy

Capitalist Nigger & Dead Aid

Two books some might find interesting reading side by side
(perhaps over the coming holiday period)

[Click on the images to access reviews]

Two books some might find interesting reading side by side
(perhaps over the coming holiday period)

[Click on the images to access reviews]

DAMBISA MOYO's "DEAD AID"

I have been so immersed in my ongoing research on China-Africa economic relations since January, including a brief stint as Research Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, during the first half of this year, that I totally missed all the furore made around Dambisa Moyo’s book "Dead Aid" on the (in)effectiveness of aid to eradicate poverty in Africa.

This has been a recurring theme in this blog since I started it. However, my critique of the aid industry always fell short of calling for a total halt to it and… of writing a book on the subject! As put in her dubbed "Anti-Bono (another recurring subjet in this blog) interview" for the New York Times Magazine, “you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.”

The Economist follows the same thread: “(…) Yet the intellectual arguments about aid are still conducted largely within a small circle of Western white men. So it is good to welcome a new voice to the debate, and a black African woman too, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist at Goldman Sachs. It is remarkable that so few voices have been raised in Africa, supposedly the main beneficiary of the world’s largesse, about how the aid money should be spent, or even whether it should be received at all.”

It then goes on to argue that “unfortunately, Ms Moyo’s contribution ends there, for “Dead Aid” does not move the debate along much. Yes, she has joined the chorus of disapproval—and that in itself might surprise a few diehards who think that Africans should just be grateful for the aid and shut up. But her arguments are scarcely original and her plodding prose makes her the least stylish of the critics. Moreover, she overstates her case, almost to the point of caricature. There is almost nobody left, even in the aid lobby, who seriously thinks that bilateral (government-to-government) aid is the sole answer to world poverty, as she suggests. “Trade not aid” is only one of several newish mantras among aidniks that seem to have passed her by.”

A review of reviews by The Complete Review on "Dead Aid" concludes: “No consensus -- and the global financial-world meltdown makes for bad timing for the argument.”

I couldn’t find the time to read the book yet, so it was with great pleasure and gratefulness that, while gradually catching up with ‘all the fuss about it’ (which included Moyo's nomination by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world), I came across what is certainly one of the most meaningful reviews made of it. Meaningful on various counts: it was one of the first among the many published so far; it was written by a Zambian; it was made by an economist; it was by my good friend Cho. And, above all, it was a thorough, insightful, thought-provoking and analytically-sound review too. Moreover, it was enriched by the interesting debate it generated among his readers. I am sorry that I missed it at the time, but having read it in the last few days I can only strongly recommend it to my readers as well. Here’s the gist of it:

"The central argument of Dead Aid is that aid is the fundamental cause of poverty and therefore eliminating aid is critical to spur growth in ailing African states. Aid is the disease that we must treat to bring us back to full economic health. A bold and daring statement built around the central belief that aid distorts incentives among policymakers and society at large. It makes governments less accountable to their citizens and has led to civil wars, rampant corruption (electoral and otherwise) and has been central to an undercurrent of irresponsibility culminating in increased and self-reinforcing poverty since independence from colonialism. None of these arguments are new of course, but Dambisa is probably the first economist to boldly claim that aid causes poverty.

If aid is the disease that causes endless bleeding, to stop the bleeding you simply need to stop aid, the only challenge therefore is how to do it. The Dead Aid solution is a five year exit strategy built around the idea of incentivising poor countries to access finance on international markets, supported by the tripod of microfinance, trade/FDI and remittances. In the Dead Aid world there’s a stash of money out there on the international financial markets that is just waiting to be tapped by any African country willing to invest in a credit rating. If African countries can enter these markets and borrow, it would provide the right incentives to spark good governance since the international markets would be more willing to “punish” bad behaviour compared to those that provide aid at infinitum. In other words, borrowing through international financial markets is a sort of "self commitment mechanism" to good governance, and with that comes better long term prosperity. It is certainly likely to be slightly more expensive than “easy money” that concessional loans and grants bring, but by rejecting these overtures nation states will find themselves on a better path to prosperity. The trouble is that African governments have limited incentives to do this on their own, though some have made progress in this direction, so they need to be compelled through the Dead Aid proposal of terminating aid completely within a five year period.

(…)

I am afraid to say, and with deep sorrow, that the Dead Aid proposal falls far short in many areas, with at least four worth highlighting.

First, there’s a general lack of clear analytical rigour evidenced by elementary confusion in key areas : correlation/causality issues; definitional problems; poor evidence on policy counterfactuals; incomplete and unbalanced citation of evidence; and, perhaps more worryingly lack of general familiarity with refined areas of existing literature.

