Africa doesn't need handouts: it needs honest governments (ATTN: DANNY GLOVER)

The Daily Telegraph ^ | February 5, 2005 | Niall Ferguson

[MadIvan]

I love Kenya. But I also despair of it. I spent nearly two years of my childhood in Nairobi, and throughout the long, grey years of my Glaswegian youth the memories never left me. The orange dirt roads of Tsavo. The dazzling white beaches of Mombasa. The broiling sun. The pungent rains.

It was just a few years after independence when we went there. The "winds of change" that Macmillan had spoken of in 1960 - 45 years ago this week, as it happens - had blown away British rule.

Kenyatta, with his Kikuyu fly-whisk, was in charge. Every morning the radio played Harambe, harambe, an exuberant anthem that means "Let's all pull together". Yet traces of the old colonial regime lingered on. Just as Kipling loved his Indian aya, so my sister and I loved Miriam, our Kenyan nanny, who taught us Swahili and how to dance the twist.

These and many more memories were rekindled when my wife and I took our children to Kenya for a holiday last month. It was a joy to find Tsavo so little changed. An obliging cow elephant even charged our Land Rover, to the great excitement of my children. The shores south of Diani, though disturbed by the after-effects of the tsunami, were as soothing as ever.

And yet throughout the holiday, I was beset by liberal anxiety. As I sipped my sundowner, was I illicitly enjoying a new form of colonial rule - the imperialism of tourism? Was I having, in the immortal words of the Sex Pistols, a "cheap holiday in other people's misery"?

Shortly before our departure, I had read in manuscript a new and troubling book about the last years of British rule in Kenya, Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Africa.

Though I tried in vain to persuade her to change her title - since the implied parallel with Stalin's labour camps is wildly inappropriate - I could not quibble with her research. Elkins reveals the calculated brutality with which the British colonial authorities overreacted to the movement known as Mau-Mau. Not really ideal pre-holiday reading.

Thank God for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown! Within days of my return from Kenya, they had, between them, reminded me of the dangers of indulging in liberal guilt.

First there was the Prime Minister hobnobbing with Bono and Bill Gates at Davos. Ever since the Labour conference of 2001, Mr Blair has had a hankering worthy of David Livingstone to do something for Africa. "If what [is] happening in Africa today," he told his well-fed audience, "was happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamour that governments would be falling over themselves to do something about this."

As it is, the only people falling over themselves seem to be Mr Blair and Mr Brown, as they vie with one another like a pair of holier-than-thou student politicians to see who can do more to assuage Britain's post-colonial guilt about Africa.

At Davos, Blair pledged £45 million towards the WHO's disease control programme. Not to be outdone, Brown flew to Tanzania to announce that Britain would unilaterally pay 10 per cent of that country's debt repayments to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank, roughly £3.5 million a year. To trump the PM, the Chancellor then offered to do the same for 70 other poor countries. That could present British taxpayers with a bill close to £1 billion. Beat that!

The trouble is that what both Blair and Brown are proposing are mere variations on an old, familiar theme known as "aid". (As Mr Brown's advisers well know, there is no real difference between "debt forgiveness" and handing poor countries a large, gift-wrapped cheque.) But we have been here before. Between 1950 and 1995, Western countries gave away around $1 trillion (in 1985 prices) in aid to poorer countries. But these efforts yielded pitiful results, as New York University economist Bill Easterly has shown, because the recipient countries lacked the political, legal and financial institutions necessary for the money to be used productively.

Indeed, much of the money that has poured into poor countries since the 1950s has simply leaked back out - often to bank accounts in Switzerland. One recent study of 30 sub-Saharan countries calculated that total capital export for 1970-96 was some $187 billion, which, when accrued interest is added, implies that Africa's ruling elites had private overseas assets equivalent to 145 per cent of the public debts their countries owed. The authors of that study conclude that "roughly 80 cents on every dollar borrowed by African countries flowed back [to the West] as capital flight in the same year".

Which brings us back to Kenya and to the fundamental problem of African politics: corruption. In the past week or so, two stories have illustrated just what is wrong with the way Kenya has come to be governed since independence. The first was the response of the authorities in Nairobi to the blunt remarks made by our High Commissioner, Sir Edward Clay, on the subject of the country's "massive looting and/or grand corruption".

Sir Edward was telling it like it is. According to the think-tank Transparency International, Kenya is one of the dozen most corrupt countries in the world. But the Kenyan government blew a gasket. "Sir Edward Clay has just behaved as an enemy of this government," declared the country's justice minister.

The other story that caught my eye concerned the violence that flared up last month in the Kenyan Rift Valley. Just another case of ancient ethnic hatred, in this case between Maasai and Kikuyu? Not quite. As the BBC reported: "The trouble is thought to have started when Maasai herdsmen accused a local Kikuyu politician of diverting a river to irrigate his farm, prompting a water shortage further downstream."

Like Mr Brown, I, too, recently visited Tanzania, where I got to know the son of an opposition politician. For most of his life, his father had been in jail. "You see," he explained to me, "what African politicians find hard to understand about democracy is why, once they have got power, they should have to hand it over to someone else just because of an election."

For power means, above all, money. It means being the guy to whom Brown hands the bulging envelope. So Africa's problem is not a problem that aid can solve. On the contrary: aid may simply make the problem worse. Africa's real problem is a problem of governance, and it is a problem Kenya exemplifies.

Nobody, least of all me, claims that British imperial rule was perfect. Elkins is not the first historian to expose the dark side of colonialism. But most sub-Saharan governments since independence have managed to treat their populations significantly worse than the British did. For all its imperfections, the Colonial Civil Service was not corrupt. When money was sent to build railways or schools, British officials did not simply pocket it.

That cannot expunge the overkill that characterised the British campaign against Mau-Mau. But it serves as a worthwhile reminder that exploitation did not cease with independence. Empires have their faults, no doubt. But independent African governments have often been more exploitative and worse for economic growth. A few more books on that subject would do no harm at all - and might also make holidays in Africa a little easier to enjoy.

[John Lenin]

Great post, I agree with your sentiments.

[NZerFromHK]

They do exist. They tend to be on free-market.net and for the MSM they are actually the "most respectable right-wingers out there". Our MSMs quote people from the Cato Institute approvingly when it comes to defence/US foreign policy issues.

[Brian Allen]

What an astute assesment of Africa's Truths.

Thank you for its posting!

[NZerFromHK]

Formerly active member alpowolf is one glaring example:

http://www.freerepublic.com/~alpowolf/