----- Original Message -----
From: "joanna bujes" <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com>
> At 05:07 PM 01/29/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> >Forgive my ignorance, I understand why debt should be cancelled for the
HIPC
> >countries, but why should the aid be cancelled? What is the realistic
> >alternative for development in sub-Saharan Africa and other very
> >impoverished countries if development aid is cancelled? Please list the
> >"obvious reasons" for canceling aid and how this will promote
development.
> I think the idea here is that if we stopped ripping them off, we would not
> need to give them aid. Compared to the capital flight from the third
world,
> the aid is a joke.
The rip-off includes aid. Opa's line is that only 15% of aid transfers actually make it to the recipient countries' citizens. Of that 15%, a tiny proportion trickles down to those considered poor. The malevolent, venal elites running virtually all the lowest-income countries today have numerous ways to suck out and rechannel the aid to their own interests, and the aid administrators based in the luxurious neighbourhoods of the capital cities may sometimes complain but certainly don't want to rock the boat that takes them to far grander lifestyles than they'd have back in their expensive, cold, wet home country.
(By the way, Opa was a top official in the Zambian Development Bank and is not one to exaggerate; so when someone like him is as frustrated with the aid bureaucracy as he is, I figure there's a huge problem...)
The most corrupting influence of aid that I've witnessed here in Southern Africa is tied-aid. This usually refers to home-country firms and individuals who benefit enormously, leaving recipients with inappropriate products/technology/advisors which require ongoing maintenance/parts expenditures, and prevent the development of linkages to the rest of the economy. South Africa's hugely expensive ($5 bn) arms deal has lots of aid tie-ins, I'm told, some connected to industrial investment offsets that have been unveiled as a profound scam (e.g. http://www.coega.org). But more insidiously, the ideological function of aid has become very profound since the early 1990s. The main villain remains US AID (which really should be shut down), but British DFID, German GTZ, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (the most activist neolibs), the EU, several UN agencies, the World Bank and various other agencies also make grants (and loans!) which are explicitly tied to the promotion of neoliberal development ideology. Quite a lot of our own ideological work on the ground is simply defending space won by progressive activists -- especially in low-income urban communities -- against incursions by idiots from aid agencies who come bearing gifts plus bad ideology.
There are all sorts of other problems; go to Maputo or Maseru and you see very explicitly how the aid agencies massively distort the local economy with their little hard-currency enclave market.
> At any rate, it might be more accurate to ask for reparations rather than
aid.
Right. There's such a huge case for reparations, including for the damage caused Africa BY AID itself.
There are some desperately impoverished countries -- amongst them Mozambique -- which would find itself in severe balance-of-payments problems if all the donors pulled out. But we've also been asking, why did Moz degenerate so fast that the aid agencies essentially run more of it than does the Frelimo government (the best source on this is Joe Hanlon's book, *Who Calls the Shots?*). And the answer invariably involves a "civil war" that killed a million people and did tens of billions in damage, but which in reality was the foreign policy of Ian Smith (1975-79) and Botha/deKlerk (1979-91). A movement is slowly emerging to insist that post-apartheid SA pay reparations.
I know the word reparations makes some US lefties nervous. I'll be coming to the US in about a month and will bring along one of the films (by Ben Cashdan) featuring Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane (Tutu's successor) making a very reasoned pitch for reparations, especially from the European banks that propped up apartheid during its time of need. Citibank should be the next target. Probably will have a chance to show the doccies in NYC around 28 Feb, so stay tuned...
> I''m not against aid; I'm just guessing why someone would want to use that
> as a slogan.
>
> Joanna B.
A major study of the debilitating effects of "post-conflict" aid in Southern Africa will soon be released by University of Natal. I'll send some URL links when it's out...