“The root of the disease was political. The treatment could only be political. Of course, we encourage aid that aids us in doing away with aid. But in general, welfare and aid policies have only ended up disorganizing us, subjugating us and robbing us of a sense of responsibility for our own economic, political and cultural affairs. We chose to risk new paths to achieve greater well-being.” These were the remarkable words from Burkina Faso’s iconic leader Thomas Sankara.
The issue of aid in Africa, which Sankara was vehemently against, is topical and today used in determining how alliances are built and strengthened between the continent and its former colonizers. From the western world, Africa should get military, humanitarian, emergency and charitable aid to promote growth and security among other issues. In these times of the Coronavirus pandemic, giving alms to Africa has gone a gear up through a new phenomenon called “medical aid.” Global players have also joined the race to aid and rescue Africa. After the 2018 Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), China pledged aid worth US$15 billion to Africa between 2019 and 2021.
Aid is a new form of colonialism. it is friendly but vicious. It is the new face the west and other global players are using to subjugate Africa because of its friendliness. Nearly four years after Ghana’s independence and realizing colonial defeat, then United States of America (USA) president John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced a new plan to address Africa’s ‘needs’.
“AID represents a very essential commitment. As important as any work that is being done by anyone for this country,” said President Kennedy in 1961 at the launch of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiative.
According to a 2019 report by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of wealthy donor nations, the value of international development aid in the world reached a new peak of US$152.8 billion, a slight increase over 2018. Africa has received more and this is not mere generosity.
Giving A Crumb After Taking A Loaf
The amount of aid which the west or east call important for African countries is not commensurate with what the global powers are exploiting and shipping out. Resource exploitation and plunder, slave labor and under-pricing of Africa’s resources have become key characteristics of what multi-national corporations are looting, and later return the crumbs in the form of aid.
Africa’s resources were plundered by the Europeans many years before they agreed to formally colonize Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1885. Slave trade stole the continent’s human resources. According to historians, over 12.5 million Africans were shipped out of the continent due to the slave trade. While it is a complex exercise to calculate the monetary value of what was stolen in Africa, but a decade before the American civil war, in New Orleans, a healthy African male slave was auctioned for $1,200. A girl aged nine or ten was auctioned for $1,400 considering her ability to bear more children for resale.
The value of the resources even after independence continues to bring slave wages in Africa. In Ethiopia, one of Africa’s biggest exporters of coffee, farmers are made to sell the coffee at US$4 per kilogram while large coffee companies sell the same at US$200 per kilogram on the international market. The same goes for cocoa in Ivory Coast. As a result, multi-national corporations continue making profits that run into millions while ‘independent’ Africa remains poor. Africa is strategic to global powers because of their reliance on its natural resources and economic opportunities.
The imposition of colonialism on Africa altered the course of the continent’s history. Its impact is felt entirely. The settler regimes had a poor and worse record for poverty reduction, considering the mineral resources of South Africa and then Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe).
With a continued pouring of aid in Africa in the name of “transforming lives” failing to meet the continent’s demands, economist and author of Dead Aid says the issue of aid in Africa is “one of the greatest myths of our time.”
“The state of postwar development policy in Africa today is one of the greatest myths of our time. That billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth is false. In fact, recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse – much worse,” wrote Dambisa Moyo.
Road To Hell Paved With Good Intentions
Humanitarian or emergency aid through drugs and food, charitable aid through scholarships and non-governmental organization (NGO) work, and other interventions have not been sufficient to transform African societies. In the longer term, these are not going to help Africa develop. Public goods such as healthcare, education, and infrastructure are in many instances being financed in most instances through donor funds. What donors are providing are goods that African governments should provide their citizens.
In 2010, in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakariya, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said the role of aid is to support the socio-economic transformation of people and help people achieve things they want and ultimately wean off aid.
European Union (EU) head of delegation to Zimbabwe Ambassador Timo Olkkonen acknowledges that Zimbabwe has wealth of resources and that in “the longer term we should move away from dependence on aid.” “Zimbabwe is a wealthy country in terms of natural resources and touristic and agricultural potential. In the longer term, we should move away from dependence on aid. Concurrently with providing development cooperation we are building our trade relations with Zimbabwe based on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) we have. We are in the midst of negotiating an expansion of that agreement to cover other areas than trade in goods,” Ambassador Olkkonen says.
According to a 2019 CSO Sustainability Index for Sub-Saharan Africa prepared by USAID, the US government pledged to give NGO’s financial aid to “empower and transform livelihoods of citizens in all sectors.” Despite reports of mismanagement of donor finances, Ambassador Olkkonnen said his bloc has mechanisms in place “to avoid any un-procedurally benefitting from our funding” adding that “the thousands of beneficiaries of EU support all over Zimbabwe will disagree” that EU aid is “just plain wasteful”.
Decolonize The Mind And Return To Freedom
Africa’s modern leaders have abandoned the self-sustenance philosophies of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, and Thomas Sankara. Zimbabwe’s media scholar and academic Dr. Lyton Ncube said aid will never develop the continent, but will only avail short-term benefits.
“That issue is a complex one and we need to understand the political economy of aid from the Washington Consensus and taking it from either the eastern or western blocs. When we look at the role of aid in transforming lives of Africans, perhaps the benefit is short-term sustainability and not for the long term. The main problem is those who fund have their own interests, goals, and ambitions. I would refer you to some of the revolutionaries when you look at the philosophies of Thomas Sankara, Patrice Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah they managed to embark on what I would call the return to freedom,” said Dr. Ncube.
According to Dr. Ncube, the issue of aid resembles the problem of coloniality in Africa and urged governments to take the lead from Zimbabwe when it embarked on the land redistribution exercise in 2000 that benefitted over 300,000 households. Before 2000, only 4,500 former white commercial Zimbabwean farmers owned an estimated seventy percent of the country’s prime land.
Dr. Ncube adds: “To have long-term development we need to own the means of production and be masters of our destiny by value-adding our products. Zimbabwe’s land reform program is a starting point to self-sufficiency. Are you telling me those donors have no people who need help from their countries? Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o says the problem that we suffer from is the problem of the mind. We need to cleanse our minds from the colonial system.”