Let's talk about Aid (Part 3)

It is a familiar sight: whenever there is a large concentration of foreigners roaming an African city, be it Arusha or Nairobi or Ouagadougou or wherever...you will find a lot of children roaming the streets begging for money. (One possible exception may be Dakar, where child begging is a shameless local industry, at worst condoned or at least not actively discouraged by the government.)
Mass tourism – or mass development: it attracts begging in various shapes and sizes. Street begging is the unpolished variety of this: "Our hospital is in a very bad shape. We need help to ensure that it does not fall apart."

Destructive forces
That is a direct quote from someone in Guinea Bissau, a country that has had an incredible confluence of destructive forces. Portuguese colonialism, a liberation war, a one party state, vicious political infighting resulting in a civil war...and a debilitating dependency on aid, a lot of which came from the Netherlands. And of course, all the aid in the world did not prevent the country from falling prey to cocaine dealers – a planeload of coke equals Guinea Bissau’s GDP.

So, let’s sum up the ways in which regular donor aid is detrimental to development.
One. It legitimised regimes that do not deserve it. I came to Zimbabwe (see parts one and two) in the wake of the worst massacres the country had seen post independence. The Gukurahundi (named after the first seasonal rains that remove dust and dirt) had just taken place. Some 20,000 people had been killed in the South and the West. And the aid kept on coming, including my own blank-slate person. More than 20 years later the world is up in arms about rigged elections and political violence but put against the background of what happened in the early 1980s it all sounds terribly hollow. The donor community plied the government with money and got a collective stiff neck from looking the other way.
No decisive influence
Two. This can be derived from the previous point and it simply is this: aid has, at crucial moments in a country’s history, no decisive influence. Aid did not prevent Zimbabwe’s self-destruction. Aid has not prevented any of the other disasters, such as the decision by the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrean to go to war, the crises in West Africa during the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire’s destructive politics, the mayhem in the Great Lakes Region. In fact, it can be argued that aid has made things worse.
We know about the destructive effects of emergency aid, read Linda Polman’s Crisis Carava (aka War Games). But Peter Uvim argues the same for regular aid. His case: Rwanda in the 1980s and early 90s. He argues that the aid organisations were so enthralled by the level of organisational efficiency of the Rwandan state that they were blind to the fact that what was being planned was not development – but genocide. Aiding Violence, the development enterprise in Rwanda is the title. Read it. It will chill you to the bone.
It is examples like these, rather than the more burlesque ones like the steel factory in Nigeria that was never used, that make aid lose its lustre. Doing good may make you look good but it does not make you good. The distinction is crucial.
There are two more ways in which aid paralyses local development. I will deal with those in the next column. More to come!