Another point you ignored is that many of the aid projects can effectively--more effectively-- and more cheaply carried out by African skilled and unskilled labor but the conditionalities built into aid often require that foreign workers be hired from the "donor" countries.”
Moses
Thank you for your intemperate response to my humble contribution to what I believe, is a serious discussion.
I did acknowledge that there is indeed need for more foreign aid budget efficiencies. You missed that in anger. Why are you this angry about a subject that you know you and I for now at least, are at best are peripheral discussants?
Do you not know that no country is at the end of the day obliged to accept foreign aid? Foreign aid acceptance has always been a choice. It still is. You wrote like foreign aid was forced.
What is also true is that foreign aid and loans come as a package. The aid recipient country is not always able, or diligent enough, to pick and choose. Do you not know that if you do a loan application to a bank, your choice are clear: accept the bank’s terms and receive the loan, or reject the bank’s term and be denied the loan. You must have heard that he who pays the piper calls the tune. You probably know, as I do that beggers are usually not choosers.
You make the point about whose money, aid funds are. Do you mean “free” money or loans? Let us suppose that you mean loans. How many African countries have actually fully paid back their foreign loans with aggressive loan forgiveness pleas and chants? Do you not know that loan forgiveness is almost always, an agenda item at meetings of African countries? How many African countries have begged for and received debt forgiveness in the last two decades? To what extent are foreign aid funds, really Africa’s money therefore?
Why in your opinion, are many African countries standing, sometimes cap-in-hand, in foreign aid lines? If you answer this question truthfully you will understand why, on both past and present experience, many African countries cannot be trusted to judiciously and prudently implement foreign aid budgets and programs without close supervision of aid agencies’ personnel.
You are yet to address the question of what African countries need to do and must do to end their obsessive and shameful pursuit of and dependence on foreign aid. What needs to be done as a matter of great urgency, is to extricate Africa from it apparently settled state of indigence. Until this happens, you may continue to look back and forth in anger.
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 11:22 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Director of Water Programs, charity: water, New York, Projects in Africa
Anunobi,
Let me speak for myself. I was not condemning foreign aid or endorsing it--in totality. My critique was specific and narrow, directed at the huge overhead that comes with aid delivery and that ends up consuming, by some estimates, as much as 50 percent of aid money, leaving a trail of unfinished and substandard projects. Which brings me to your question about "whose money is being misapplied (wasted) anyway....? Implied in the question is the assumption that the money is foreign money and so how it is used should not be the problem of Africans. Actually, most of it is not foreign money, since, apart from grants, bilateral or otherwise, these monies are actually low to zero interest LOANS to be repaid by the AFRICAN countries who receive the aid. The fact that much of aid money comprises of loans is precisely why Africans should take a keen interest in how the money is spent and on what it is spent. So, in many cases, the answer to your question would be that it's Africans' money. Therefore, I think it is legitimate for Africans to raise these issues.
Your "long term" implications of aid argument is one that everyone is familiar with and shares. I have not seen anyone who is not a critic of aid dependency. Yes, it is a more significant critique of aid but there is no reason why one should focus on it to the exclusion of critiquing the obvious cesspool of waste that the aid industry has become. Another point you ignored is that many of the aid projects can effectively--more effectively-- and more cheaply carried out by African skilled and unskilled labor but the conditionalities built into aid often require that foreign workers be hired from the "donor" countries. In other words, it is not the case that without these expensive, over-pampered foreign workers the aid projects cannot be carried out. The waste that comes with SUV, five star hotel and expensive holiday-laden lifestyles is therefore entirely avoidable. Often, however, the aid is just another opportunity for the "donor" country to create jobs for its citizens and contracts for its manufacturers. There is nothing wrong with "donor" countries deploying aid in a self-interested way. But there is also nothing wrong with highlighting this reality as a way to complicate and critique the simplistic, self-serving narrative of altruistic Euro-Americans helping helpless Africans.
You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with your point about pushing for less aid dependency at home and for reforms that would make aid unnecessary. That point is so banal that I don't think it should be a big part of this discussion.
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Anunoby, Ogugua <AnunobyO@lincolnu.edu> wrote:
I must be missing something.
Is it being suggested that all “Euro-American” aid to Africa does not help targeted poor Africans because of budget inefficiencies?
Is it being suggested that foreign aid work should be devoid of some of life’s comforts which serve as incentive for potential foreign aid workers?
