How we lied to Africa
James Button and Jo Chandler
June 2, 2007
NEARLY two years ago, an 86-year-old man shuffled to the front of a stage in Johannesburg and challenged people to "wipe poverty from the Earth". Nelson Mandela, watched by an estimated billion people as he addressed the 2005 Live8 concert, called on world leaders gathering for the G8 summit to show commitment, to not make hollow promises. "It is within your power to avoid a genocide of humanity."
As he spoke, on the other side of the African continent — 5000 kilometres north and eight borders away — the people of the poorest nation on the planet, Niger, withered in devastating drought. Subsistence farmers living in one-room huts without power or water, it is unlikely that many of them heard the words of Mandela or the impassioned pleas of rock-star activists Bono and Bob Geldof or, a few days later, the pledges of the world's wealthiest nations to provide an extra $US50 billion ($A67 billion) for aid, half of it to Africa.
The then UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, hailed the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, as "the best summit ever for Africa". British Prime Minister Tony Blair said: "It isn't the end of poverty in Africa, but it is the hope that it can be ended." Cynics, or perhaps realists, muttered that hopes were being lifted too high on a wave of goodwill and fine talk.
Two weeks later, senior UN officials were accusing the world of dithering on Niger, putting 3 million people at risk of starvation. British National Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, could only concede it was true. "It isn't good enough," he admitted. "We need to be quicker and more effective in dealing with this, and we have to learn the lessons."
Two years later, Niger is not in the emergency room but remains in a critical, chronic state, still with the sad distinction of being the world's poorest state, still without the hardware and systems that might fortify its population against the next inevitable locust plague, drought or flood. As a benchmark by which to measure lessons learned or aid delivered in the two years since the G8 hype, there is little to celebrate in Niger. "Investment in infrastructure is the key element in the fight against poverty," says UNICEF's Niger representative, Akhil Iyer. Yet that investment — in roads, schools, dams, health centres, bridges, irrigation, in the hard slog of sustainable, structural, long-term relief — remains insufficient to bring relief.
Africa will be on the agenda, but only just, when G8 leaders meet in the German resort of Heiligendamm for their annual summit next Wednesday. Climate change is the hot topic, while Africa only made the program after last-minute lobbying of German Chancellor Angela Merkel by Blair and Bono.
What's more, research by the OECD and Bono's organisation, Data (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), shows that all bar two of the G8 countries are far from meeting the promises they made at Gleneagles. Only Britain and Japan, which have stumped up most of the extra $US2.3 billion the G8 has so far provided, are on track to meet their pledges for extra funds. The United States is almost $1 billion behind on its pledge, though Congress recently adopted a $1 billion package to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa.
Germany, France and Italy suffer a particular "crisis of credibility", DATA says. France and Italy cut aid last year, the latter dramatically. Globally, aid fell 5 per cent last year, says the OECD. (Australia's aid program focuses on the Asia-Pacific region, which has two-thirds of the world's poor, but will provide an estimated $94.4 million in donor aid to Africa in 2007-08, an increase of $12 million on this year.)
Countries have inflated what they spent by including debt relief, domestic funds for refugees and even money for educating overseas students in aid budgets, a report by European non-government organisations (NGOs) found. Russia does not even bother to hide its failure to meet its tiny aid commitment. "We only made those promises because we felt sorry for Tony Blair after the terrorist attacks on 7/7," a Russian G8 delegate told The Guardian, referring to the London bombings a day before the Gleneagles agreement.
US economist Jeffrey Sachs, a special adviser to the UN on tackling poverty, writing last month for German news service Deutsche Welle, said that half-way down the track towards the 2015 Millennium Development Goals to cut poverty, hunger and disease, "the rich G8 countries are not meeting their part of the bargain, despite endless words from the rich countries about increasing their aid to the poor countries.
"We are not talking about an unachievable amount of money from the rich countries. Indeed what we are talking about is minuscule," Sachs wrote. He calculates that the extra $US25 billion promised to Africa at Gleneagles represents less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the income of the rich donor world. "To put it in perspective, the Christmas bonuses this year on Wall Street — just the bonuses — amounted to $US24 billion."
