A major international conference gets underway in Accra, Ghana, today, and the thrust is effectiveness of donor aid.
The moneylenders — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other multilateral agencies — are the key players at this parley, where the giver and the receiver are negotiating the skewed benefits of aid.
The meeting, coming three years after a similar one in Paris, France, is as farcical as it is paradoxical.
Farcical because everyone knows that donor aid has not helped the developing nations in any significant way. On the contrary, it has created a dependency syndrome, sucked creative talents and consigned millions of people to destitution.
Likewise, it is paradoxical in the sense that the givers, knowing very well their profit motives, can pretend that they want to make aid effective. Everyone is pretending to be well-meaning when, in actual sense, no one is.
Even before the meeting starts, the lenders are already sealing new deals using the old perverted terms. Corrupt leaders in the South are busy wiring their ill-gotten wealth to the banks in the North.
A review of the short history of this engagement is vital. At the Paris meeting, the representatives of governments and donors agreed on five key principles about aid, namely, ownership, alignment, harmonisation, results management and mutual accountability. In reality, these have not been effected.
Contrary to the resolutions, aid is donor-driven and the receivers have little say on the timing, projects to be implemented and processes involved. The terms are dictated by the givers.
Consultants and service providers from the giver countries are routinely looped into the donor projects and at the end of the day, up to 60 per cent of the aid fund rolls back to Western capitals.
Against this backdrop, the Accra meeting should not be about aid effectiveness, but how the developing countries can wean themselves off aid. The accent must shift from aid to fair trade.
But as the World Trade Organisation meetings have proved since the Doha caucus of 2001, fair trade is a pipe dream.
The onus is on the developing countries of the south to enhance trade among themselves.
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