May 15, 2009 at 11:11 am

Exactly my point. Also please make the important point that any such calls on when we have had enough should come from thinking Africans on the ground..not some affluent mouth pieces whose faces are buried in meaningless figures or ideological nonsense.

May 15, 2009 at 8:35 pm

Thanks Edith & Iyinoluwa for your voices. When added to Pres. Sirleaf-Johnson’s recent remarks on focused, targeted foreign assistance for Africa and Dr. Alex Coutinho’s support, all of your voices and many more echo a sensible approach to African long-term development.

I hope that this trend continues.

ALWAYS FOREVER, ONE – debbie

May 20, 2009 at 1:57 pm

Is the issue simply aid, or that aid is causing a lack of development? I’ll venture to say its the latter. And as long as a few people keep benefiting from these foreign donations, they have no incentive to see the rest of the continent rise. 40 years and counting, when exactly will we say ENOUGH!

June 9, 2009 at 5:45 am

I’m an African and i say enough…..I live in zambia and see and experience the corruption and gross misuse of the Aid money. I’ve seen the emergence of greedy leaders who aren’t ashamed to steal all, huge amounts, while the needy suffer in unequipped hospitals. The same people represent us and ask and recieve Aid on our behalf……We’ve become dependant, pets of the big donors…..
Africans need to save Africa, we need to sort ourselves out, yes Affrican lives will be lost, thats collateral damage and a sacrifice we need to make. This generation for the future generations….lets break the cycle of dependancy!!!

June 9, 2009 at 8:22 am

“yes Affrican lives will be lost, thats collateral damage and a sacrifice we need to make”

I’m sorry but that is a sacrifice that any human being, no matter what color that they are, should have to pay to change an economic course of action fpr any country or any continent…..and thank God that sensible people from all over the world realize this & won’t accept your hypothesis!

If you are actually an African & from Zambia then I would offer the same advice to you that I’ve given Moyo – clean up the corruption first in Zambia before you want to lecture others on how to conduct their lives.

No one with any humanity will listen to your ideas that allow innocent people to die to prove your point while you allow your own country to wallow in corruption.

Nice to meet you, “angie”.

Living Positively, debbie

June 9, 2009 at 10:55 am

Stop the Aid and give us a fair chance to clean up the corruption. The issue is Aid’s perpertrating the corruption!

June 9, 2009 at 12:55 pm

That is a circular argument…its like saying, I have worms in my stomach….starve me to death so the worms will die…..its a pretty dumb argument….I agree- aid will NEVER solve Africa’s problems….but the problems that exist with AID are the same problems that exist with FDI or entrepreneurial sources of development funding (unless you want to argue we don’t need any funding for development). the significant difference is that misuse of AID has less grave consequences than misuse of FDI. Moyo’s supposition in this argument is very naive–and it is simply thus…African leaders have the best interests of their people at heart…like she does…nothing could be further from the truth in most cases

June 12, 2009 at 2:29 pm

My apologies for neglecting to cite the following two references: 1. In regards to food aid being sold on the Zimbabwean black market, the link is: http://etd.uwc.ac.za/usrfiles/modules/etd/docs/etd_gen8Srv25Nme4_5741_1182748598.pdf . 2. In regards to Baidoa General Hospital, the reference is BBC World Service – Africa Today podcast (April 17, 2008), min.12.30. Thank you for your patience.

June 22, 2009 at 2:13 pm

With respect to Ms. Jibunoh’s admirable concern for protecting innocent civilians, I take issue with her insistence on international obligations in her recent BBC interview (Global News, 11 June 2009) in which she criticizes donor nations as: Showing poor performance, failing to deliver, falling short, showing a lack of leadership, not living up to their commitments, lacking credibility, being on the wrong path, and throwing away their own promises.

The truth of the matter is that, during the worst global economic crisis of our generation, G8 nations are still pouring in $25 *billion* dollars into Africa by this year alone, as she herself admitted in the interview. This is incredible generosity. The ones paying for this aid – the taxpayers of the donor nations – not the recipients – are the only ones who have the right to determine the “scope of aid.” Moreover, what is at stake is certainly not the credibility of Western nations but rather the credibility of failed post-colonial African states like Zimbabwe, with its 230 million percent inflation, that willingly collapsed its own export economy by forcibly evicting farmers off their own land. Due to the lack of an accountability and transparency process, food aid has since been sold on the black market (Munyanyi, R., 2005, The Political Economy of Food Aid: A Case of Zimbabwe, University of the Western Cape, p. 77, available on demand at http://etd.uwc.ac.za/usrfiles/modules/etd/docs/etd_gen8Srv25Nme4_5741_1182748598.pdf).