Secondly, the treatment of aid in a homogeneous and aggregate way is particularly problematic. Dead Aid defines aid as the “sum total of concessional loans and grants”, but excludes “emergency aid” e.g. help for Darfur or the Asian Tsunami. There’s no distinction within Dead Aid between budget support, infrastructure aid, person to person aid, heath related aid, grants or concessional loans for discretionary spending. It is all discussed under one umbrella and handed the same fate.

Thirdly, Dead Aid is characterised by a plethora of inconsistent arguments. A key example that stands out is the emotive issue of Chinese investment. Dambisa dedicates a whole chapter explaining why the “Chinese are our friends”, largely arguing from their historical involvement in Africa and their renewed commitment to trade and FDI. However, against a backdrop of Dead Aid’s “anti-dependency” rhetoric , the chant for China appears odd. Let us be clear, China is not only bringing FDI to Africa but it has also brought concessional loans and long term dependency. Zambia’s external debt has now risen to about $2bn since the HIPC completion point, a significant part of that is through new agreements with the Chinese government and Chinese businesses. A closer look at Angola reveals the same truth. Not only is China investing heavily in that country but in exchange it is tying Angola and other countries to China for a long time reducing their options to renege in the future. That is not necessarily bad, but if the central worry is that dependency leads to ineffective governments with poor incentives we should be honest enough to consider the possibility that China’s closeness to many African governments (which are not all democratic) may have similar negative impacts as aid.

Fourth and finally, the solutions proposed by Dead Aid are ineffective. This is not surprising because without a clear definition of the problem, it is inevitable that the solutions would not work. But even if one was to accept Dead Aid’s basic premise that aid is bad, its solutions come far short. It’s quite obvious to any ordinary analyst that in order to assess whether any proposals would present an overall improvement beyond the status quo, we need to define what happens in the counterfactual carefully and then judge that against proposed policy initiatives.

(…)

In short on both theory and practice, Dead Aid falls far short of what is expected of a book advocating such a radical proposal of “turning off the aid tap”. If there’s any consolation in this assessment, it is that Dead Aid will hopefully not find any intellectual traction. The analytical consensus remains that aid is important and the challenge is how to make it smarter, better and ultimately beneficial to the poor. This question has never been more urgent given the limited aid resources around. Dambisa is certainly right about one thing, now is the time to examine these issues and we can certainly do better than the present!"

I have been so immersed in my ongoing research on China-Africa economic relations since January, including a brief stint as Research Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, during the first half of this year, that I totally missed all the furore made around Dambisa Moyo’s book "Dead Aid" on the (in)effectiveness of aid to eradicate poverty in Africa.

This has been a recurring theme in this blog since I started it. However, my critique of the aid industry always fell short of calling for a total halt to it and… of writing a book on the subject! As put in her dubbed "Anti-Bono (another recurring subjet in this blog) interview" for the New York Times Magazine, “you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.”

The Economist follows the same thread: “(…) Yet the intellectual arguments about aid are still conducted largely within a small circle of Western white men. So it is good to welcome a new voice to the debate, and a black African woman too, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist at Goldman Sachs. It is remarkable that so few voices have been raised in Africa, supposedly the main beneficiary of the world’s largesse, about how the aid money should be spent, or even whether it should be received at all.”

It then goes on to argue that “unfortunately, Ms Moyo’s contribution ends there, for “Dead Aid” does not move the debate along much. Yes, she has joined the chorus of disapproval—and that in itself might surprise a few diehards who think that Africans should just be grateful for the aid and shut up. But her arguments are scarcely original and her plodding prose makes her the least stylish of the critics. Moreover, she overstates her case, almost to the point of caricature. There is almost nobody left, even in the aid lobby, who seriously thinks that bilateral (government-to-government) aid is the sole answer to world poverty, as she suggests. “Trade not aid” is only one of several newish mantras among aidniks that seem to have passed her by.”

A review of reviews by The Complete Review on "Dead Aid" concludes: “No consensus -- and the global financial-world meltdown makes for bad timing for the argument.”

I couldn’t find the time to read the book yet, so it was with great pleasure and gratefulness that, while gradually catching up with ‘all the fuss about it’ (which included Moyo's nomination by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world), I came across what is certainly one of the most meaningful reviews made of it. Meaningful on various counts: it was one of the first among the many published so far; it was written by a Zambian; it was made by an economist; it was by my good friend Cho. And, above all, it was a thorough, insightful, thought-provoking and analytically-sound review too. Moreover, it was enriched by the interesting debate it generated among his readers. I am sorry that I missed it at the time, but having read it in the last few days I can only strongly recommend it to my readers as well. Here’s the gist of it:

"The central argument of Dead Aid is that aid is the fundamental cause of poverty and therefore eliminating aid is critical to spur growth in ailing African states. Aid is the disease that we must treat to bring us back to full economic health. A bold and daring statement built around the central belief that aid distorts incentives among policymakers and society at large. It makes governments less accountable to their citizens and has led to civil wars, rampant corruption (electoral and otherwise) and has been central to an undercurrent of irresponsibility culminating in increased and self-reinforcing poverty since independence from colonialism. None of these arguments are new of course, but Dambisa is probably the first economist to boldly claim that aid causes poverty.

