Africa News blog

Hi, I do not think it is good to stop the aid at this time. People will get angry and probably attach the government.The best way is to get the country better, try to get low-cost labor advantages and beat ‘China’ or other Asia countries.

I think the argument has some merit. It’s likely, though, that the best route is not to stop aid completely but to create a timeline for when Africa can being self sustenance.ricoexplainsitall.squarespace .com

I believe that the sentiment is nice, but a bit misguided. Stopping aid in and of itself with not necessarily help Africa. The other options of building the economy will. These options are present with or without aid, and in fact can be facilitated in part by aid. As an African who lives and works in China, I believe that quoting China’s reserves only betrays a vast misunderstanding of the country’s ability and willingness to replace western assistance. To counter that statistic, I could also mention that China has been in the top 10 recipients of development assistance until 2005, and is still in the top 20. More important than saying what doesn’t work, why not give more realistic options as to what can work.

I like the fact that Dambisa Moyo is so frank and blunt about what the real issues affecting economic growth in Africa are.It all reads as a sort of tough love policy that will require indigenous self-sufficiency and there is indeed a lot of truth in that.However to single out Zimbabwe as an example, certain countries will need an enormous amount of aid to give prospects of economic growth some kind of structure. Now that the expertise of white farmers are absent and an agro-based economy has been made fallow and overseen by under-equipped “new farmers” – western aid will definitely be required to re-build the economy.Her proposals however noble and accurate are not universally applicable to every African country.

If aid was not necessary it would not exist. You dont ban banks (including Goldman Sachs) because companies fail. You dont ban medicine or hospitals because disease continues. You dont ban schools because children dont learn as well as they should. Nor do you ban roads or airports because of accidents etc. You make things more effective. Those who argue against aid want to sell books to simpletons and their ideological sympathizers. Moyo was never a World Bank staff. At best, she was a temporary consultant. She has no credentials in development, economics, or finance, and scant experience to make her a credible voice, and she is certainly not an authority by any stretch of imagination.The frustration that it has not worked, and blaming aid, is akin to saying we should stop treatment because the patient is not recovering for whatever reason – lack of cooperation or ineffectiveness. Many naive commentators quote irrelevant examples of countries that have succeeded without aid and in the process betray their own ignorance. There is not a single country that has succeeded economically without aid, not even the United States. The advanced countries had colonies to plunder and military power to defraud their creditors with impunity (i.e. default on their debts) — all of them, without exception. They still have global economic hegemony to plunder and sustain their economies, only this time not always (but very often) through direct resort to military power. Talkers and writers without direct responsibility or experience with poverty and development assistance live in utopia – a world where all things wished were possible. They are often elitists who feel superior in their vaunted knowledge but without a single scar of experience or often even expertise in the issues they so eloquently write and talk about. More often than not, they are “successful” (merely lucky) in the private sector, got jobs in places like Goldman Sachs so they earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, and imagine it is becuase they are smart or the whole world could be likewise lucky. China, Korea, Japan, Europe, every country that has succeeded, has done so by using their own ingenuity, favorable trade policies, and outside assistance. They have been lucky as well, to be able to take advantage of their advantages when the opportunity came their way. Africa’s time will come. For a young person like the author, 50 years seems like a long time, but in reality it is a drop in the ocean of time. Africa is making progress, but its problems and burden of disease, wars and outside interference cannot be underestimated. It is time to make aid more effective and smarter, not to gut it.

Dambisa’s opinion makes complete sense to me. Aid is what helps many of the worst rulers survive – even look at Mugabe. It is not him who is feeding his people. If you take away the aid then people will have to make the right decisions and take their own responsibilities instead of looking to foreigners to do that for them. Even in other cases the money from donors that goes into projects allows bad governments show they are delivering something while they steal the money that should have been spent on those very same projects. We have been independent in most African countries for two generations or three generations. We say we are equal with all others and then abase ourselves for handouts. Yes if you are addicted to crack cocaine it is hard to break the habit but the way to do it is not to prostitute yourself more it is to recognise the problem and stop and work hard to build a new life.