In a Cato conference provocatively entitled “Let Failing African Governments Collapse: A Radical Solution to Underdevelopment” (2008, available at http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=4589), one speaker showed how African corruption roughly equaled aid. In other words, by correcting the problem at its source (rather than financially bolstering corrupt governments), we could eliminate the need for aid – an intriguing proposition.

Governments should be held responsible for the welfare of their own citizens, to whom they themselves have the primary humanitarian imperative and moral obligation to serve. Those states whose leaders conclude they cannot meet the financial obligations of statehood without foreign assistance should automatically go into a kind of governmental foreclosure, protective services adoption, or international receivership (preferably managed by one of the former colonial powers) in exchange for the requisite funds requested. Conditionalities? Strings attached? Absolutely! As Clarence Long, former chairman of the U.S. House Appropriations committee, wrote (on a gold plaque, hung in his committee’s hearing room), “Them that has the gold makes the rules” (Crile, G., 2003, Charlie Wilson’s War, p. 175). One of those rules should and must be mandatory anti-corruption institutional reform, with international implementation and oversight.

Obviously, this isn’t going to happen (perhaps with the exception of sovereign wealth funds). I am exaggerating for effect. However, the one principle we can take from this scenario is the possibility of allocating funds for internationally managed anticorruption initiatives as a prerequisite, nonnegotiable precondition to any other form of assistance for those governments with a history of embezzlement.

I say this because donors are sometimes taken to task when refusing to simply turn large sums of money over to corrupt governments (for local consumption), rather than (at the very least) bringing in their own people to do the job. But why should ECHO, USAID, or the IMF trust its funds to, for instance, the Republic of Niger, whose own Customs regulations (for the past 50 years) actually mandate that “only 40 per cent of the income from fines and sanctions at customs goes to the public Treasury, with the remainder split between customs inspectors according to a set formula” (Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2008, 7.1, pp. 134-135, available on demand at http://www.transparency.org/content/download/32775/502125)? Why indeed, when, for instance, senior officials in two of Niger’s highest governmental offices – Ari Ibrahim, Minister for Health, and Harouna Hamani, Minister of Education – recently embezzled no less than US$8.8 million in aid (2002-2006) from the European Union’s Education Development Programme (ibid.)?

Problems arise when donor countries stipulate excessive conditionalities solely for the purpose of their own benefit ; for instance, “40 percent of aid is made conditional on its being spent on goods and services purchased from the donor country;” and in regards to exports, according to Action Aid, “‘tariff and non-tariff barriers, dumping and product standards cost an estimated $100 billion per year to developing countries, 50 percent more than total official aid’” (Marsden & Hyland, 2005, G8 agrees to paltry debt forgiveness package, WSWS).

(The debate over protectionism is beyond the scope of this post. However, for an interesting article in favor of trade liberalization, see “The False Promise of Gleneagles: Misguided Priorities at the Heart of the New Push for African Development”) (Tupy, M., 24 April 2009, Development Policy Analysis no. 9, available on demand at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10145 ).

Concerning this and other inherent failures of the current aid system, I would highly recommend Oxford and Harvard educated economist Dambisa Moyo’s book “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa” (Moyo, 2009), which the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has called “a compelling case for a new approach…her central point is indisputable…” http://www.dambisamoyo.com/deadaid.html (an excerpt from which is available here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0374139563/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link). Ms. Jibunoh and Dr. Moyo concur concerning the desirability of funding local entrepreneurial initiatives directly, through microloans.

The other strong point of Ms. Jibunoh’s argument is that of the urgency of taking immediate measures to combat preventative diseases, especially malaria (a farmer in Kenya lost his child because he couldn’t afford to buy a $1 mosquito net, or four days’ wages) (“A Dollar a Day, p. 1,” 2007, BBC Documentary Archive, min. 4.15). (Somalia’s Baidoa General Hospital has no running water, electricity, or oxygen; never has enough painkillers; and the doctors haven’t been paid for years)(Africa Today , 17 April 2008, BBC World Service, min.12.30). She makes quite a powerful, cogent, and compelling argument in this regard.

Despite whatever disagreements I may have with Ms. Jibunoh concerning international obligations, I respect her highly for her heartfelt concern for, and passionately devoted efforts on behalf of, the protection of vulnerable populations. Hers is a voice of conscience; her dedication is commendable. She is an intelligent, articulate professional with insight and wisdom on this issue.

- Ivan Veller, M.Ed.

September 5, 2009 at 12:48 pm

Я считаю, что Вы допускаете ошибку. Пишите мне в PM, пообщаемся.