The Sunday News
If things were fair and just in world affairs the name of Africa would not be mentioned in the same sentence with the word ‘aid.’ For the sheer wealth that Africa has in natural and human resources the continent should be the one that advances aid to other continents.
But what has happened in the tragic history of the continent is that other continents have forcefully and systematically aided themselves with Africa’s wealth, reducing the continent to the status of the poor cousin within the comity of continents. The condition of Africa remains a condition of lacks and deficits, economic wounds and political scars that keep bleeding instead of healing as time goes by. And in prevailing global media and academic discourses, Africa should be blamed for its condition, for its poverty and darkness. It is a specifically colonial double-bind to be wounded and blamed for the wound.
Greg Mills tells an interesting ancient story that involves Mark Antony the political ally and son in law of Julius Caesar, and Octavian the son of Caesar. After the death of Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian became blood political rivals, even as they were in-laws. Rome was afflicted with a debilitating famine and urgently needed supplies of grain. Octavian who ruled Rome as Emperor Augustus Caesar sent emissaries to Queen Cleopatra of Egypt to beg for supplies of grain.
At the time Mark Antony was co-habiting with Cleopatra in Egypt, exiled from Rome where Octavian seriously meant to harm him. Mark Antony used his love relationship with Cleopatra to deny grain to Octavian’s Rome, to politically sanction and suffocate his rival. Octavia Caesar, the wife of Mark Antony and daughter of Caesar tried and failed to negotiate away the grain sanctions on Rome. At the time Rome was an Empire that covered vast expanses of what is Europe today. Mills uses this story to dramatise, through the misery of Rome, how Africa used to feed and save the western world. The West used to receive humanitarian aid from Africa.
In actuality, through slavery, colonialism and imperialism, the West used military might and fraud to rob Africa of its wealth instead of begging for aid from the continent, the way Octavian pleaded for grain from Queen Cleopatra to no avail. Many of us remember well the story of the biblical Joseph who was dumbed in a pit by his angry brothers on their way from collecting some grain in Egypt.
As things stand, the power and prosperity of an Africa that used to aid the West now remains frozen in biblical and other historical narratives as the continent has become a political and economic charity case. Poverty walks on two legs and wears a hat in the African continent.
European countries, and America, now enjoy the power and the privilege to send dollops of aid to Africa. European and American development experts and consultants populate the continent of Africa, disseminating unsolicited advice and prescriptions on how Africa can develop.
Non-Governmental Organisation named development this and development that are all over the African continent. Aid, developmental and humanitarian, is being showered over Africa as a needy continent.
The politics of aiding Africa
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, he of the famous Earth Institute of Columbia University, which he formerly headed, believes that “with the right policies and key interventions, extreme poverty—defined as living on less than $1 a day—can be eradicated within 20 years. India and China serve as examples, with the latter lifting 300 million people out of extreme poverty during the last two decades.” Sachs, who opposes the expansion of NATO into former Soviet territories, and condemns America’s use of Ukraine to fight Russia, has been called the Bono of economics, the good voice for the development of disadvantaged societies. He believes in the use of development and humanitarian aid to lift up poor countries. As such, Sachs undoubtedly means well for the Global South.
He believes that colonialism and imperialism have been evils that have caused the poverty and suffering of the people of the South. Governments of the Global South, according to Sachs, need to cultivate efficiency at policymaking and policy implementation, and eradicate corruption, to allow aid to reach its intended beneficiaries, the poorest of the poor in the world. It is a conspiracy, or coalition of the elite in the West and the elites in the Global South that is the enemy of the poor in the Global South. The Global South has produced its own political and economic elites that are networked with the elites in the West in impoverishing the poor of the South. Sachs is a true Bono to be a white American intellectual that is able to see and express the plight of the poor of the South.
Against aid for Africa
Foremost amongst opponents of development aid to Africa, perhaps, is Professor William Easterly. In his book of 2007; The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill, Easterly diagnoses aid as a problem rather that a solution in the condition of the Global South. Aid, in short should be “over” if the poverty and underdevelopment of Africa should end. After Easterly, the Zambian economist, Dambisa Moyo, leads in the intellectual crusade against aid in Africa. Moyo’s book; Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa, of 2009, can be described as a true manifesto against aid in Africa. Easterly and Moyo might as well be the true defenders of development though investment and doing business in the Global South.
To Moyo, Easterly, and other skeptics of aid development aid cultivates dependence and contributes to the decline in the growth of economies. Instead of landing in the hands of poor Africans that need aid the most the charity tends to get exhausted in the hands and mouths of corrupt officials and operatives in civil society organisations. Aid, otherwise, tends to benefit the elite and not the poor in Africa.
The coloniality of Aid
There is no doubt that advocates of aid like Jeffrey Sachs, some of them, mean well. There is equally no doubt that in material terms Africans need and also deserve aid. Where there is doubt is if aid as it has been deployed by the West to the rest has achieved its pronounced intentions. There is doubt if aid has not been used as a cover for some colonial agendas.
My point is that Africans do not need aid but deserve reparations for the underdevelopment that slavery, colonialism and imperialism dealt them. The slave traders used to buy and sell slaves. The prices were calculated using the gender of the slave, the bodily strength and physical size, much the way we buy and sell horses and other beasts of burden in the modern world. Enslavers, colonisers and imperialists have been good mathematicians who do not only understand the prices of things but also their value.
As such, Europe and America should be the first to understand the quantitative claims of reparations and compensation for the losses that accrued to Africa in slavery, colonialism and imperialism. Aid as the West presents it, as benevolence and charity, tends to mask the fact that Africans need to be paid for their impoverishment and exploitation. The West might be using aid to heal their guilt for the conquest and domination of Africa. What Africa deserves, therefore, is justice not generosity. Aid as a gesture of western generosity to Africa is a continuation of the modernising and civilising mission of western colonialism in Africa and that should be condemned for what it is. Some aid, after all comes as a debt trap for African countries.
λ Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].