I agree with Dambisa Moyo. I think outright charity whether at an individual level, or national level, only makes people dependent, and effectively hinders their growth. The only way to help the African countries would be to give them the African people opportunities to grow. If the western countries really want to help, they should offer more scholarships to African children in western schools and universities. The Job market in other countries should be more open towards African immigrants, and financing should be available to African entrepreneurs. Probably, the western governments can offer more incentives to businesses which setup operations in the African continent. They should be helped by giving them work and not throwing alms at them.

i dont think aid should stop . but that each contributing government should do projects of bussiness land improvment dig wells aid in farm equipment building supplies for houses roads and elictricity. do not give money but products and services over seen by a public notice from a trusted news sorce. if these things were done in ernest improvement and learning would follow .

Every so often, the rich in the west trot out a token African to make some such argument; one which coincidentally concedes exactly with the Free Market absolutism which passes for macroeconomic theory on Wall Street. One which concedes exactly with the enrichment of the richest Western interests. Such theories have led to to destruction of African civilization, from the commercial slave trade to mercantile colonialism to full blown imperialism to neocolonialism. Farmers in West Africa today live in an economic system in which their food crops have been undersold for 40 years by subsidized American exports, and now are driven into wild fluctuations of price by the Western Commodity Market speculation.That we should now listen to the deep thinkers who brought us the deregulatory causes of our current financial crisis when it comes to sending meager food supplements to the poorest nations of the world is either absurd or simply evil.

We absolutely must stop aid to Africa. Let’s start to take care of some the people in this country. We are going through some hard times right now and we should keep all aid over here.

I get so much irked when I hear African leaders beg for aid money rather than exploring trade avenues with the rest of the world. It’s important for Africa to realise that the continent will never prosper through aid.My experience particularly in Tanzania where I live is that aid money is always swindled by greedy civil servants at the expense of poor people. That means most of aid money ends in the hands of these guys,knowing that donors will give more money even when it is evident that the money is abused. I had an opportunity to attend a high level meeting on Africa needs at the UNHQ and I was pissed off to hear African leaders condemning developed nation for not giving them enough aid. I have read books on African problems, interviewed world leaders and thought so hard about African problems and my conclusion is that nobody does the right thing when it comes to solving Africa problems. It could be that African politicians and policy makers stopped thinking long time ago.

Africa does not need anymore aid. Its this aid that has retarded growth in most of the continent. As an Media person I have increasingly seen how information and use of technology can reshape the lives of people. Take the example of Mobile Money transfer; before the product only 6 million Kenyans had bank accounts. Now a year later over 5 million mostly un-bankable kenyans are transfering money around the country with new services and products mushrooming. Now even gorvenment is thinking of using the service.All africa needs is not sympathy but level playing ground to trade, get information for its fast growing and curious youth. 8 years ago westerners were asking what possible use would africans need a mobile food. well now I not only pay my bills with it, I can get the best prices for my product and where it can be sold fast

Here again. Giving money is not the issue. How it is given, debt payment structure, interest rate and so forth are the issues. Believe it or not, its not just a debt, because it comes with conditions or strings attached to it. Yes of course accountability is the key, and corruption is the reason why we are lagging behind. Aid, Debt and the likes are what SSA can use as a starting point, requiring a new leadership in the region. Not just the dancing, celebrations, and speeches that are common practice in the region. A change and a radical change is what we need.

We should continue to give money but put it into better resources instead of the african governments. http://www.mnlakeplace.com

Hi, stopping aid for afrca now is like condamning a large part of african people to death but in the other way its must be done so that african leaders can start thinking about how to feed their population because right now the only thing they know is to buy weapons to keep them long in power, they always have money to buy weapon but not to buy food. something need to be done so that one day african people can be able to produice their own foods and why not medical product as well. if only africa had to buy those aid i think most of the african country would prefere to invest their money in some key production sectors like agriculture or research to feed and keep their population in good health because they know that will boost their economy than use the money to by aid from europe or america or elsewhere.

