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A post by Pat

That’s “aid”, not “AIDS”. Billions of dollars of Western aid to Africa has fostered corruption and oppression with very little going towards alleviating poverty. Frontpage interviewed Martin Durkin, a British documentary producer, about the impact of foreign aid on Africa. His opinion—it destroyed Africa.

The ruling elites wind up with the major share of foreign aid, salting it away in foreign private bank accounts. Durkin points out government officials have larger foreign bank accounts than business people.

If you want to get rich in Africa, you join the ruling party or get in with the mafia that masquerades as a civil service, judiciary and police force. By hook or by crook, that’s where the bulk of the aid money ends up.

Being part of the ruling elite in Africa is very lucrative and the aid millionaires are not likely to give up their positions easily, thus dictatorships are perpetuated. Corrupt governments lead to insurgencies and civil wars killing millions. Liberal Westerners refuse to acknowledge the negative impact of aid money, if they can even see the reality. It is more of an emotional, ideological issue for them. They are deluded by their own emotional need to “do good” when in fact they are doing great harm.

The savagery that we see in Africa is not because there’s something funny in the water. It’s not because they’re still hunter-gatherer types at heart and can’t forget some archaic gripe with the neighbors. Africa used to be quite a nice place 40 years ago. But since then, a gigantic volume of aid has wrecked the fabric of civil society. And what has all this aid done to fight African poverty? The UN declared in 1999 that 70 countries – all aid recipients – were poorer than they had been in 1980. The countries that had received the most aid – like Liberia, Zaire and Somalia – had descended in barbarism and anarchy.

Food aid that gets through to the people results in dependency on food imports and acts as a disincentive to foster the local agrarian economy which is the primary basis of African economies. To make matters even worse, the West has put up trade barriers against African food exports. Rich countries restrict imports and subsidize exports of agricultural products. World market prices are depressed for these goods and Africans are forced to import food that they themselves could grow more efficiently. Political catering to the American farm lobby has a lot to do with these policies. Additionally, a scheme euphemistically called “fair trade” is in place. This, at the urging of environmentalists, forces African farmers to maintain primitive farming techniques. It’s OK for Africa to sell food to the West, but only if it is organically grown, i.e., no economic efficiencies in food production.

Famine in Africa is rarely caused by natural disasters these days. It’s caused by aid.

Durkin’s suggested solution, and he’s not alone in this thinking, is to permit free trade to establish a viable African economy.

.. the growth of a successful, wealthy bourgeoisie is the only hope Africans have of building a healthy political system. In other words, when the wealth comes from below, locally, rather than from above from foreign powers. Only then will the African nightmare end.

Financial aid leads to corruption which leads to civil unrest that is not conducive to farming. Whenever farming can go on, the local product cannot compete with food aid and can’t be sold on the international market. I don’t think aid can be suddenly or drastically cut off, but trade not aid is the ultimate answer to Africa’s problems. Is there leeway in Western powers farm policies for giving Africa a chance to earn a living? Misguided liberal thinking is at the core of the destructive nature of financial aid. Will the liberal-left let go of its needy self-righteousness and allow the African people to prosper? That would indeed be acting for the welfare of others. We don’t seem to understand these fundamental truths ourselves any more.