By Dominic Odipo

After 60 years and over one trillion dollars of African aid, there is not much to show for it. Were aid simply innocuous — just not doing what it claimed it would do — this book would not have been written.

"The problem is that aid is not benign — it is malignant. No longer part of the potential solution, it is part of the problem. In fact aid is the problem."

What aid? The ‘aid’ being referred to here is foreign aid or donor funding which has been given to African countries over the last 60 years mostly from Europe, United States of America, Canada, Japan and China.

What book? The book that pointedly states that foreign aid is actually one of Africa’s biggest problems is Dead Aid, published in New York earlier this year and already sending ripples through all the major corridors of development financing around the world.

In case you think this book was written by some conservative American economist working in some new York-based think tank, you are dead wrong. The book was written by Ms Dambisa Moyo, a black lady from Lusaka, Zambia who happens to hold a PhD from Oxford University in England and has spent more than a decade working for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank.

If you are an African (particularly a black one) familiar with this debate, you will find it very difficult to put down this book once you get started.

Ms Moyo is not only turning the old argument on its head, she is saying the unsayable: Foreign aid is so dangerous to the development of African countries that, as currently structured, it should be stopped altogether!

Benevolent dictator

Moyo does not confine her observations and prescriptions to the arena of development economics. She boldly thrusts her foot into the even more volatile world of African political theory and practice and, once more, turns everything upside down.

"In a perfect world" she writes "what poor countries at the lowest rungs of economic development need is not a multiparty democracy but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving."

If you happen to be Kenyan, you will take a deep breath at this point and ask yourself a few basic questions.

What is all this nonsense we are going through about restructuring our constitutional and electoral systems? Should we not be content with some benevolent dictator who can take charge of all our affairs for at least 20 years?

Who would a ‘benevolent’ dictator be, as opposed to, a malevolent one and what mechanisms would be put in place for selecting him and then firing him if we collectively decided that he had turned malevolent or been there too long for any good he might have been doing?

Moyo boldly argues that foreign aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world. To support her argument she puts some very powerful facts on the table.

Over the last 30 years, she writes, the most aid-dependent countries have exhibited an average annual growth rate of minus 0.2 per cent.

In other words, their economies have contracted, not even held on at the same level, despite the billions of dollars that have been pumped in as foreign aid.

"Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, the poverty rate in Africa actually rose from 11 per cent to a staggering 66 per cent".

So what is going on? Why does benign foreign aid appear to be destroying African’s economic development instead of pumping new life into it? Why are foreign dollars apparently smothering and suffocating us, instead of giving us a whiff of fresh air?

Hiring concorde

In Moyo’s exceptionally blunt language, foreign aid to African countries is a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict while at the same time discouraging free enterprise.

In other words, African leaders and aid officials not only steal the aid money but also habitually fight over it, making it very difficult for this money to seep to the ground. A simple example carried in the foreword by Dr Niall Ferguson, captures Moyo’s thesis:

"No sooner had President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire requested a reduction in interest payments on the debt than he leased Concorde to fly his daughter to her wedding in Ivory Coast".

Does Moyo have a point? Should we reject this aid altogether if it cannot be re-structed? Food for thought.

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

dominicOdipo@yahoo.co.uk