From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Wed Jul 09 2008 - 00:29:50 EDT
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-luttwaktupy8-2008jul08,0,3973792.story
>From the Los Angeles Times The aid Africa can't afford If the G-8 really
wants to help, it should cut off funds for dysfunctional states. By Edward
N. Luttwak and Marian L. Tupy
July 8, 2008
African development is high on the list of topics for the leaders of the
Group of 8 countries meeting in Hokkaido, Japan. The host country has
already pledged to double its aid to Africa from the current $6.9 billion
over the next five years. President Bush, arriving in Japan on Sunday, made
it clear he planned to push other G-8 nations to meet their 2005 promises
to increase African aid.
Representatives of rich countries seem united in their belief that Africa
would benefit from more international assistance and oblivious to the harm
that aid has already inadvertently caused to African populations by
propping up Africa's most dysfunctional states.
Instead of serving their people, most African states function as vehicles
for the self-enrichment of political elites that have inherited none of the
public-spiritedness of their colonial predecessors but all of the latter's
contempt for the African masses. The remedy, therefore, might be to let
Africa's failing neocolonial states disintegrate totally -- so that organic
African political structures can emerge.
One of the key innovations that made the birth of the modern state possible
was the emergence of a fundamental distinction between the government and
the state. Over time, "states" came to mean the permanent territorial
institutions that belong to all citizens, while "governments" denoted
groups of people with temporary control of the machinery of the state. That
crucial distinction nourished the ethos of public service that makes the
embezzlement of public funds and all other abuses of state resources not
only illegal but shameful.
The historical process whereby individual loyalties to families and clans
lost ground to loyalties to states spanned many centuries in the West. Up
to colonialism and after, original family and broader in-group loyalties
remained largely intact in Africa.
When the colonial powers imposed the machinery of the modern state on
Africa, complete with tax collectors, customs officers, police officers and
soldiers, they did not instill an ethos of public service in local
populations. After all, they meant to govern with their own officials. When
Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, for example, it had only
three Africans in the entire civil service and only 30 university
graduates.
Is it surprising that when the colonial administrators abruptly left,
almost all of their African successors proceeded to use their official
positions to benefit themselves, their families and tribes? In fact, many
Africans believe that it is immoral not to help family and clan if one can
do so.
Corruption in Africa is almost a matter of common sense: As long as
everyone else is abusing public office to benefit their clans and families,
it remains self-defeating not to do so as well. A teacher in, say, Kenya
may draw his government salary but seldom visit the classroom. Instead,
he'll hold a second job -- driving a taxicab, maybe. In doing so, he may
have learned from city government, in which public servants are nominally
responsible for the delivery of public services but seldom do anything at
all.
Most African states are therefore predators on the people they are supposed
to serve and protect. Police officers extort bribes instead of protecting
life and property; soldiers rape and rob the people they are supposed to
protect from foreign attack; teachers collect salaries but do not teach;
customs officers extract bribes instead of collecting duties; and for many
African diplomats, foreign tours amount to prolonged shopping vacations.
>From a historical perspective, then, the greatest harm inflicted by
colonialism was to interrupt the organic evolution of indigenous African
governments and states. That harm is being perpetuated by Western
governments and nongovernmental organizations that want to help African
populations.
On a micro level, Africa is littered with failed projects financed by
foreign aid, including a steel plant in Ajaokuta, Nigeria, that does not
produce steel and agricultural projects in Mali that decreased rather than
increased the production of grain. Millions of Africans have been uprooted,
with their livelihoods destroyed, by the pursuit of harebrained
agricultural and irrigation schemes dreamed up by ignorant and arrogant, if
well-meaning, foreigners.
On a macro level, aid has kept predatory African states alive by enriching
corrupt political leaders and paying the salaries of their bureaucrats,
soldiers and police. Uganda, by no means an outlier when it comes to
"budget support," receives 50% of its annual government revenue from
foreign aid. Economist Paul Collier of Oxford University showed that aid
pays for up to 40% of African weapons purchases. On a continent where
interstate conflicts are mercifully rare, those weapons are often used to
crush domestic opposition -- as has been happening in Zimbabwe.
Pulling aid away from dysfunctional African states seems like a shocking
move. Allowing failing states to collapse, it will be said, could lead to
anarchy and turn Africa into a haven for terrorists. In the aftermath of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, however, many now believe that terrorists are
best confronted by security measures, including intelligence gathering and
surgical strikes against individual terrorist groups, rather than by social
engineering on the scale of entire countries.
Aid is social engineering par excellence. But after 50 years and hundreds
of billions of dollars, it should be clear that aid has failed to make the
modern state viable in most of Africa. Instead, it has prevented the
emergence and growth of authentic African polities rooted in African
traditions. Aid should be ended along with most of the well-meaning but
mostly harmful Western involvement in African affairs.
The well-meaning G-8 leaders can find an outlet for good works at home --
African countries are too poor to afford their charity.
Edward N. Luttwak is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. Marian L. Tupy is a policy analyst at the Cato
Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
--
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