Let’s talk about aid (Part 4)

In part three of this miniseries, we saw two ways in which aid does not help but hinders a country’s development. Here are two more.
Number three. ‘Stop throwing money at the problem!’ It was the exasperated outcry of a Sudanese expert, who wanted the donor community to understand that the surest way to ensure that the decades-old political crisis in his country would continue – is to continue funding it.
You see: in most cases money is not the problem. Take Guinea, supposedly an impoverished West African nation that I visit frequently. When the economist and technocrat Sidya Touré was made prime minister there in the mid-1990s, suddenly the lights in the capital Conakry went on, water started running out of the taps and garbage was collected. Until this very day, his nickname remains “Sidya Courant” – Sidya Electricity. Did Guinea suddenly get more money, more aid? No – the government started managing its income better and attacked corruption.
When money becomes a problem
Money is not the problem. It becomes a problem when aid comes in to plug holes in state finances caused by corruption and mismanagement. And this ties in closely with yet another way in which aid is a problem: there is nothing the citizens can do about it.
Number four. A functioning state gets its income from taxpaying citizens. In a dysfunctional state, no-one pays tax. The friends and cronies of the rulers don’t pay tax because they are...friends and cronies. The citizens don’t pay tax because they know their money gets stolen. Donors plug the holes. So, who is the government accountable to, if at all? Not its own citizens. Africa expert Stephen Ellis once wrily remarked that African governments do not need their own citizens to survive. A former director of the Dutch public information group NCDO once wrote that 1.2 billion impoverished people had no electoral influence in the rich, affluent and uncaring West. The real problem is of course that these 1.2 billion paupers have zero influence...in their own countries!
Getting out of this mess
Sufficiently depressed? Good. Because now we can start thinking about ways out of this mess.
We have two more columns to go. One will deal with how things work in the real economies of poor countries and the last one is about life without aid.
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