SPIEGEL Interview with African Economics Expert
"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!"
The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...
Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.
SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.
Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.
Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there's a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program -- which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It's only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it's not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa ...
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Too Much of a Good Thing
By Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke, Der Spiegel
07 April 2005
 Ethiopia is often a victim of severe draught. |
Part I: Choking on Aid Money in Africa
Ahead of this week's G8 conference in Scotland, the world's richest nations forgave billions in debt to the world's poorest. Great news, right? Not necessarily. Decades of Western aid have done little to ease suffering in Africa -- indeed the situation is worse than ever. Is it time for the West to rethink its aid strategy?
The aid workers are thirsty and the beer is flowing: There is a party mood in Rumbak, the city of tents which at one time almost became the capital of Southern Sudan. It's is a bit like the end of the day atmosphere at a trade fair: The stands have closed down and people have knocked off work.
All over the place people in sandals and washed-out T-shirts emblazoned with meaningful slogans ("no cattle plague -- more milk") and where they are stationed ("Somalia, Uganda, Sudan"), dart down side streets. The aid organizations' colored pennants flutter in the hot evening wind.
Several times a day local people heave heavy crates out of the rickety old planes which have just landed. Obscure airlines use these planes, before they are sent to the scrap yard, to turn a fast buck. Rumbak, which until recently was a God-forsaken hole, is now booming.
After over 20 years of civil war between the North and the South in Sudan, a peace agreement has now been reached. In April it was decided in Oslo that Sudan would be granted $4.5 billion in reconstruction aid. A decision which, although greeted joyfully by many people, is viewed with skepticism by Norway's minister for development aid, Hilde Frafjord Johnson: "Much more aid has been agreed on than I think we actually need."
This sudden wealth is a cause for concern even among the aid workers themselves. "If we carry on like this," says Lammart Zwaagstra, who comes from the Netherlands and works for the EU's department for humanitarian aid, "then people will never stand on their own two feet."
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Africans to Bono: “For God’s Sake, Please STOP!”
Jennifer Brea, AfricaBeat & The American
June 22, 2007 * Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Africa is a continent of despair and desperation. Here, eight year-olds toting AK-47s massacre whole villages and eccentric dictators feast on the organs of the opposition, believing it’ll boost their mojo. Tsetse flies nibble on the eyelids of starving children who sport distended bellies like it’s their birthright, not to mention the fact that by the time you finish reading this article, another six Africans will die from malaria, five from AIDS, and seventeen from poverty and hunger. Also, the wildlife is beautiful and the people like to dance and sing.
That’s Africa, and it’s in desperate need of our help. Luckily, a few enlightened megastars from America and Europe have come to save it.
Curiously, not all the natives are grateful.
Earlier this month, world leaders and Bono met in Heiligendamm, Germany for the G8 summit to renew their commitment to increase aid to Africa. Vanity Fair’s special Africa issue, edited by the man himself, hit newsstands with 20 celebrity covers, a gaggle of celebrity writers, and a conspicuous shortage of Africans.
Meanwhile in Arusha, Tanzania, at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, a group of the continent's intellectual elite issued a very different plea: stop flooding Africa with aid. Since 1984, an assortment of Silicon Valley billionaires, child prodigies, ex-presidents, artistic geniuses, mad scientists, and movie stars have descended on Monterrey, California for TED, for an annual event The Economist called "Davos for optimists." Three weeks ago, TED held its first-ever conference in Africa, bringing together trademark optimism with an even more humbling sort of A-list.
Eleni Gabre-Madhin, a World Bank economist, returned to her native Ethiopia to start a commodities exchange to prevent future famines. Daniel Annerose invented software in Senegal that allows farmers to track market prices via SMS text messaging. Alieu Conteh built the first cellular network in the Congo, Florence Seriki, Nigeria's first computer manufacturing company.
Then there's William Kamkwamba, the undisputed showstopper, a teenager from rural Malawi who, at age fourteen, built a windmill from plastic scrap and an old bicycle frame that generates enough electricity to light his family's house.
These speakers were selected to support a thesis, painfully obvious but somehow radical in this age: Africa won't be "saved" by aid, but by the ingenuity and determination of its own people.