If aid is the disease that causes endless bleeding, to stop the bleeding you simply need to stop aid, the only challenge therefore is how to do it. The Dead Aid solution is a five year exit strategy built around the idea of incentivising poor countries to access finance on international markets, supported by the tripod of microfinance, trade/FDI and remittances. In the Dead Aid world there’s a stash of money out there on the international financial markets that is just waiting to be tapped by any African country willing to invest in a credit rating. If African countries can enter these markets and borrow, it would provide the right incentives to spark good governance since the international markets would be more willing to “punish” bad behaviour compared to those that provide aid at infinitum. In other words, borrowing through international financial markets is a sort of "self commitment mechanism" to good governance, and with that comes better long term prosperity. It is certainly likely to be slightly more expensive than “easy money” that concessional loans and grants bring, but by rejecting these overtures nation states will find themselves on a better path to prosperity. The trouble is that African governments have limited incentives to do this on their own, though some have made progress in this direction, so they need to be compelled through the Dead Aid proposal of terminating aid completely within a five year period.

(…)

I am afraid to say, and with deep sorrow, that the Dead Aid proposal falls far short in many areas, with at least four worth highlighting.

First, there’s a general lack of clear analytical rigour evidenced by elementary confusion in key areas : correlation/causality issues; definitional problems; poor evidence on policy counterfactuals; incomplete and unbalanced citation of evidence; and, perhaps more worryingly lack of general familiarity with refined areas of existing literature.

Secondly, the treatment of aid in a homogeneous and aggregate way is particularly problematic. Dead Aid defines aid as the “sum total of concessional loans and grants”, but excludes “emergency aid” e.g. help for Darfur or the Asian Tsunami. There’s no distinction within Dead Aid between budget support, infrastructure aid, person to person aid, heath related aid, grants or concessional loans for discretionary spending. It is all discussed under one umbrella and handed the same fate.

Thirdly, Dead Aid is characterised by a plethora of inconsistent arguments. A key example that stands out is the emotive issue of Chinese investment. Dambisa dedicates a whole chapter explaining why the “Chinese are our friends”, largely arguing from their historical involvement in Africa and their renewed commitment to trade and FDI. However, against a backdrop of Dead Aid’s “anti-dependency” rhetoric , the chant for China appears odd. Let us be clear, China is not only bringing FDI to Africa but it has also brought concessional loans and long term dependency. Zambia’s external debt has now risen to about $2bn since the HIPC completion point, a significant part of that is through new agreements with the Chinese government and Chinese businesses. A closer look at Angola reveals the same truth. Not only is China investing heavily in that country but in exchange it is tying Angola and other countries to China for a long time reducing their options to renege in the future. That is not necessarily bad, but if the central worry is that dependency leads to ineffective governments with poor incentives we should be honest enough to consider the possibility that China’s closeness to many African governments (which are not all democratic) may have similar negative impacts as aid.

Fourth and finally, the solutions proposed by Dead Aid are ineffective. This is not surprising because without a clear definition of the problem, it is inevitable that the solutions would not work. But even if one was to accept Dead Aid’s basic premise that aid is bad, its solutions come far short. It’s quite obvious to any ordinary analyst that in order to assess whether any proposals would present an overall improvement beyond the status quo, we need to define what happens in the counterfactual carefully and then judge that against proposed policy initiatives.

(…)

In short on both theory and practice, Dead Aid falls far short of what is expected of a book advocating such a radical proposal of “turning off the aid tap”. If there’s any consolation in this assessment, it is that Dead Aid will hopefully not find any intellectual traction. The analytical consensus remains that aid is important and the challenge is how to make it smarter, better and ultimately beneficial to the poor. This question has never been more urgent given the limited aid resources around. Dambisa is certainly right about one thing, now is the time to examine these issues and we can certainly do better than the present!"

AFRICA: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles

Chinua Achebe, the grandaddy of African writing, was so impressed by Richard Dowden’s new book on Africa that when the author asked him for a few kind words to put on the jacket, Mr Achebe wrote him a two-page foreword. “One could not ask for a more qualified author to explore Africa’s complexity,” he concluded.

