My Beauty Best Teacher

Richard Dowden a Director of the Royal African Society writes "...As the momentum for Live 8 gathers pace and the pressure on international leaders to deal with Africa's problems mounts, Richard Dowden argues that aid is not the answer.Many argue that aid creates a situation of dependency When a tsunami hits or war creates refugees, the victims can do with some help to get back on their feet wherever they are.Humanitarian relief aid will always be needed when disaster strikes.But the evidence that aid can transform whole societies and lift millions out of poverty is unconvincing.It can only speed up a process that is already happening.When we see scenes of destitution from Africa we assume that we can change things by sending money.But if aid could make Africa prosperous, it would have done so by now.Despite nearly a trillion dollars of aid since independence in the 1960s, much of Africa is worse off now than it was then.Much of that aid was spent by outsiders without consultation with Africans and with little understanding of Africa's ways or needs.Today the continent is full of abandoned projects: wells in the wrong place, factories without a fuel supply, roads that were not maintained.Impoverished by politics But UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown are proposing to double aid to Africa, promising a Marshall Aid plan, like the help America gave Europe at the end of the Second World War.The comparison is false.In 1945 there was peace in Europe and armies of disciplined and skilled workers stood ready to rebuild. All that was needed was the cash.Africa has rich resources but has been impoverished by bad politics - including our own policies.Africa's nation states that crammed old societies into artificially created countries have not produced effective governments.
It is impossible to deliver education and better health to Africans without working through those governments.The African countries that are well run, South Africa and Botswana for example, do not need aid.At the other end of the spectrum are countries like Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo which have collapsed as nation states and do not have any effective administration. It is impossible to use development aid there.Those in the middle that are not doing too badly, like Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda, are already receiving around 50% of their budgets from aid.That makes them more dependent on Western aid donors than they were in colonial times.Aid creates and sustains unequal relationships. Talk of partnerships is false.As one western diplomat in Africa put it to me recently: "We like it when they take ownership of the programme but we mean our programme. We don't like it if they start having their own ideas."No shortcut the aid business is an industry with its own dynamic.Much of it is spent in the donor countries in the form of consultancies and goods.For the recipient it creates dependency, undermines self-reliance and ultimately breeds resentment.There is no short cut to development. Only Africans themselves can bring change to Africa.States have to raise taxes and spend them productively in order for their countries to develop.Aid creates and sustains unequal relationships When state institutions are functioning in support of the people and the economy, there may be a case for helping with specific short term assistance but unless and until the local systems are in place and there is real commitment, aid will be wasted.At present lack of capacity and corruption prevent even basic services being delivered in most of Africa.Outsiders can run one-off projects like immunisation programmes but development has to be done by the people themselves.
Better alternatives Giving aid feels good but there are better ways to help Africa.We must pursue policies that create a fairer system of trade. Current policies and practices in Europe and America damage Africa's chance of earning its living in the world.We must end agricultural subsidies that distort prices allowing cheap food to be dumped in Africa and ruining farmers there. We must lower tariffs and trade barriers to allow Africa to trade more processed goods.We must stop encouraging Africa's brain drain, luring the best educated and talented out of the continent to fill jobs in the West.The British government could also do something about arms flowing into Africa.Weapons that kill in Africa's wars may not be made in Britain but arms dealers base their operations in London and are largely unregulated.
And London has become the laundry of choice for money laundering because Britain applies one of the weakest banking scrutiny systems in the world.We need to start treating money stolen by corruption in the same way as drug money or terrorism funds..."

As Kenya descends further into institutionalized corruption, Richard Dowden profiles the work of the exiled anti-graft campaigner - John Githongo

In an attempt to recover the billions of pounds missing from the Kenya treasury, Githongo employed Kroll, the London-based "risk advisory" company, to trace the money through western banks. The Kenyan government made a formal request to the British government and a former MI6 officer who worked in east Africa was commissioned to follow the trail of bank deposits from Kenya to Britain, Switzerland, Frankfurt and the Gulf states. But extraordinarily Kroll gave the management of the project to a young member of a prominent white Kenyan family, thereby putting the family - and the whole project - at grave risk...It seems that back in Nairobi a deal had been done between members of the new Kenya government and Moi's sons. The Kibaki government was rapidly losing interest in past robbery anyway. It was too busy organising its own. In opposition Kibaki's alliance had helped draw up a new constitution that included checks and balances to the presidency. It was supposed to be put to a national referendum but what Kibaki and his cronies - known as the "Mount Kenya Mafia" - had supported in opposition, did not suit them in government. They drew up a new version that did not include the main changes. The only way they could get that through the electorate was by bribing the voters. They set up a fictitious company called Anglo Leasing, said to be developing a new passport system for Kenya, and stuffed millions into it.

