So you thought all vultures flew?

This weekend, the London weekly magazine, New Statesman devoted a full page to an interview with Dambisa Moyo, author and “economist”, in which she was at it again, going on about how “aid” is useless to African countries and makes them dependent. http://www.newstatesman.com/africa/2010/03/interview-aid-zambia-jobs

Why the Western media give this woman all that space is a mystery to me. Why don't they, instead, give the space to another woman who is actually on the ground, not theorising but trying to save lives and improve the living conditions of those she has saved by ending civil war from her society?

I am talking, of course, about Mrs Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of Liberia, who has just paid a visit to Ghana.

I gained a very good impression of her when I went to New York to interview her for South magazine in 1986, and true to her reputation, she has, since she took office in January 2006, been battling with poverty in the country that had been torn to bits by two decades of civil war.

She needs to build schools, rehabilitate hospitals and clinics repair roads sink wells to give people water, and above all, give the people a sense that something can be done to lessen their pain.

In all these endeavours, Liberians are volunteering their labour, or working for very little pay.

What they need are the tools for the job — cement, nails, electric pumps, coal-tar, spare parts to repair broken machinery.

And the trucks to take people and materials to and from the sites where work is going on.

All these things can only be bought with foreign exchange. And Liberia's shattered economy has very little of that.

But its shortfall in foreign exchange earnings can be made up by carefully targeted aid. Mrs Johnson Sirleaf, having been a banker like Ms Moyo (in fact, she held a much more responsible position in a bank: regional Vice-President of Citibank) knows how to make a penny go a long way.

But she must first lay hands on that penny.
Yet listen to Dambisa Moyo: “The fundamental problem is that the aid industry has become so pervasive that governments abdicate their responsibilities.”

Mrs Johnson Sirleaf will “abdicate her responsibilities” to an aid organisation? It is not only an insult but a deadly lie, which will, if listened to by the politicians of the rich West with as much relish as the Western media, only make the rehabilitation of Liberia unnecessarily difficult.

In order to earn the foreign exchange that will finance its rehabilitation, it cannot do this if the country's roads are full of potholes; if its ports are incapable of efficiently loading exports into ships and offloading crucial imports from them; and if it cannot import medicine to keep the dock-workers healthy.

In other words, without foreign exchange, Liberia will be chasing her own tail.

Now, Mrs Johnson Sirleaf is not the late Mobutu Sese Seko. Nor is she Omar Bongo or the panoply of other African leaders, in whose hands money melted into nonsensical expenditures mainly conceived out of the fancies of megalomania.

But Ms Moyo lumps Mrs Johnson Sirleaf together with these African dunderheads when she says “governments abdicate their responsibilities” when they obtain aid.

The notion is so stupid it makes one want to tear one's hair out. If a government is foolish or corrupt or both, then it will do idiotic things, whether with aid money or its own money.

But certainly not all African governments are stupid? For instance, in her interview, Ms Moyo singled out Botswana for praise.

But she implied that Botswana is prosperous only because it encourages private investment.

What she omits to mention is the wise leadership provided by Botswana's late President, Sir Seretse Khama and his successors, who have been clever enough to leave the mining and selling of diamonds (a highly skilled operation better left to private companies) to De Beers (now Debtswana) whilst keeping a watchful eye on how it goes about its business.

The Government of drought-stricken Mali isn't stupid, either. But if Western Governments listen to Ms Moyo, Mali should be denied the aid that will enable it to import the fertiliser that can help Mali's farmers increase their cotton yield — when the rainfall is good (that is).

I urge Ms Moyo and those who subscribe to her views to watch a programme shown by the BBC TV programme, Newsnight, recently:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8538889.stm

This programme is about the activities of Western companies, known as “Vulture Funds”, which buy up “dead cheap”, the debts of poor countries that contract international debts and are unable to pay them back. Nations such as Liberia.

http://www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/?lid=2893
One such “Vulture Fund” recently sued Liberia for $28 million and won. The Liberian debt for which $28 million is being demanded was bought at a derisory price.

Countries that allow “Vulture Funds” and other predator companies to use their law courts to screw poor countries like Liberia, bear a responsibility for Liberia's dying babies and school children, who are sinking into illiteracy.

They can fulfil this responsibility by giving such countries aid.

Of course, there are flaws in the aid system. But too much is made of the ineffectiveness of aid.

If a project is well thought out by the two sides; if inbuilt auditing of funds is agreed upon; if there is enough flexibility in the disbursement of funds, so as to allow for materials to be sourced from the cheapest sellers and not necessarily from the donor country only, aid for particular projects can be made to work.

I know this first-hand, for Ghana's Volta River Dam at Akosombo, to whose construction I was an eyewitness, has served the country handsomely since it came on stream in 1966. It was built with aid from the US, Britain and the World Bank.

The negotiations for this aid were almost interminable. But it meant there were no loopholes in the project's profile.

The deficiencies in aid financing are too well known not to be capable of elimination by a pair of countries determined to make aid work.

As for Ms Moyo and her ilk, I request them not to view aid in isolation.

They should remember whose slave labour built up the economies of those countries currently capable of donating aid.

They should carry out research into the histories of the port cities of Bristol, Liverpool and London and maybe they will appreciate that these cities did not become rich in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, merely because they had good merchants, but merchants who made huge profits from human beings kidnapped from Africa.

Account should also be taken of the amount of profiteering that colonial-style investments in Africa — buy raw materials on the cheap, ship them in your country's own vessels “home” to add value, hundreds of times over, to what was paid for the raw materials, and flog the finished product — enabled Britain, the US, France, Portugal, Germany and Spain derived from such investments in order to become the rich countries they are today.

If the Governments of these countries give back little bit of the taxes they scooped from the companies as aid to Africa, it is not the act of charity it is often touted to be.

It is but a small part settlement of an enormous debt which may not be acknowledged legally, but looms very large when moral justice comes into the picture.

Credit: Cameron Duodu/Ghanaian Times