Mr Dowden maintains the reader’s interest by skilfully interweaving his research on the economic effects of AIDS and international aid into stories of myriad encounters with Africans rich and poor. He describes, for example, how he met the Mourides of Senegal, the followers of a 19th-century Islamic mystic and poet, Cheikh Amadu Bamba Mbakke, whose descendants operate an informal, yet highly effective, global trading system based entirely on trust. He goes on to contrast this portrait with the difficulties so many people have starting businesses in Africa or developing local manufacturing. Similarly, a visit to the Niger Delta leads him to ruminate about the curse of having abundant reserves of oil.
(The Economist)

From the dusty Horn of Africa, Dowden takes us on a journey through history and geography through the steamy forests of the Congo River basin, where warring factions replicate like bacteria in a petri dish, and we find the abandoned palaces of that king kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko; the drug-fuelled chaos of war in Sierra Leone and Liberia; the vibrantly corrupt megalopolis of Lagos in Nigeria; the morally topsy-turvy world of Angola's civil war, where US-backed rebels attacked US oil installations protected by Cuban revolutionaries; the growing madness of Robert Mugabe as he truculently turned Zimbabwe from Africa's breadbasket to its basket-case.

(The Telegraph)

The best chapters are those in which Dowden writes from personal experience, where he excels at describing the people and the action around him. Chapters on the civil wars in Angola and Somalia are particularly striking, as is Dowden's harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda. One unifying theme is the continent's resilience and optimism despite its manifest failures. Of course, Dowden's beat as a journalist has focused on the parts of Africa that have failed in some way, and they tend to be overrepresented in a book that barely mentions peaceful, democratic countries, such as Botswana or Cape Verde. Only in the last chapter does Dowden note that the last decade has actually been reasonably good for the region, with the end of several long-standing conflicts and a period of sustained economic growth.
(Foreign Affairs)

This may come as a surprise to many, given what most outsiders associate with Africa: poverty, disease, war, political oppression and disasters. The image conjured up is almost exclusively bad news - even at a time when, at last, a power-sharing agreement has been reached in Zimbabwe.
The other truth to learn is Africa's deep spirituality. The spiritual streams are ancient, multifarious - and run deep. The place of spirituality in African life is an essential characteristic that defines the society and individuals. The emphasis is always on a holistic view of life. How people interact with each other is as important as their relationship with their Creator. The dichotomy between secular and spiritual dissolves in African spirituality into a sacramental universe. The West should heed this awareness of the spiritual dimension in life, something Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed to in his address at Harvard in June 1979. The good, liberal, capitalist, democratic audience was shocked to hear him denounce their values almost as much as the Soviet ones. “A plague on both your houses!” Western democracy and Communism had sprung from the same one-sided Enlightenment roots, both elevating man's reason above the spirit, above God.
(The Times)

“The media’s problem is that, by covering only disasters and wars, it gives us only that image of the continent,” Dowden writes — and 90 percent of the Africans reading this are now nodding at that line. “Persistent images of starving children and men with guns have accumulated into our narrative of the continent.” “The aid industry too has an interest in maintaining the image of Africans as hopeless victims of endless wars and persistent famines,” Dowden continues. “However well intentioned their motives may once have been, aid agencies have helped create the single, distressing image of Africa. They and journalists feed off each other.”
In particular, Dowden lets loose at celebrities like Bob Geldof and politicians like Tony Blair with their “messianic mission to save Africa.” As Dowden writes: “That set teeth on edge. It sounded like saving Africa from the Africans.”
(The New York Times)

***

{Mentioned, in passing, here}

Chinua Achebe, the grandaddy of African writing, was so impressed by Richard Dowden’s new book on Africa that when the author asked him for a few kind words to put on the jacket, Mr Achebe wrote him a two-page foreword. “One could not ask for a more qualified author to explore Africa’s complexity,” he concluded.

Mr Dowden maintains the reader’s interest by skilfully interweaving his research on the economic effects of AIDS and international aid into stories of myriad encounters with Africans rich and poor. He describes, for example, how he met the Mourides of Senegal, the followers of a 19th-century Islamic mystic and poet, Cheikh Amadu Bamba Mbakke, whose descendants operate an informal, yet highly effective, global trading system based entirely on trust. He goes on to contrast this portrait with the difficulties so many people have starting businesses in Africa or developing local manufacturing. Similarly, a visit to the Niger Delta leads him to ruminate about the curse of having abundant reserves of oil.
(The Economist)

From the dusty Horn of Africa, Dowden takes us on a journey through history and geography through the steamy forests of the Congo River basin, where warring factions replicate like bacteria in a petri dish, and we find the abandoned palaces of that king kleptocrat, Mobutu Sese Seko; the drug-fuelled chaos of war in Sierra Leone and Liberia; the vibrantly corrupt megalopolis of Lagos in Nigeria; the morally topsy-turvy world of Angola's civil war, where US-backed rebels attacked US oil installations protected by Cuban revolutionaries; the growing madness of Robert Mugabe as he truculently turned Zimbabwe from Africa's breadbasket to its basket-case.

