John Mbaku, Roy, and others have spoken for me on this. The op-ed that provoked this conversation displays a shockingly pedestrian understanding of aid, portraying it as some kind of largesse altruistically dolled out to the benighted populations of the world. Even my American undergraduate students, some of them super-patriots who believe against the statistical evidence that the US gives a greater percentage of its GDP as aid than it actually does, have the sense to discern the self-interest that underpins Western aid. In addition to the points about stiffling conditionalities, the wilful financial patronage of rogue regimes, and the recycling of aid money through complicit Western financial institutions, one should note that most so-called aid are actually soft loans but loans nonetheless, designed to be repaid with interest and penalties that the countries struggle with, payments which hamstring and mortage future financial resources and prevent crucial social investments in education, health, and infrastructure. Payments which amount to double exploitation since the original loans produced no positive economic outcome for the debtor country and were instead frittered away to Western banks. The writer of this piece is so misinformed about aid it would be better to have him thoroughly reeducated.
And, yes, his commentary on corruption simply goes over familiar and tired territory. It breaks no new ground in our understanding of corruption in Nigeria and instead repeats the pathologizing Western hyperboles about corruption in Africa. This Western anti-corruption hysteria of course conveniently ignores the corruption on the home front while repeating arithemetically impossible numbers and problematic statistical extrapolations. What's more, the author commits the elemental but common Western error of suggesting that Nigeria/Africa is hobbled by the corruption of the everyday, quotidian corruption if you will, when in fact the bane of Nigeria's regression is public sector or governmental corruption. This distinction is not a pedantic one; it is necessary if one wants to seperate sanctimonious and hypocritical anti-corruption rhetoric from a genuine concern about corruption's impact on Nigeria/Africa. For as I argued in a published paper, we care about corruption not for its own sake or because it says anything peculiar about Africa or Africans--that is the stuff of ill-informed and prejudiced Westerners seeking to validate themselves by criminalizing and pathologizing Others. Instead we care about corruption in Africa because of its moral consequences---because corruption's moral consequences are greater in Africa than they are in the West, where there is, to be sure, a high incidence of both quotidian and public sector corruption but where the consequences of this corruption are hardly felt because of the sheer size and scale of the economy and the existence of susustainable foundational social infrastructures that insulate citizens from corruption's societal effects.
On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Roy Doron <konstrukt@gmail.com> wrote:
One of the stipulations of most foreign aid to countries is that recipient countries must use up to 80% of the aid received on programs, products and services from the donor country. Thus, in many cases, foreign aid is not much more than a subsidy for large corporations based in the donor country.
According to the World Bank, in 2008 in Uganda only 18% of the contract value of World Bank-funded projects went to local firms. For contracts valued at over $1m, that share dropped to 11%. Firms from China and the UK won the bulk of large World Bank-funded contracts in Uganda, 32% and 19% respectively. (source: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2011/sep/07/aid-benefits-donor-countries-companies) Donor countries thus have little incentive to lower or change the conditions of aid because those conditions might harm the political future of politicians who are using international aid to subsidize industry in their own backyards.
The larger point of this article comes on the heels of the policeman in Nigeria that was sacked for doing what every other policeman in the country has been doing for decades: extorting civilians for dash or other imagined penalties. This article attempts to put the policeman's crime in the context for people unfamiliar with Nigeria's climate of corruption, which is not unique by any means.
On Monday, August 12, 2013 8:49:17 AM UTC-4, Felix Kayman wrote:That corruption at very high levels of government is endemic in Nigeria is not news. So why are foreign donor countries still extending aid to corruption prone countries like Nigeria? Certainly not because they wish to promote development in such countries. After all, it is a trite notion that no nation has ever left the space of underdevelopment by receiving aid. In fact, there is consistent evidence that foreign aid tends to further impoverish the developing countries that receive them because of the unpublicized conditions that are associated with such grants. Therefore, one reason that may accounts for the continued donation of aid to countries like Nigeria by developed countries like the UK could be that it is in the best interest of the donor country. So when this writer claims that it is better to burn the aid money rather than award it to Nigeria, he overlooks the fact that the aid grants is a strategy by which the UK government supports local manufacturers and organisations, because part of the associated clause of such grants is that Nigeria would continue to patronise UK manufacturers. It is not an accident that most foreign grants for education are directed towards funding Nigerians studying in UK universities, rather than to strengthening research capacity of the local universities. Then the donors will then turn around and report that donation is not reaching the 'ordinary Nigerians'.
On Saturday, August 10, 2013 11:19:30 PM UTC+1, Roy Doron wrote:It is estimated that since 1960, about $380 billion (£245 billion) of government money has been stolen — almost the total sum Nigeria has received in foreign aid.
And that even when successive governments attempt to recover the stolen money, much of this is looted again.
President Sani Abacha, a military dictator who ruled in the Nineties, had accrued a staggering $4billion (£2.58billion) fortune by the time he died
In essence, 80 per cent of the country's substantial oil revenues go to the government, which disburses cash to individual governors and hundreds of their cronies, so effectively these huge sums remain in the hands of a mere 1 per cent of the Nigerian population.
--
Thanks,
Roy--
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