Progressives are howling about Musk, DOGE, and the ransacking of USAID. "A disgraceful, humiliating, horrible, inhuman thing to do. Think of the poor, starving people of Africa.'
This lament has been heard for decades since African independence from European rule in the early Sixties, a period during which the continent fell prey to Big Men, dictatorship, autocratic rule, kleptocracy, and corruption - a disgraceful downward spiral of callous indifference Mobuto, Deby, Kagame, Amin, and a host of others enriched themselves while millions under their rule remained in Paleolithic poverty.
It is hard to name any African country on a solid democratic or economic path. Most are a mess – Nigeria, Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Angola, Mali just to name a few. Ghana is everyone’s favorite, and fans point to its moderate GDP growth as an example of success, but that number reflects more the dismal rate from which it started than any promise of rapid economic growth.
China started from the same point as Africa fifty years ago - a desperately poor country where millions died at the hands of Mao through enforced famine and political murder - but now is a world superpower. During the same period Africa's socio-economic status only deteriorated and is now far worse off than under French and British rule.
Most of this continued decline into civil chaos, corruption, and unmitigated poverty is due to the misrule of the big men, Presidents for Life; but also because of a persistent tribal, forest culture that lacks the discipline, rigor, and moral authority of Confucianism.
The Big Men were fat and happy because the West was concerned about Communism and bought them off in return for political allegiance and the vast mineral and energy resources they controlled.
Some donor countries like the United States and international organizations like the World Bank applied 'conditionalities' to their grants - money was contingent on judicial, financial, and legislative reform; but this was just a cover, and despite the manipulative chicanery of African leaders who promised reform but had no intention of performing, Western donors looked the other way and kept on giving.
Idriss Deby, the dictator of Chad played the US and the World Bank for fools, duplicitously agreeing to a gas-for-reform agenda and then reneging completely and continuing his despotic rule over one of the poorest countries in Africa.. The lionized Kagame presides with a repressive regime that muzzles opposition. He has lied or distorted reports about his support of anti-government clandestine military operations in the Congo and the murderous civil war there.
Author William Easterly wrote extensively about African corruption and the willing complicity of the West. He cited the journalist Helen Epstein who described the support that aid donors give to Ethiopia’s tyrant Meles Zenawi, who has roughly matched Biya [President of Cameroon] in aid receipts in a shorter period of time.
Peter Gill in his book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (2010) documents Meles’s misdeeds further, which rise to the level of war crimes in his counterinsurgency in Ethiopia’s Somali region.
Other long-serving aid-receiving dictators include Idriss Déby in Chad ($6 billion in aid between 1990 and the present), Lansana Conté in Guinea ($11 billion between 1984 and his death in 2008), Paul Kagame in Rwanda ($10 billion between 1994 and 2015), and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda ($31 billion between 1986 and 2010).
There are those who defend Africa, beating the dead horse of colonialism for Africa's persistent miasma, but ignore how no country suffered worse than China under Mao, but once that yoke was removed recorded an unprecedented economic acceleration.
They are upset and outraged by the stifling of ‘African voices’, but who are they? The likes of Déby, Kagame, Conté, Museveni, Meles or the successive venal, ignorant leaders of South Africa after apartheid? Or the president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta sought by the Hague for international crimes against humanity?
When Donald Trump abolished USAID and said that it had done nothing to improve the lot of Africans, had misspent billions in taxpayer money, and had done nothing to foster American interests, liberals wailed about the desperate needy; but most Americans had had enough.
It was time that African countries take responsibility for their own people said conservatives. The free flow of foreign entitlement money was preventing this from happening, and stopping it would be the incentive for reform to occur.
Instead of taking soft, don't-bother-repaying World Bank loans and siphoning the money into offshore bank accounts, African leaders would be forced to borrow on the international capital markets for only the loans they absolutely need and can repay.
PEPFAR, the international AIDS anti-retroviral drug distribution program begun under George W Bush did more to save African lives than any USAID 'development project', and it was assumed that at some point African governments would take it over, either by negotiating favorable pricing from pharmaceutical companies or concluding a settlement with them to allow the local generic production of key drugs. The direness of the problem does not alter the need for structural reform - it only emphasizes it.
The time for handouts, particularly those which enable, embolden, and support the oppressive, anti-democratic regimes of Africa, is over. Will the people suffer? Since USAID projects did little to alleviate poverty or improve socio-economic status, that is unlikely. Will there be increased deaths if governments do not step up and take over anti-retroviral drug distribution and vaccinations against other infectious diseases?
Yes, but those deaths are on the hands of African governments, not the United States. Pulling out of USAID and putting pressure EU countries and international banks and development organizations to do the same will have a long term benefit for the continent.
What is needed is for African rulers to take charge of reforming their countries enough so that they will be creditworthy. Without a truly independent judiciary, a rule of law, financial and budgetary transparency, civil institutions of the highest quality, a free press and an open government, African countries will never improve. Since they obviously incapable of initiating and instituting these reforms on their own, pulling the plug on foreign assistance will be a great incentive for them to begin.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.