(The Telegraph)

The best chapters are those in which Dowden writes from personal experience, where he excels at describing the people and the action around him. Chapters on the civil wars in Angola and Somalia are particularly striking, as is Dowden's harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda. One unifying theme is the continent's resilience and optimism despite its manifest failures. Of course, Dowden's beat as a journalist has focused on the parts of Africa that have failed in some way, and they tend to be overrepresented in a book that barely mentions peaceful, democratic countries, such as Botswana or Cape Verde. Only in the last chapter does Dowden note that the last decade has actually been reasonably good for the region, with the end of several long-standing conflicts and a period of sustained economic growth.
(Foreign Affairs)

This may come as a surprise to many, given what most outsiders associate with Africa: poverty, disease, war, political oppression and disasters. The image conjured up is almost exclusively bad news - even at a time when, at last, a power-sharing agreement has been reached in Zimbabwe.
The other truth to learn is Africa's deep spirituality. The spiritual streams are ancient, multifarious - and run deep. The place of spirituality in African life is an essential characteristic that defines the society and individuals. The emphasis is always on a holistic view of life. How people interact with each other is as important as their relationship with their Creator. The dichotomy between secular and spiritual dissolves in African spirituality into a sacramental universe. The West should heed this awareness of the spiritual dimension in life, something Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed to in his address at Harvard in June 1979. The good, liberal, capitalist, democratic audience was shocked to hear him denounce their values almost as much as the Soviet ones. “A plague on both your houses!” Western democracy and Communism had sprung from the same one-sided Enlightenment roots, both elevating man's reason above the spirit, above God.
(The Times)

“The media’s problem is that, by covering only disasters and wars, it gives us only that image of the continent,” Dowden writes — and 90 percent of the Africans reading this are now nodding at that line. “Persistent images of starving children and men with guns have accumulated into our narrative of the continent.” “The aid industry too has an interest in maintaining the image of Africans as hopeless victims of endless wars and persistent famines,” Dowden continues. “However well intentioned their motives may once have been, aid agencies have helped create the single, distressing image of Africa. They and journalists feed off each other.”
In particular, Dowden lets loose at celebrities like Bob Geldof and politicians like Tony Blair with their “messianic mission to save Africa.” As Dowden writes: “That set teeth on edge. It sounded like saving Africa from the Africans.”
(The New York Times)

***

{Mentioned, in passing, here}

MY LAST ARTICLE FOR AFRICANPATH

DEVELOPMENT AID TO AFRICA: QUO VADIS? (Part II)

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder _ Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economics

A year has passed since the much talked about issue of Vanity Fair on Africa, with its spectacular twenty different covers. It has also been a year since I wrote my first take on it, expressed my reticences about the Sachs v. Easterly debate and promised to come back to Sachs’ ‘Big Dream’ for Africa… I finally decided to come back to it, but I’m afraid only to reiterate my initial reticences. This is, therefore, my last take on the issue – which is only appropriate since this is also my last article for Africanpath.

I wrote in that first take that my reticences stemmed mainly from the realisation that most of the issues raised by that and other related debates were not essentially about economics but about charitable aid. And that I maintain. So, why write about it again? Well, firstly, because I always make it a point to keep my promises (even if only a year later…) and, secondly, because there are, nevertheless, a few considerations I deem worthy of making about the world of “development aid” or, to be more precise, the world of the “charitable aid industry” to Africa and Africans, from an economic perspective.

From the top of my head I can think of a few established “engines of growth” in the developing world, such as ‘infrastructure development’, ‘technology transfer’, ‘seed capital’, ‘value-addition to raw materials’, ‘comparative advantages-based trade’, ‘self-sustained agriculture’, ‘redistribution of assets’, ‘small business development’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘primary and secondary education’, ‘vocational training’, ‘learning by doing’, 'women's political and economic empowerment', ‘institutional strengthening and organisational streamlining’, etc., among a range of inputs across the various economic sectors that can significantly contribute to endogenous economic, human and social development.

However, I never came across one single development model where ‘charity’ plays any meaningful role as an “engine of growth”, whichever way we approach it. That said, I recognise that it is extremely difficult to achieve any significant level of development when large segments of the population of a country or region are affected by HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis or Malaria – and here Sachs’ projects and the money he is able to raise for them play a role in saving lives and improving the living conditions of such affected populations, thereby securing the basis upon which to build strong economies in the continent.

Unfortunately, though, there is a major drawback to that kind of projects which ultimately prevents them, in most cases, from being taken as reliable and sustainable inputs to development: they are randomly located and funded and, more importantly, exogenously determined and disconnected from the targeted regions and countries’ economic, political and institutional structures. At this point, I am compelled to return to that Vanity Fair issue to recast the tale of that African Health Minister who was so grateful to Sachs for the extra money she got for her ministry’s budget and Sachs’ expressed outrage at the “ridiculously small budget allocated to health” in that and other African countries.

