Does aid to Africa make things worse?


Why aren't we debating this more instead of just shoveling money at the problem and hoping it goes away?
I know this one is from FrontPageMag.com, which is one reason I didn't post it right away. But I have seldom seen a better example of how good intentions can make things worse. It's an interview with Marvin Durkin.

Durkin: Aid is like welfare writ large. But the mechanisms of destruction work in different ways and are ultimately even more devastating.

Aid goes into Africa and is either snaffled by the ruling elite or their flunkies, or else, in shockingly small amounts, does what it’s meant to. Let’s look at the effects of the misappropriated aid first.

Vast amounts of aid is siphoned off in various ways by the ruling elite. According to an old UN report, in 1991 alone, $200 billion of AID ended up in foreign private bank accounts of African politicians and government officials. In Kenya and elsewhere, government officials have larger foreign bank accounts than business people. If you want to get rich in Africa, you join the ruling party or get in with the mafia that masquerades as a civil service, judiciary and police force. By hook or by crook, that’s where the bulk of aid money ends up.

Now many people say, “Oh well, even if a little gets through, it’s worth it.” But they are missing the point – big time. In Africa, being in government is so massively lucrative, thanks to aid, that the rulers refuse to relinquish power. As one African commentator has put it, “the primordial instinct of the ruling elite is to loot the national treasury, perpetuate itself in power and brutally suppress all dissent and opposition.”

In a word, political power means you get your dirty mits on all that aid money, by the sackful. These vile people with chunky gold rings are corrupt aid millionaires, sometimes aid billionaires. So it’s no surprise they wish to hang on to power.

FP: So aid to Africa actually helps keep dictators and dictatorships in power? It fuels the oppression of the people?

Durkin: Aid kills democracy. It makes being in power enormously lucrative. When going into (corrupt) politics or becoming a (corrupt) state official is a more attractive career option than starting a business, it will obviously end in tears. It means that politics attracts gangsters, indeed creates gangsters. The gangsters don’t want to relinquish power, so another set of gangsters, thinly dressed as liberators, arm themselves and make war.

The chain of cause and effect is so glaringly obvious, and yet the liberal left in the West really get uppity if you point it out to them. They are believers in state patronage, on a national and international level, and are blind to its hideous consequences.

This is one of those topics which the politically correct among us do not wish to debate, but which deserves careful attention.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - December 5, 2008 at 01:39 PM  Tag


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