Cameroon becomes a tourism destination-Global Voices
"Copycat Dictators and Cartoon Democracies..." Alemayehu G. Mariam in Ethiopian Review
"Formal education is not advancing Africa"-Nana Yaw Asiedu
Ivory Coast's descent into madness-Richard Dowden
Taking a look at Land 'Grabs' in Africa-African Arguments
African Export Successes by William Easterly & Ariell Reshef

Richard Dowden writes"...Africa is changing fast. Driving those changes are mobile phones and radio stations and China's appetite for raw materials. The G8's agenda of aid and debt relief may, if delivered, play a secondary role. The external driver is China's search for minerals , particularly oil, which pushes up Africa's mineral prices...The internal driver is the mobile phone revolution that has transformed business and politics in Africa in the past ten years. In 2001, only 3 per cent of Africans had telephones of any sort. Now there are 50 million mobile-phone users, with numbers growing by 35 per cent a year. The phone companies completely misjudged the market - they thought that only the super-rich would buy mobiles. But it turned out that the people who really needed them were small self-employed businessmen, market women, taxi drivers and the casual workers who keep Africa going. In some areas, beer sales have plummeted as people have invested their meagre earnings in mobile phone cards instead. The pace of life has picked up hugely..."
Via Textually.Org

Richard Dowden writes:

School is seen as an escape route from the village; a magic elevator that will lift your child from the patch of subsistence land and transport him or her to the city to work in an office and send money back to the family. It is a terrible illusion. Visit a typical village school and you will find rows of old-fashioned desks crammed with anxious young people chanting answers learned by heart. The curriculum that is being crammed belongs to Britain in 1960...The education system in most African countries is a steepening pyramid pointed at Oxbridge and creating failure and despair at every level. Each year millions tumble off it, without qualifications or useful knowledge. They are failures who have wasted the family's resources, but they cannot go back to digging the land, because they have "learned book." Despite the obvious need for profound curriculum reform, African civil servants and politicians have little interest, since they themselves reached the peak of the pyramid. But what about the rejects?

teaches you how to make life better here in this area when you leave school." The next thing he tells parents is that they too must come to school and learn alongside their children. And it is not just literacy that the school teaches. There is a solar power centre and, if families can afford a car battery, they can charge it up for 60p, which will give them a light in their house for a month. In a country with 12-hour nights, that is a lot of studying time. The schoolchildren learn to grow their own food and use new farming methods. They look after the school herd of cows, using the cowshit in a biogas maker for cooking.

Richard Dowden writes "...Africa’s winner-takes-all politics lie at the heart of everything that has gone wrong with the continent. It is the reason why it has fallen behind the rest of the world economically, the reason for its wars and poverty...Its roots go back to the creation of African states themselves, the lines drawn on maps by the European colonial powers at the end of the 19th century. The process eventually produced fifty-three states overlaying some 10,000 pre-existing societies and political entities...African states, with a few exceptions, have no common understanding or experience of nationhood. Their flags, national anthems, and identities were created by outsiders. Patriotism, in the good sense of positive loyalty to one’s country and fellow citizens, is in short supply. If you want power, you play the ethnic card or smear your religious rivals. When you achieve power, you bring your own people into government – and even more important, into the army...",OpenDemocracy.

In a Guardian review of Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles John Ryle calls for a halt to generalizations:

People shouldn't write books about Africa. Not the whole of Africa. When was the last time you read a book about Eurasia? Never. The vastness of the European-Asian landmass precludes useful generalisation. And Africa is just as various, if not quite as huge. There are almost as many countries, rather more languages and a comparable degree of environmental diversity...In an important sense, "Africa" is a western invention. Despite attempts by visionaries to promote unity among the states that inherited dominion from Europe's retreating empires, African politicians have never paid anything more than lip-service to the pan-African ideal. African writers have an uphill task reclaiming the term "Africa" from the mythic associations it has in western literature. Most of these writers don't write about continental aspirations but about the worlds within a single country, leaving generalisations to World Bank experts, grandstanding politicians and Hollywood stars...[continue reading]

In the Prospect Richard Dowden analyses the continents dysfunctional 'democracies':

The core of the problem is not inexperience in electoral procedure; it is the nature of the African nation state. Successful democratic systems depend upon a group of people—judges, civil servants, election officials—who stand outside party politics and serve the state and people as a whole, irrespective of who is in power. In Africa this class barely exists. Only a few countries maintain a distinction between the ruling party and the state...[continue reading]