Whose money is being misapplied (wasted) anyway if indeed many foreign aid budgets are misapplied?
It must not be forgotten that most foreign aid work are jobs. The jobs are often times some of the least salaried for those who choose to take the jobs. Foreign aid work in Africa is quite often times in unfamiliar, rural, and undeveloped communities and territory and laden with personal risk for foreigner aid workers.
There is not much that is wrong with criticism that are intended to improve the efficiency of foreign aid budgets.
Critics of Euro-American aid to Africa should however be slow to extended their criticism to foreign aid workers. Many of them risk life and limb, to help communities and people they did not have to care about. Does anyone know what the poor Africans whose lives are impacted upon by Euro-American aid feel and say about foreign aid?
A more serious gripe about all foreign aid to Africa it seems to me, should be about foreign aid’s long-term effect on the can-do spirit of beneficiary countries (governments and people). Do we all know that foreign aid is an item in the national and other budgets of some African countries? Is it not the case for example, that President Mugabe of Zimbabwe argues that the criticism of and “hostility” to his government by the British and American (U.S.A.) governments especially, are the primary reasons for the decline in foreign aid to his country? President Mugabe apparently does not seem to know that good governance and self reliance as viable alternatives to reliance on foreign aid. Foreign aid is not all bad as inefficient as their budget implementations might be. Europe and Japan after the great war of 1939-45), and South Korea and Taiwan are cases in point.
African critics of Euro-American aid to Africa may wish to consider using their knowledge and time better i.e. persuade African countries’ governments to pay more attention to improving living conditions for their citizens such that all foreign aid to Africa is unnecessary sooner rather never.
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 12:07 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Director of Water Programs, charity: water, New York, Projects in Africa
Pius et al,
We were just talking about this in my class the other day. The truth is that the SUV/Five Star Hotel (counter)narrative of the Mercy Industrial Complex (apologies to you, Pius), does not sell with Americans. Students, politicians, liberal, conservatives, regular folks, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't because it refuses to fit neatly into the feel-good rhetoric of American generosity and of the army of self-sacrificial Americans and Westerns that slaves in the scotching African sun and treacherous bush to bring development and uplift to Africans. Needless to say, when I broached the subject of the crazy overhead of NGOS and charities it didn't find many takers. Let's just say it wasn't the most popular segment of the seminar. It obviously threw a wrench in the settled self-narrations about American sacrifice for the good of Africans. When I personalized it and asked the students if, upon graduation, they would take a job with some "development agency" in some of the African villages we saw in class movies without "hazard allowances," comfortable SUVs, cozy hotels, and paid holidays, the class fell silent. Once I drove that point home, it became clear to them that the aid and charity industry is a global behemoth that "helps" and sustains Euro-Americans as much, if not more than, it "helps" Africans. This is precisely the reason why, broken as it obviously is, the aid industry is impervious to reform, rethink, and self-critique. Too many people, blacks and whites, are invested in it.
On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Tony Agbali <attahagbl@yahoo.com> wrote:
| And Pius, don't also forget that image of "Mama Africa" painted by Wole Soyinka's "You Must Set Forth at Dawn," the kind that loves Africa more than Africans, while paving a way for a distinguished and functional lifestyle springing forth from donations. Apart from the notion of ongoing western patronization of these unfortunate "uncivilized," hapless and helpless poor, so often visualized in civilizing and salvific constructs, this modified and modulated modern "civilizing missions" further produce new imaginaries and images of Africa of a stunted continent. These evolutionized tribe of new civilizers also become the official "mouth-organs" of Africa and African issues in the west, aided in large measure by the beguiling pixelized imageries of Kwashior and emanciated children daily reified on the media- TV, newspaper (secular and church ads), etc,). Not only does this objectified pixeled images produce imaginative effects through the way it darkens and blurs the screen (in the case of TV ads), but acutely and intently are designed toward jolting sympathetic action from the "civilized and privileged" imagination into pivoting effective action that stimulates their consciences into reaching deep into their pockets. It is not for nothing, therefore, that these imageries are often depicted in black and white photography or videography, as effective and profoundly symbolic tools in creating stark differentiations that cast and contrast between our ways and theirs,and through masquerading the ideas of darkness, ancient, back-wood civilization, given emphasis to the heightened Dubyan ideology that pegs the distinction between "us" and "them." --- On Wed, 11/10/10, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
|
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