Does Africa really need the aid?

By Godwin Nnanna*

Writing for Black Britain from Nigeria, Godwin Nnanna says that the billions of pounds of aid flowing into Africa not only ends up being used for personal gain by corrupt leaders but breeds dependency and destroys local farming industries.

Aid has a negative impact on the continent

Gordon Brown’s announcement early this month in Mozambique that Britain would provide $15 billion as education aid to poor countries, including many African countries, sounds quite cheering to many apparently concerned about the standard of education on the continent.
The plan, according to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, will involve the funding of schools, teachers and equipment over 10 years. Brown said Britain would lobby other rich countries to raise a further $10 billion a year to help educate 100 million children, mostly in Africa, by 2015.
The pledge is seen by Nelson Mandela, former President of South Africa, as a major step towards realising the undertaking at last year’s G8 Gleneagles summit to increase aid to Africa. Last year, European governments made a historic commitment to reach the United Nations target of allocating 0.7 per cent of their gross national income to fight extreme poverty. If these pledges are honoured, Europe will provide at least $38 billion a year in more aid from 2010 onwards.

No doubt, Africa needs to make quality education a serious priority if it hopes to escape the scourge of poverty. Poverty presents a complex challenge for Africa and quality education remains of one of the most potent forces that Africa can use to fight it. Ironically, the education sector remains grossly under-funded. Despite huge earnings from oil, 35 per cent of primary schools in Nigeria don’t have teachers for core subjects like Mathematics and English Language.

Sub-Saharan Africa, according to recent report from UNESCO Institute of Statistics, will need another 1.6 million teachers in classrooms by 2015 to provide every child with a primary education. To achieve the 2015 target, Chad will need almost four times as many primary teachers and Ethiopia will need to double its stock of primary teachers, the report notes. Reaching such targets requires enormous cash injection, a reason why aid proponents campaign intensely for more aid for Africa.

Much as these aid gestures look great, I am strongly against them, given the overall impact of aid on the continent. One question that both the receiving government and the donors need to answer is – has aid really helped Africa? Quite frankly, I don’t think it has. In terms of impact, it is my conviction that there is no difference between aid and AIDS in Africa. Both have over the years proved to be very destructive to the continent’s development.

While AIDS decimates lives on daily basis, aid has been one of the biggest killers of the economies of most African countries as well as one of the causes of high-level corruption amongst government officials who see it as free money. Most of the money that has reached Africa from Europe and America as aid since the 1960s returned back to the same places they came from, as loots in the private accounts of the leaders of the countries that got them leaving in their wake huge debt profiles that until recently were annually serviced with the little resources of the countries in question.

Until corruption is reduced in Africa, the continent would continue to go down the poverty ladder with every aid it receives. A peculiar leadership style now pervades Africa, where the primal instinct of the ruling class is to siphon public fund, suppress and oppress oppositions while perpetuating themselves in power. Despite the mounting opposition against it, President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and his aides are today spending hundreds of millions of the nation’s earnings from oil to execute his third term bid. There are widespread reports that more than 50% of the senators at the nation’s upper house have been given $1 million each to support the bid.

Meanwhile, the government to date, has been unable to account for the sizeable percentage of the over $16 billion of Abacha loot recovered so far. By March 2000, the government declared that $709 million and another £144 million had been recovered from the Abachas and other top officials of his regime. According to a UN estimate, in 1991 alone, more than $200 billion in capital was siphoned out of Africa by the ruling elite. Projections are that the figures would have hit more than 800 billion dollar mark by the end of the first quarter of 2006.

I doubt how much, for instance, a president like mine who has been busy building and equipping his private university while starving public universities of funds, can do with education aid from abroad. As I write now, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has just concluded a warning strike. As President Obasanjo is building his own university in his home town of Ota - so is his vice building his in his home state, Adamawa.

My take is that Blair, Brown and all friends of Africa outside of the continent must join forces together to ensure that good governance prevails on the continent. Many African countries are poorer today than they were at independence several years ago because of the impact of bad governance. Financial aid in the hands of corrupt governments equals nothing but an opportunity to steal more. Having considerably overcome the burden of debt, due to debt relief by the G8 countries, African governments must be challenged to a judicious management of the continent’s abundant human and natural resources.

Not even the food aid gospel being propagated for countries like Ethiopia, Chad, Kenya, Eritrea and Sudan is helpful to the continent. In Ethiopia today, the aid industry is the second largest industry. Addiction to food aid has virtually wiped out every semblance of self-reliance in the country. Ethiopia is home to more than 300 aid organisations. A third of these organisations do basically one thing - give food handouts daily to the local people. Despite its status as one of the world’s poorest countries, Ethiopia has the largest military in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Food aid to these countries is fast destroying the local farming industry. According to a Der Spiegel report, farmers in the Ethiopian highlands earned only $25 for each ton of grain that it cost them $50 to produce, because free imports were destroying grain prices on the open market. Food aid is the reason why many African countries are sinking more and more poverty. If African leaders acted propoerly, the continent would not need to beg to have its growing population fed.

*Godwin Nnanna is Assistant Editor at Business Day Nigeria and winner of the Kalaam Award for Consumer Journalism 2005.