It's not just about money. The G8 has not kept its promise to move towards opening its markets to goods from poor countries, a reform many specialists say would be far more effective than aid. The view is echoed by aid workers on the ground. UNICEF's Akhil Iyer says that even with an improved agricultural sector, farmers in places such as Niger cannot compete in the protected international marketplace they must access to build their economies. Relief from poverty requires, he says, "a combination of trade, of aid, of debt relief, of debt cancellation".
Niger has, he says, already benefited from debt reduction which has come about from one G8 pledge that was honoured — to write off the debts of 18 of the world's poorest countries, most of which are in Africa.
"Millions of children in Africa are now at school because debt relief has given governments the resources to pay for teachers and school buildings," says Simon Maxwell, director of Britain's leading aid think tank, the Overseas Development Institute.
Although a promise to create near universal access to AIDS and malaria treatments has not been met, the proportion of AIDS sufferers who get life-saving medication in sub-Saharan Africa has increased from one to 28 per cent since 2002, according to Bono. In recent weeks, an urgent tone has entered Bono's statements. Noting that 40 per cent of Africa's population is Muslim, he has linked aid issues to Islamic extremism, saying: "Better we help kids go to school than they end up in madrassas and learn to hate us." He says Gleneagles' achievements are in "jeopardy" and warns of renewed violence by anti-globalisation protesters similar to the clashes in Genoa in 2001.
Yet a simple account of wealthy nations backsliding while the poor slip further into despair ignores the shifting ground of aid politics in both the West and Africa. The "one big push" rhetoric of Live8 made some in the aid sector uneasy, because after 50 or more years of large payments to Africa, it is evident aid does not work miracles.
What's more, it seems to work best when delivered in a sustained and sometimes more modest form than when handed out in huge sums. Aid already makes up more than 20 per cent of the gross national income of Zambia, Mozambique, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While some of this is emergency aid, too much development aid risks condemning these countries to perpetual dependency.
"Does aid work?" asks Maxwell. "The general answer is yes. Could it work better? Yes. Are we better off with it than without it? Yes." It's a qualified answer far from the "Make Poverty History" slogan of Live8.
To David Booth, a researcher at Maxwell's institute, the "well-intentioned" campaign of Bono and Bob Geldof has to move beyond the Western-focused message of "Africans' big needs and the immorality of not meeting them when we are so rich". Instead, says Booth, "we have to engage with the politics of Africa".
These politics are complex and not always grim. Noting that in 2003, African emigres transferred $US 200 billion home in remittance payments, Nigerian political scientist Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe writes that "Africans are already transforming their societies on the ground". Across the continent the economy has grown at nearly 5 per cent, more than twice that of the OECD, in the past three years. "The question is, will it be restricted to the elites?" asks Maxwell.
The worry is that the mini-boom in parts of Africa is powered by sales of primary resources, notably oil, minerals and timber. The nation driving the boom by making huge investments in these commodities is China. There is no longer much doubt that China is changing Africa. For one, it "has turned conventional wisdom about aid and development on its head", says Maxwell. Typically, poor countries hope to grow through manufacturing.
But no one can compete with China's phenomenal ability to produce cheap goods and most African countries have stopped trying. China is also spending big sums on aid to Africa, including $5 billion in export credits and loans. And it does not ask pesky questions about governance, democracy and corruption, just as those questions grow more important to the West.
In September 2005, President Denis Sassou-Nguesso, of the Republic of Congo, attended the UN global poverty summit in New York. He and his entourage of 50, including his butler and his wife's hairdresser, ran up a bill of $A400,000 for a week's stay in two hotels, according to court documents obtained by The Sunday Times.
At the time the President was negotiating with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to cancel much of his country's debt, under the Gleneagles agreement, on the grounds that it could not afford to repay it. About three-quarters of the country's 3 million people live on less than $2.50 a day.
Such revelations drove former World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz to put corruption at the top of the global aid agenda, starting with the bank's lending decisions. To Heather Marquette, a development specialist at Birmingham University, it was the "only thing he got right" in two years as bank president.
"There needs to be a more honest discussion among donors about when to cancel projects and even to cut off aid," Marquette says. "Wolfowitz has shown people the elephant in the room and it's not going to go away."
Britain has shown a willingness to cut aid to countries that look to be guilty of corruption or democratic violations. Last year it cut funds to two "donor darlings" — Ethiopia and Uganda — because troops loyal to Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi fired on protesters, and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni changed the constitution so he could not be voted out.
