No More Aid To AfricaGeorge B. N. Ayittey, Ph. D.
(George Ayittey, a Ghanaian, is associate professor of economics at the American University in Washington, D.C. His book, Indigenous African Institutions, was published by Transnational in the summer of 1991. The following essay originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 18, 1991.)
African leaders are pressing for more aid and loans at the World Bank/International Monetary Fund convention in Bangkok this week. Their pleas should not be heeded.
For decades, Africa was coddled and cradled by a West that felt burdened by guilt for colonialism and slavery. The continent has collected more than $300 billion in aid since the early 1960s. In the 1980s, Africans, who constitute about 12% of the developing world's population, were receiving about 22% of the West's development assistance. Foreign aid per individual African amounted to $26, as against about $9 per Latin American, and $6 per Asian. Omit the Arab countries of North Africa, and the figure was even higher: $46 per person in black Africa between 1980 and 1988.
In poor, small countries, these sums loom very large. The $8.6 billion poured into Tanzania between 1970 and 1988 is more than four times that country's 1988 gross domestic product. Relative to the size of the economy, it would be as if some kindly donor had given the United States $20 trillion, or four times the value of all of Saudi Arabia's proven oil reserves. The $9.6 billion given to Sudan over that period is only slightly less than one year of that country's annual output. The $5.8 billion that Zaire, Mozambique, Niger, Togo and Zambia each received were equivalently huge amounts.
But all that Western aid failed to spur economic growth and lift Africans out of grinding poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is littered with a multitude of "black elephants" (basilicas, grand conference halls, show airports and new capitals) amid institutional decay, deteriorating infrastructure and environmental degradation.
Above all, Africa's leaders used aid to finance Swiss bank socialism. But while Africa's leaders got rich --- Zaire's Sese Mobutu is said to be worth $10 billion, Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda has been accused of looting up to $6 billion --- Africa's people have sunk deeper into poverty. Per-capita income in black Africa has steadily dropped through the 1980s; by 1988 in Tanzania, to cite one of the starkest examples, it had dropped to $160, lower than at independence in 1961.
Western sympathy for demands for aid is premised on the naive presumption that helping African governments necessarily helps the African people. It is more true, as a Lesotho chief says: "we have two problems --- rats and the government."
Free enterprise, free markets, free trade and government by consensus were the norm across indigenous Africa. Self-sufficiency and independence were cultural imperatives. "If you rely on somebody for food, you will go without breakfast," says a proverb of the Fanti people of Ghana.
Even today, Africa could find within itself the resources it needs to progress. African governments manage to spend $12 billion per year to import arms and maintain their militaries. Elite bazongas (raiders of the public treasury) are able to siphon billions of dollars into foreign bank accounts. The cost of the damage done by Africa's wars in incalculable, but must amount to billions more.
In Bangkok, on October 17, 1991, the World Bank cautioned that financial assistance to Africa will be cut unless economic reforms are carried out. But, though vital, economic reform alone is not sufficient. Events in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and elsewhere have now demonstrated that, without better governance and a viable democratic political structure in place, economic reform is an exercise in futility.
Cameroon, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Morocco, Nigeria, Kenya and Togoland have at one time or another been described as "African economic success stories." But their economic prospects faded under institutionalized looting and stiff official resistance to democratic reform. In Liberia and Somalia, the gains achieved by economic reform under authoritarian regimes were wiped out in revolutionary convulsions. Their ex-leaders' bull-headed refusal to yield to popular demands for democratic reform was to blame.
Even where the economic reform process was not interrupted by political upheaval, the overall achievements in Africa were scarcely spectacular. (Botswana has been the only exception.) In the 1980s, the World Bank provided about $24 billion in loans to 36 African countries for structural adjustment toward a market economy. But only Ghana and Tanzania were deemed "successful performers." In fact, the World Bank itself concluded in March 1990 that "adjustment lending appeared to have been relatively less successful in sub-Saharan Africa."
Even in Ghana and Tanzania, however, the sustainability of economic reform is under question. Investment, both foreign and domestic, has sagged and economic forecasts have been revised downward. In both countries, the commitment to reform has been less than sincere. Of Ghana's 195 state-owned enterprises, fewer than 40 have been privatized, as have fewer than 10 of Tanzania's 400-odd.
Africans are getting fed up. Last month, President Robert Mugabe was stunned during a speech when a black Zimbabwean stood up and declared: "Ian Smith was better!" The crowd reportedly cheered the bold heckler as he was dragged off to jail for insulting the president. Across the border in Zambia --- where a state of emergency has been in effect for the past 24 years --- a crowd in Lusaka pelted a car carrying the president with garbage, chanting "Kaunda walawala" ("Kaunda is dead").
"People everywhere are demonstrating that they will not tolerate the one-party system (and military dictatorship)," said Babacar N'Diaye, president of the African Development Bank, a multilateral lending institution headquartered in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The West needs to heed this resentment sweeping Africa or find itself on the wrong side of the continent's second liberation struggle.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
None.