Of course he was right about that. I wonder, however, how much of the current African governments’ budgetary strife in the education, health and other social sectors could have been prevented if Sachs had expressed the same level of outrage when he was in a position to do so throughout the 80s and 90s when the ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ for Africa, spearheaded by the Bretton Woods Institutions, were being inspired and actively guided by his “universal shock therapy” prescriptions?

That question leads me to one critical ‘entry point’ to the understanding of the ever growing “charitable aid industry” to Africa and its current branching out to NGOs operating in virtually all sectors of policy making in the continent – yes, it is an industry: it increasingly operates as an employer of choice for the masses of young, and the not so young, unemployed or under-employed people flocking to Africa to fulfill all sorts of needs, dreams and fantasies (including this one, or those which led to this report), while crowding-out the masses of unemployed and under-employed Africans who, more often than not, end up in the West as immigrants invariably treated as a ‘burden’ to the host countries’ public budgets, which are themselves continuously ‘balanced’ by the transfers and remittances from their aid organisations and workers in Africa and the relief of part of the budgetary pressures induced by their domestic levels of unemployment; and it is self-justified: with very few notable exceptions, it tends to lack openness and transparency as far as its raison d’etre and modus operandi are concerned, hardly contributes to any transfer of know-how or technology relevant to its target groups or countries’ self-reliance and, in order to maintain the continuous influx of donations and public funding it relies upon, often resorts to over-dramatising, thus reinforcing, the problems it was supposed to help solve in the first place.

That critical ‘entry point’ refers to the, concealed or overly assumed, sense of ‘guilt’ apparently moving its main protagonists and determining the way poverty in Africa is seen through the eyes of their beholders – the same eyes which appear wide shut to such realities as the one reported just two days ago by the Black AIDS Institute, according to which the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the US is higher than that observed in some of the African countries most affected by the epidemic, such as Botswana or Uganda. It is this sense of (just misguided or simply irrational?) ‘guilt’ which is acting as a “engine of growth” for that self-justified industry and, with its self-centered, self-righteous captains often perceived in the recipient countries as the ‘new colonisers’ or the ‘new missionaries’ (yes, “The White Man’s Burden” is back with a vengeance…), perpetuating the dependency structures that have characterised for centuries the relationship between the West and Africa – a continent many invariably conceive as an abstract entity only awaiting their arrival to materialise itself into real countries with real (if frequently failing) governments, real people with dreams and aspirations of their own, real cities and villages with their own rhythms and paces, real cultures and institutions with their own history, in short, a real continent with its own place in the world. Thus all seems to suggest that the “charitable aid industry” has been more effective as a guilt relief engine than a poverty relief one.

I would like to finish on a positive note, though, by calling your attention to this young African and the inspiration and faith in the future of the continent he has been inspiring: now, that’s what I call a ‘Cheetah’!

DEVELOPMENT AID TO AFRICA: QUO VADIS? (Part II)

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder _ Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economics

A year has passed since the much talked about issue of Vanity Fair on Africa, with its spectacular twenty different covers. It has also been a year since I wrote my first take on it, expressed my reticences about the Sachs v. Easterly debate and promised to come back to Sachs’ ‘Big Dream’ for Africa… I finally decided to come back to it, but I’m afraid only to reiterate my initial reticences. This is, therefore, my last take on the issue – which is only appropriate since this is also my last article for Africanpath.

I wrote in that first take that my reticences stemmed mainly from the realisation that most of the issues raised by that and other related debates were not essentially about economics but about charitable aid. And that I maintain. So, why write about it again? Well, firstly, because I always make it a point to keep my promises (even if only a year later…) and, secondly, because there are, nevertheless, a few considerations I deem worthy of making about the world of “development aid” or, to be more precise, the world of the “charitable aid industry” to Africa and Africans, from an economic perspective.

From the top of my head I can think of a few established “engines of growth” in the developing world, such as ‘infrastructure development’, ‘technology transfer’, ‘seed capital’, ‘value-addition to raw materials’, ‘comparative advantages-based trade’, ‘self-sustained agriculture’, ‘redistribution of assets’, ‘small business development’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘primary and secondary education’, ‘vocational training’, ‘learning by doing’, 'women's political and economic empowerment', ‘institutional strengthening and organisational streamlining’, etc., among a range of inputs across the various economic sectors that can significantly contribute to endogenous economic, human and social development.