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Charity and the savage
By The Narrator, Majority Rights
Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 01:51 AM
There is an old, outdated saying that goes, “Charity begins at home”. I say outdated because, obviously, today charity begins at least a thousand miles from home. Whether it is flying half-way around the world to bring their self-righteous selves to the savages or just simply bringing the savages back home, the missionaries and charitable types love to seek out those who are least like themselves and take the opportunity to bask in their own benevolence.
And to note, I use the word “savage” in the true spirit of these people who travel about the globe and dazzle various primitives with their presence. After all, charity automatically requires one person to be in a superior position and another to be in an inferior position.
No wonder then that the most charitable people often strike us as the most arrogant and pompous. So referring to the beneficiaries of such self-aggrandizing types as savages or primitives is only done in deference to the social vantage point the aggrandizers enjoy.
Actually, this kind of super-charity (as opposed to the kind that flows naturally back and forth between peoples of similar racial, social and cultural standings) finds its greatest acts of giving through indirect compulsory sacrifice on the part of others. For example, if you and your church/charity arrange to bring a savage into America, you are, through force and cohesion, compelling other members of your community into giving as well. Their taxes and resources will be automatically re-distributed to the savage through healthcare, education, housing and so on. This also happens when tax dollars are sent abroad for charitable purposes.
This, then, is not the community giving but rather the charitable taking. Thus charity has now become an act of aggression which ultimately leads to the despoiling and plundering of communities and (eventually) nations.
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Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS
Kevin Myers, Irish Independent
Thursday July 10 2008
 'Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation,' writes Kevin Myers. A sick child waits in line to be screened at Giara Clinic, Southern Ethiopia |
No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.
So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.
One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .
Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
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Why Africa Has Gone To Hell
by James Jackson, TakiMag
January 08, 2010
White Zimbabweans used to tell a joke—what is the difference between a tourist and a racist? The answer—about a week.
Few seem to joke any more. Indeed, the last time anyone laughed out there was over the memorable headline “Banana Charged with Sodomy” (relating to the Reverend Canaan Banana and his alleged proclivities). Zimbabwe was just the latest African state to squander its potential, to swap civil society for civil strife and pile high its corpses. Then the wrecking virus moves on and a fresh spasm of violence erupts elsewhere. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, even Kenya. Take your pick, for it is the essence of Africa, the recurring A-Z of horror. And as surely as Nelson Mandela took those steps from captivity to freedom, his own country will doubtless shuffle into chaos and ruin.
Mark my words. One day it will be the turn of South Africa to revert to type, its farms that lie wasted and its towns that are battle zones, its dreams and expectations that lie rotting on the veldt.
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Yes, Africa Must Go To Hell
Alex Kurtagic, TakiMag
January 20, 2010
I welcome James Jackson’s courage in pointing out the fact that Africa’s chronic dysfunction is the result of, not white European rule in the past, but black Africans rule in the present—that, rather than its being the result of European colonialism and post-imperial indifference, as is the Left’s contention, chronic dysfunction in the region is the result of European post-colonialism and post-imperial aid programs.
I will not accuse him of Leftism, but Mr. Jackson still commits the fallacy— characteristic of the Left—of judging sub-Saharan Africa by European standards, and still seems to assume that Africa would develop into a European-style civilization if only Africans stopped playing victim and got their act together, for once and for all.
This latter assumption stems from the belief, held by the Left, that black Africans are Europeans with black skin. Said belief is linked to another belief, one that values progress and measures it in terms of convergence with Europe’s present techno-industrial society—a type of society characterized by complex social organization, high technology, industrial production, scientific discovery, capitalism, rule of law, private property, citizen’s rights, modernity, and secular rationalism.
The abnormality of these beliefs in relation to some non-European societies is not obvious to us, because we take them for granted. But taking cognizance of it is important, for the consequences are catastrophic: they underpin the entire aid and white guilt enterprise, which have fuelled a population explosion in the Dark Continent and the consequent tide of hungry and resentful immigrants into Europe and North America.
I have argued for some time that if stability is ever to visit the Dark Continent, we must allow black Africans to diverge from Europe and to reorganize in a manner harmonious with their temperament, proclivities, and endowments.
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