As a visitor who grew some 10 critical younger years living in Africa and as an expat for many more having the opportunity to be a part of developing African industry in some small way, through numerous regions of Africa, across varied levels of desperation… from the downward spiral of the Congo’s and Sudan’s to artificial oil enriched areas of extraction…we really must listen to this lady more carefully! Ms Moyo is way more accurate in her clinical protestations than many from the broader version of the west will likely want to hear or believe. The normal mechanisms of aid I feel aren’t really the true body of her claims or warnings…it’s the unchecked disease itself that troubles her so…she profoundly understands by the fact that she’s forever recovering that disease herself. Because aid dependence like she says …is an addiction from father to son mother to daughter…deeply imbedded like cultural DNA…. the insidious part of this addiction being its unabated development and institutionalized support for over 6 decades of routine injections from afar. None of us from outside can truly speak intelligently about the depth of this disease today. We can only speak of the death and desperation of specific and reliably revolving situations or symptoms upon which the outsiders have for decades developed and nurtured immense industry and profit in the never ending servicing of desperation. None of us not even the ones who honestly by humanitarian contact with such desperation for no profit, believing they are rightfully a little more part of the African fabric;…they all are only visiting like the rest of us who love the place and can never really get to the deepest understanding of this now-cultural and very blinded way of African existence.Ms. Moyo is possibly so accurate; the statements she makes might well suffer another routine addiction of our times,…the addiction of carefully not being read by those who could affect change if so moved to do so!

I can tell you personally how our country has become a wasteland since the fall of whites from power. They were good managers and farmers and brought wealth and prosperity and above all, enough food for all. But we were foolish and jealous of them, and like children we banished them and stole their lands, and gave the monster Mugabe the power to destroy us and our country. And is South Africa under the blacks any better? We seek refuge there and are murdered by those who should welcome us as brothers. The whites were never so cruel.I love Zimbabwe. But I weep with regrets for Rhodesia.

From the comments from some people on this forum, I get the impression thatAfricans are regarded as helpless people and that chinese involvement in africa is “evil” and “colonial”. This is far from the truth as much of what appears in the Western media is pure exaggeration or half-truths.EDUCATION:Renee speaks about education being a “western thing”. This is not true at all. We do have a lot of good schools in Africa. In Nigeria for instance, we have numerous thousands of primary and secondary schools and 92 universities (34 privately owned, 31 state government -owned and 27 federal government-owned). Despite problems of equipment and funding in government-owned universities, we still manage to produce churn relatively good graduates. National literacy rate is 69% in Nigeria.)AFRICAN BUSINESSES:The problem here has nothing to do with “teaching Africans how to run businesses”. Africans are already an enterprising people who run businesses. In Nigeria, we have thousands of small and medium scale businesses surviving in a nation where entreprenuers have to source capital from friends and family since banks rarely loan money to ordinary people and contend with infrastructural decay. Despite the odds, many of these types of businesses have grown big and expanded to employ thousands of people. Nigeria’s Nollywood is an example of a small scale business started with personal finance in 1992 by individual entrepeneurs which has now grown into a 250 million US dollar per year industry, employing thousands of people. I am sure that there are similar examples of success in other African countries. In fact, the hold-backs african enterprises are experiencing can be traced directly to infrastructural decay in the various african nations and UNFAIR trade dealing by Western nations.CHINESE INVOLVEMENT IN AFRICA:Some people don’t understand that Chinese involvement in Africa goes beyond mere engagement of the much stereotyped “corrupt governments” in Africa (let us pretend that countries like Botswana and Ghana with relatively low corruption do not exist).At a “micro-level”, chinese involvement means that individual enterpreneurs like those in the industrial clusters of Eastern Nigeria are now able to form partnerships with their chinese counterparts who bring badly needed technical know-how and equipment at a price these [african] enterpreneurs can afford.At the “macro-level”, I welcome the official Chinese government engagement with African nations because China is willing to provide much needed infrastructure to our people in exchange for natural resources. I do not see any “colonisation” here unlike what the jealous and domineering Western nations will have us believe. In fact, I see Africa able to negogiate deals with China as equal trade partners in contrast to the master-servant trade relationship that exists between the continent and the West. It cannot be “colonisation” if China is partly funding a 400MW power station in Ghana worth 600 million dollars in exchange for 38,000 tonnes of Ghanaian cocoa beans or funding and building railways and roads in Ethiopia. Yes there are issues with Sudan, Zimbabwe and D.R. Congo, but there are at least 48 other african nations where chinese involvement is positive and welcome.CONCLUSION:African nations must continue economic engagement with China, stop asking for useless “aid” packages and ferociously wrestle the West for fair trade just like the Indians and the Brazilians do at international trade talks.