However, I never came across one single development model where ‘charity’ plays any meaningful role as an “engine of growth”, whichever way we approach it. That said, I recognise that it is extremely difficult to achieve any significant level of development when large segments of the population of a country or region are affected by HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis or Malaria – and here Sachs’ projects and the money he is able to raise for them play a role in saving lives and improving the living conditions of such affected populations, thereby securing the basis upon which to build strong economies in the continent.

Unfortunately, though, there is a major drawback to that kind of projects which ultimately prevents them, in most cases, from being taken as reliable and sustainable inputs to development: they are randomly located and funded and, more importantly, exogenously determined and disconnected from the targeted regions and countries’ economic, political and institutional structures. At this point, I am compelled to return to that Vanity Fair issue to recast the tale of that African Health Minister who was so grateful to Sachs for the extra money she got for her ministry’s budget and Sachs’ expressed outrage at the “ridiculously small budget allocated to health” in that and other African countries.

Of course he was right about that. I wonder, however, how much of the current African governments’ budgetary strife in the education, health and other social sectors could have been prevented if Sachs had expressed the same level of outrage when he was in a position to do so throughout the 80s and 90s when the ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ for Africa, spearheaded by the Bretton Woods Institutions, were being inspired and actively guided by his “universal shock therapy” prescriptions?

That question leads me to one critical ‘entry point’ to the understanding of the ever growing “charitable aid industry” to Africa and its current branching out to NGOs operating in virtually all sectors of policy making in the continent – yes, it is an industry: it increasingly operates as an employer of choice for the masses of young, and the not so young, unemployed or under-employed people flocking to Africa to fulfill all sorts of needs, dreams and fantasies (including this one, or those which led to this report), while crowding-out the masses of unemployed and under-employed Africans who, more often than not, end up in the West as immigrants invariably treated as a ‘burden’ to the host countries’ public budgets, which are themselves continuously ‘balanced’ by the transfers and remittances from their aid organisations and workers in Africa and the relief of part of the budgetary pressures induced by their domestic levels of unemployment; and it is self-justified: with very few notable exceptions, it tends to lack openness and transparency as far as its raison d’etre and modus operandi are concerned, hardly contributes to any transfer of know-how or technology relevant to its target groups or countries’ self-reliance and, in order to maintain the continuous influx of donations and public funding it relies upon, often resorts to over-dramatising, thus reinforcing, the problems it was supposed to help solve in the first place.

That critical ‘entry point’ refers to the, concealed or overly assumed, sense of ‘guilt’ apparently moving its main protagonists and determining the way poverty in Africa is seen through the eyes of their beholders – the same eyes which appear wide shut to such realities as the one reported just two days ago by the Black AIDS Institute, according to which the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the US is higher than that observed in some of the African countries most affected by the epidemic, such as Botswana or Uganda. It is this sense of (just misguided or simply irrational?) ‘guilt’ which is acting as a “engine of growth” for that self-justified industry and, with its self-centered, self-righteous captains often perceived in the recipient countries as the ‘new colonisers’ or the ‘new missionaries’ (yes, “The White Man’s Burden” is back with a vengeance…), perpetuating the dependency structures that have characterised for centuries the relationship between the West and Africa – a continent many invariably conceive as an abstract entity only awaiting their arrival to materialise itself into real countries with real (if frequently failing) governments, real people with dreams and aspirations of their own, real cities and villages with their own rhythms and paces, real cultures and institutions with their own history, in short, a real continent with its own place in the world. Thus all seems to suggest that the “charitable aid industry” has been more effective as a guilt relief engine than a poverty relief one.

I would like to finish on a positive note, though, by calling your attention to this young African and the inspiration and faith in the future of the continent he has been inspiring: now, that’s what I call a ‘Cheetah’!

SUNDAY COVER & POETRY (VII)

"In positing any solution we have to be aware of some historical background. Africa was colonized at a time when the nation state was a primary determinant of the historical process. The consequence was that the continent is today divided into more than forty-six-states – more than three times the number of Asia, whose land mass is fifty percent larger. This was done largely to further the interests of European power and commerce."

(...)

"Given that Africa was wrongly assumed to have had no history of its own before the arrival of Europeans, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Europe created the image of Africa that the colonial period bequeathed to the world. Europe drew boundaries and undertook to establish a civilizing government in each with hierarchical administration and military support – according to the prevalent model of the nation state.”
(...)
“The question cannot be, do Africans have human rights, but what do Africans understand and desire their human rights to be? Otherwise we are yet again remaking Africa, and Africa’s struggle, in the image of our own modernity, or more truthfully, our own recent past.”

GET MORE CONTENT HERE

{Poem: Europe, by Sarah Maguire. Sarah is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. She has published four poetry collections. Her latest, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto & Windus) is The Poetry Book Society's Summer Choice, 2007. in Life Lines 2/Poets for Oxfam/Edited by Todd Swift, 2007}

"In positing any solution we have to be aware of some historical background. Africa was colonized at a time when the nation state was a primary determinant of the historical process. The consequence was that the continent is today divided into more than forty-six-states – more than three times the number of Asia, whose land mass is fifty percent larger. This was done largely to further the interests of European power and commerce."

