Let’s talk about Aid (Part 1)

Dear readers, it is a subject we cannot and must not avoid, certainly not now that the Netherlands has decided to pull out of another handful of African nations and concentrate its bilateral aid worldwide on some 15 countries I think it was.
So – let’s talk about aid, baby! After all, it is the inevitable face of foreign involvement in a depressingly large number of countries I visit. And while we have moved away from the idea that it is an Unmitigated Good, we are still far from establishing the reasons why it rarely helps and why, much more frequently, it is a hindrance. Let’s discuss that here.
So, the Dutch have decided their aid should go to just 15 countries. As far as I’m concerned, 0 would have been fine too.
Former donors’ paradise
But let’s begin at the beginning because I have a past in the aid industry, which began in a former donors’ paradise: Zimbabwe. Yes – hard to believe today is it not but back in the late 1980s the place was ablaze with logos, abbreviations and the restaurants abuzz with development talk. Talking is something this sector does very well. Eating and clubbing are other favourites. Nothing wrong with this, by the way. As I will repeat ad nauseam: the people working within the aid system are not necessarily the problem – the system itself most certainly is.
So – back to Zimbabwe, where I arrived in 1988 as a volunteer. I was going to work in education, a beyond-reproach sector in a land that ticked all the right boxes: newly independent since 1980, a government with an ostensibly socialist outlook on life, a charismatic leader in the person of president Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Just a little push here and there, that was all that was needed: some money here, some goods there, some people all over the place and hey presto! In a few year’s time, this would be Holland on the Limpopo.
Less naive
In the intervening years, two romantic ideas, carelessly cultivated, had to be drastically revised. One: the idea that somehow “southern” societies were more egalitarian and more steeped in solidarity than the mendacious, perfidious and dehumanised West. Nothing was further from the truth. Kids two-thirds my age turned out to have triple my street cred. Which stands to reason; when you grown up in a land where your early existence is not cosseted against all kinds of dangers and where you are required to take responsibilities for others very early in life, you tend to become a lot less naive about life rather quickly.
The other idea to be jettisoned was that I was somehow needed or wanted there. Volunteers can of course be useful stopgap measures that do not cost too much and – usefully – are so full of idealism that they work much longer hours than are actually required. But needed? My presence was enjoyed, certainly, tolerated at other times and a useful conduit to the embassies and donor offices in the capital. ‘After all, if I show my black face to these donors I am sure I won’t get a cent,’ one school headmaster told me. ‘So I want you to run those money errands for us....’ He was, of course, dead right.
More soon – we are most definitely not done yet!