Remove the blood sucking devil from the north and you will see a lot of good in Africa while making it on it’s own.

I have not read “Dead Aid”, but was not too surprised to read that someone who has been through Harvard, Oxford and the World Bank came out saying the things Dambisa Moyo does, in very much the same way that William Easterly says them.It’s a simplistic, and quite an attractive argument to liberal economists, yet hardly a new one. The fact that it still grabs headlines like this is testament to how ill informed we are about economics in general. People have been saying for decades that aid doesn’t work, and yet all of the successful emerging economies are aid graduates. The green revolution in Asia was the result of aid, and it allowed productivity to reach the point where there was an investable surplus.In order to reach the threshold from which they can “kick start” their economic development, purchasing power in the average sub Saharan economy has to grow by 300% per capita, and even then, there are considerable structural obstacles of which economists are all aware.Of course no one is decrying the need for fairer trade regimes, and the need for trade to be made to work for Africa, instead of for the importing countries. That, however, is no argument against foreign assistance; assistance is needed in order to make trade work more fairly, and to get those economies to the point where they can generate surpluses for trade and investment. To do that, the basics of health, education and agricultural productivity are preconditions which are not being tackled by outside investors, and cannot be adequately funded by impoverished governments.Yes there are many failures in the way that assistance is delivered and the efficiency of aid in general; but that is no argument against its existence, it is an argument against poor delivery, and no one argues for poor delivery anyway.Everyone, except those involved in it, deplores corruption. Corruption however is not the preserve of African governments, and certainly not exclusive to foreign assistance. There are plenty of people taking 20% stakes in businesses all over the world by virtue of their political position; that it is more obvious where the majority of the population have less than $2 a day to live on is not a valid argument for not trying to bring those poor above the poverty line, just as the fact that it is sometimes better concealed in more developed countries is no excuse for accepting it. Do not ignore the significant role that developed economies play in keeping developing countries exactly where they are, and the role that developed businesses play in corruption.That Africa has failed to perform since independence is a failure of aid. A failure to provide enough, consistently and of the right quality. Maybe if Dambisa Moyo was to return to Zambia and take up the challenge of bringing about development in the region, she might remember more uMunthu and tone down on some of the right wing free market ideology.

As an African, I can honestly say that Western aid has killed many Africans. Western aid usually goes to the corrupt dictator, he buys weapons and suppresses human rights, kills his people, lives very rich life. Just look at Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. He has massive army yet almost every year 8 milion people need food. He is deceptive and has become overtly confident in playing the West for fools and taking their money.

Its time for we African stop for waiting for handout from the west..we know how to kill eachother we have to find our own solution .

You are right Dambisa, there comes a time in a nation or individual or community when economic aid is no longer a right but an option. Over 50 years we have depended on the west so much that it has developed into a chronic economic syndrome. Its time, and 2009 is a critical barometer, if Africa cannot see the tides approaching and ready herself, then the future is disastrous.

I totaly agree with DAMBISA AID FROM WEST IS HERTING the continent big time the west care fore thier people even if takes to distroy others they brig their surpluses to distroy African farmers. they bring some thing thy call it expatrates that take $80 of evry $100 they bring as aid for salry.

How increadibly short sighted are the last 8 posts !!!Is it really ONLY the corruption that eat those AID money, or are there more damaging factors ?First of all, WHERE are those corruption benefits stored ? The western banking system, especially the dark spots of FISCAL PARADISES !!!Then, some of Africa’s countries have been at war for a VERY LONG time … WHERE do they ultimately find the weapons and ammo ?Top 4 arms dealer in the world : Europe, USA, China, Russia (not sure about the order, though) … do we (Europe, US and Russia) REALLY NEED to produce those weapons (instead of focusing on way more FULFILLING activities as research and ECOLOGICAL development) ? Then, we may gradually stop AID and hoping to look ourselves in the mirror with pride..Unfortunately enough for development POSSIBILITIES, there is a BIG STOP-SIGN down the road … intellectual property (Patent laws in particular), which really came in effect only after Word War 2, a principle that makes worldwide scientific advance way more difficult than say the middle ages, as before inventing, you have to lawyer-up to the WORLD’s patents records … it definitely is a broken model in the path to a bright future !The world is in balance … unfortunately, the current state is QUITE FAR from EQUILIBRIUM !!!