The Marshall plan came to bear after World War II when the United States, with Harry Truman at the helm of affairs, used it to bail out and greatly rebuild Europe. It extended to Asia and Africa long after these nations attained independence from their erstwhile colonial masters.
Europe did not depend on aid ad infinitum. It was a mere short term measure which had an exit timeline. Africa has, however, come to be largely dependent on this form of charity that has done the continent more harm than good.
The so-called aid comes with many negative strings attached which are mostly overlooked by the ‘leaders’ of the African nations involved. Most of the aid does not go to the poorest of the poor and fails to address the genuine needs of the people, as it most times furthers the nest of the corrupt politicians in the continent.
The World Bank has admitted that 75 per cent of its agricultural projects in Africa has been monumental flop. In North Kenya, Norwegian aid agencies built a fish-freezing plant to help employ the Turkana people. After completion, the plant required more power than was available in the entire region. Some $10 million was spent in Tanzania to build a cashew processing plant. The plant ended up having a capacity three times greater than the entire cashew production of the country, and it made more economic sense to process the cashew in India. In South Africa, over $2 million donated by the European Union (EU) was used to stage an AIDS awareness play – Sarafina 11 that did little to educate the public about the scourge. It consumed 25 per cent of the entire AIDS budget of the Rainbow country. Congo sold the donated food supplies funnelled from international aid and used it to procure arms and ammunition from Italy. Mauritius diverted the high quality rice to tourist hotels. Zimbabwe received aid for two decades to initiate land reforms. The funds were instead diverted by corrupt ZANU-PF officials to buy up land, thereby disenfranchising the poor that were the real fighters for the Uhuru.
Italy parcelled out $1 billion to Somalia from 1981 to 1990 to fund projects, but the dictator, Siad Barre, had other ideas and used it to purchase arms used in murdering opponents and dissidents. The socialist-inspired regime of Mwalimu Julius Nyerere attracted $10 billion from many Scandinavian countries. The World Bank reported that between 1960 and 1988, the economy shrank by 0.5 per cent every year.
In 2011, Liberia received $765 million – 73 per cent of its gross national income. It increased in 2010, yet all the 25,000 students that took the entrance examination to enter the University of Liberia failed woefully.
It is crystal clear that the aims of this aid are at variance with the needs of Africa which the greedy and visionless leaders fail to take into account. Accountability to the people is out of the question, as they are accountable to the donors who dictate the tune. Corruption makes most of the aid funds end up in private pockets of the leaders and back to the west through the foreign bank accounts operated by the kleptocrats.
Trade liberalisation, which is an implied condition, ensures that the recipient African nation uses overpriced goods and services from donor countries which greatly hampers the local industries, leading to poverty and mass unemployment. The case of Nigeria before the home-grown Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) – a condition for the receipt of foreign aid while Ibrahim Babangida held sway – killed the textile industry in Kano. This industry had the potential to make that city a major exportation hub; but right now it is contending with terrorism issues as a result of the mass unemployment and poverty that the so-called aid brought about.
During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia damned the prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and stuck to his guns. The result was that the IMF was forced to eat its words and lose some of its mystic. The Asian Tigers did not make the great leap on the back of foreign aid; they looked inwards and broke the eggs to make the omelet. Singapore did not achieve the miracle of leaping from a third world to a first world country with foreign aid. It emerged as the major financial and banking hub of South-East Asia because of the vision of the Cambridge-trained Lee Kuan Yew and taking advantage of its unique geographical location.
China, which is the fastest growing economy in the world, has long shunned foreign aid and is giving the West a run for its money with the flooding of its technological innovations in the world market. The West has been forced to take advantage of China’s huge population and cheap labour to site factories there which has contributed in no small measure to lift more than 600 million Chinese out of poverty.
India is the world’s largest outsourcer of information technology. Was it by foreign aid? The former Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, as finance minister in 1991 liberalised the market, thereby making millions of his countrymen benefit from the information technology cross border boom without having to leave the country. Indians’ giant stride in the field of medicine wasn’t obtained by any advice from the Bretton Woods institutions or the West.
It is high time Africa started viewing herself as a player rather than as a beggar in the world stage. Solutions to our nagging problems must come from within with the culture of self-reliance being espoused right from the cradle. The damage done to the African psyche as a result of this beggar culture has taken the continent centuries backwards and has got to stop.
Come to think of it, our forefathers were minding their businesses and doing well before the advent of colonialism and globalisation. Why should the present world economic order be to the disadvantage of the continent? Let us stop heading for Washington and London, as they will only worsen our woes. The Yoruba would say: what one is looking for in Sokoto is in his sokoto. The dawn of a new era of self-help should begin from now.