Zambia and Tanzania, meanwhile, seem to have benefited from debt relief, the former using it to build schools and hospitals. But the two countries are easier to fund, precisely because they already appear to be on the right track.
It is what development researcher Paolo de Renzio calls "one of the basic paradoxes of aid: countries that most need aid are the ones least likely to use it effectively, given that they are plagued by conflict, mismanagement or outright corruption".
What's more, how do donors ensure their money is well spent without preserving a neo-colonial intrusiveness? Britain tries to solve the dilemma through "budget support", in which aid is not tied to projects determined by donors, as was the case for decades. Instead, governments are given block grants to spend as they choose.
"Tony Blair made an astonishing remark at Gleneagles that challenged the abiding assumptions of paternalism" in the approach of the West to Africa, wrote Ekwe-Ekwe on the Open Democracy website. "Blair said that 'the only people who can change Africa ultimately are the Africans'."
There is still monitoring, but the British believe giving Africans freedom to spend money on their own priorities promotes self-reliance and accountability to citizens, since the funds are not special grants but part of the country's budget. It's a strategy in line with the three-point plan economist Jeffrey Sachs says is crucial to salvaging the G8's dwindling credibility on Africa.
First, the G8 "must make crystal clear that it will honour its commitment to increase aid to Africa by $US25 billion per year, so that total aid reaches $US50 billion per year. That way, the cynics within the G8 governments can understand their assignments. Second, the G8 needs to put forward a plan of action. The lack of specific commitments by specific countries is shocking, and a display of governance at its poorest. Third, the recipient countries need to be told of the year-to-year increases in aid that they can expect, so that they can plan ahead to the year 2010."
African countries know what their priority investments are — in health, education, agriculture and infrastructure — what they lack, he says, is the certainty to make them.
Akhil Iyer echoes this line as he travels the parched, impoverished communities of Niger. The Canadian-born aid worker is a veteran of several aid projects through poor African nations, but was nonetheless shocked at the depth of the poverty he found on arriving in Niger 18 months ago. "It was very, very apparent, very visible. Over 60 per cent of the population live on less than one dollar a day."
But it is not hopeless, it is not intractable, and good things have happened, he says. More and more families have access to microfinance and microcredit, allowing them the possibility of new ways to find income. More have improved access to clean water and to schooling. But for the typical rural family, the level of need for the most basic elements of survival remains very high, he says. Finding those requires "long-term, predictable aid over a period of years, not months or weeks".
Melbourne man Tony Rinaudo, who spent 17 years living and working with farmers in Niger, has seen the fruits of such investment growing across once infertile farmland throughout Niger.
A specialist in natural resource management who now works for World Vision, he was involved in a reforestation project that introduced a cheap, simple system of replanting, and recovering fertility, in the windswept plains south of the Sahara where Niger's subsistence farmers try to scrape together a living between drought and flood. "That technique has been passed on, largely farmer to farmer, in what is probably a pretty unique people's movement," Rinaudo says. After an initial 10 years of hard work and start up, the knowledge spreads from farmer to farmer, "and Niger today is greener than at any time in the last 30 years".
That growth provided food and fuel through the most recent drought, which Rinaudo is certain would have been even more devastating without the project. The knowledge has helped the country recover. He sees it as a reminder of the staggering benefits, if not dollar profits, that minimal, careful, targeted investment can make.
Rinaudo's assessment of the things that make Niger so poor distill the observations of the political scientists, pragmatists and politicians. They tell the broader story of the challenges that continue to face Africa.
It's in part the climate, the landscape, the frequent droughts. It's that 80-90 per cent of the people are rural, reliant on weather for survival of their crops and animals. It's the failure of government. It's the failure of seasons one or two years in every five, so people are constantly playing catch-up. It's that this impoverished soil must sustain one of the highest population growth rates in the world. It's that people are sick, and there is no health system capable of making them better.
"Then there is the people's world view, a fatalism — an approach to life that doesn't help them," says Rinaudo. "They are endlessly patient. They believe that whatever happens is God's will, that there is not much you can do to change the future."
The G8 effort two years ago sought to assure them they were wrong.
James Button is Europe correspondent. Jo Chandler is a senior writer.
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