(...)

"Given that Africa was wrongly assumed to have had no history of its own before the arrival of Europeans, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Europe created the image of Africa that the colonial period bequeathed to the world. Europe drew boundaries and undertook to establish a civilizing government in each with hierarchical administration and military support – according to the prevalent model of the nation state.”
(...)
“The question cannot be, do Africans have human rights, but what do Africans understand and desire their human rights to be? Otherwise we are yet again remaking Africa, and Africa’s struggle, in the image of our own modernity, or more truthfully, our own recent past.”

GET MORE CONTENT HERE

{Poem: Europe, by Sarah Maguire. Sarah is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre. She has published four poetry collections. Her latest, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto & Windus) is The Poetry Book Society's Summer Choice, 2007. in Life Lines 2/Poets for Oxfam/Edited by Todd Swift, 2007}

SUNDAY BRAAI

FOR SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT

READ FERNANDO PACHECO'S

"A AJUDA AO DESENVOLVIMENTO EM ANGOLA"

(HERE)

EXTRACTS:

Quem ajuda quem?

A cooperação, entendida na vertente da ajuda ao desenvolvimento, é uma actividade que faz correr rios de tinta em matéria de crítica. Qualquer forma de cooperação pressupõe participação das partes envolvidas de forma equilibrada, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao processo de tomada de decisões. No entanto, quando se fala de cooperação para o desenvolvimento, estamos, obviamente, perante uma falácia, porque, na realidade, ela é percebida como funcionando num único sentido: um dá e outro recebe, quer se trate de finanças, de bens materiais ou de ideias.

Finalmente…

Relativamente a Portugal, é reconhecido o papel fundamental que o país teve no período de vigência da troika ligada ao processo de paz. Mas foi perdendo influência, e hoje a cooperação com Portugal é vista como pouco eficaz e consistente, baseada em projectos sem coordenação. Muitas vezes pensamos que as relações pessoais podem trazer vantagens, mas já vimos que também podem trazer desvantagens. É preciso ter cuidado com o aproveitamento desses aspectos e não sobrevalorizar a língua e a história. Muitas vezes as percepções impedem o conhecimento da nova realidade que começa a nascer em Angola. Portugal, mesmo com poucos recursos financeiros, pode ocupar um lugar importante no núcleo duro de doadores, principalmente se souber tirar melhor partido das agências multilaterais, pois em Angola é quase nula a presença de portugueses nas instituições da União Europeia, do Banco Mundial ou das agências das Nações Unidas. Ultrapassados os complexos de colonizador e colonizado, Portugal pode integrar e influenciar o grupo de amigos que Angola necessita para fazerem a ponte com os países mais poderosos.

FOR SOME FOOD FOR THOUGHT

READ FERNANDO PACHECO'S

"A AJUDA AO DESENVOLVIMENTO EM ANGOLA"

(HERE)

EXTRACTS:

Quem ajuda quem?

A cooperação, entendida na vertente da ajuda ao desenvolvimento, é uma actividade que faz correr rios de tinta em matéria de crítica. Qualquer forma de cooperação pressupõe participação das partes envolvidas de forma equilibrada, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao processo de tomada de decisões. No entanto, quando se fala de cooperação para o desenvolvimento, estamos, obviamente, perante uma falácia, porque, na realidade, ela é percebida como funcionando num único sentido: um dá e outro recebe, quer se trate de finanças, de bens materiais ou de ideias.

Finalmente…

Relativamente a Portugal, é reconhecido o papel fundamental que o país teve no período de vigência da troika ligada ao processo de paz. Mas foi perdendo influência, e hoje a cooperação com Portugal é vista como pouco eficaz e consistente, baseada em projectos sem coordenação. Muitas vezes pensamos que as relações pessoais podem trazer vantagens, mas já vimos que também podem trazer desvantagens. É preciso ter cuidado com o aproveitamento desses aspectos e não sobrevalorizar a língua e a história. Muitas vezes as percepções impedem o conhecimento da nova realidade que começa a nascer em Angola. Portugal, mesmo com poucos recursos financeiros, pode ocupar um lugar importante no núcleo duro de doadores, principalmente se souber tirar melhor partido das agências multilaterais, pois em Angola é quase nula a presença de portugueses nas instituições da União Europeia, do Banco Mundial ou das agências das Nações Unidas. Ultrapassados os complexos de colonizador e colonizado, Portugal pode integrar e influenciar o grupo de amigos que Angola necessita para fazerem a ponte com os países mais poderosos.