Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
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Authors: Dambisa Moyo
Dead Aid
WHY AID IS NOT WORKING
AND HOW THERE IS
A BETTER WAY FOR AFRICA
Dambisa Moyo
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, NY 10011
Copyright © 2009 by Dambisa Moyo
Foreword copyright © 2009 by Niall Ferguson
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in 2009 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books,
Great Britain, as
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is
Another Way for Africa
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moyo, Dambisa.
Dead aid : why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa / Dambisa Moyo.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-13956-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-13956-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Economic assistance—Africa. 2. Poor—Africa. 3. Africa—Economic conditions—21st century. I. Title.
HC800 .M69 2009
338.91096—dc22
2008055451
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Peter Bauer
To the Excellencies and officials of Europe: We suffer enormously in
Africa. Help us. We have problems in Africa. We lack rights as
children. We have war and illness, we lack food . . . We want to study,
and we ask you to help us to study so we can be like you, in Africa.
Message found on the bodies of Guinean teenagers Yaguine Koita and
Fode Tounkara, stowaways who died attempting to reach Europe in the
landing gear of an airliner
.
Foreword
by Niall Ferguson
It has long seemed to me problematic, and even a little embarrassing, that so much of the public debate about Africa’s economic problems should be conducted by non-African white men. From the economists (Paul Collier, William Easterly, Jeffrey Sachs) to the rock stars (Bono, Bob Geldof), the African discussion has been colonized as surely as the African continent was a century ago. The simple fact that
Dead Aid
is the work of an African black woman is the least of the reasons why you should read it. But it is a good reason nonetheless.
Born and educated in Zambia, Dambisa Moyo also brings to her subject a rare combination of academic expertise and ‘real world’ experience. Her training in economics took her from the World Bank to Harvard and on to Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Since leaving the academy, she has spent eight highly successful years at Goldman Sachs, most recently as Global Economist and Strategist. It is quite a CV.
And this is quite a book. Though she is not the first writer to criticize Western aid programmes in Africa, never has the case against aid been made with such rigour and conviction. Why, asks Moyo, do the majority of sub-Saharan countries ‘flounder in a seemingly never-ending cycle of corruption, disease, poverty, and aid-dependency’, despite the fact that their countries have received more than US$300 billion in development assistance since 1970, The answer she gives is that African countries are poor precisely
because
of all that aid. Despite the widespread Western belief that ‘the rich should help the poor, and the form of this help should be aid’, the reality is that aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower. In Moyo’s startling words: ‘Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.’ In short,
it is (as Karl Kraus said of Freudianism) ‘the disease of which it pretends to be the cure’.
The correlation is certainly suggestive, even if the causation may be debated. Over the past thirty years, according to Moyo, the most aid-dependent countries have exhibited an average annual growth rate of
minus
0.2 per cent. Between 1970 and 1998, when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, the poverty rate in Africa actually rose from 11 per cent to a staggering 66 per cent.
Why? Moyo’s crucial insight is that the receipt of concessional (non-emergency) loans and grants has much same effect in Africa as the possession of a valuable natural resource: it’s a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict, while at the same time discouraging free enterprise.
Moyo recounts some of the more egregious examples of aid-fuelled corruption. In the course of his disastrous reign, Zaire’s President Mobutu Sese Seko is estimated to have stolen a sum equivalent to the entire external debt of his country: US$5 billion. No sooner had he requested a reduction in interest payments on the debt than he leased Concorde to fly his daughter to her wedding in the Ivory Coast. According to one estimate, at least US$10 billion – nearly half of Africa’s 2003 foreign aid receipts – leave the continent every year.
The provision of loans and grants on relatively easy terms encourages this kind of thing as surely as the existence of copious oil reserves or diamond mines. Not only is aid easy to steal, as it is usually provided directly to African governments, but it also makes control over government worth fighting for. And, perhaps most importantly, the influx of aid can undermine domestic saving and investment. She cites the example of the African mosquito net manufacturer who is put out of business by well-intentioned aid agencies doling out free nets.
Moyo offers four alternative sources of funding for African economies, none of which has the same deleterious side effects as aid. First, African governments should follow Asian emerging markets in accessing the international bond markets and taking advantage of the falling yields paid by sovereign borrowers over
the past decade. Second, they should encourage the Chinese policy of large-scale direct investment in infrastructure. (China invested US$900 million in Africa in 2004, compared with just US$20 million in 1975.) Third, they should continue to press for genuine free trade in agricultural products, which means that the US, the EU and Japan must scrap the various subsidies they pay to their farmers, enabling African countries to increase their earnings from primary product exports. Fourth, they should encourage financial intermediation. Specifically, they need to foster the spread of microfinance institutions of the sort that have flourished in Asia and Latin America. They should also follow the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s advice and grant the inhabitants of shanty towns secure legal title to their homes, so that these can be used as collateral. And they should make it cheaper for emigrants to send remittances back home.
In
Dead Aid
, Dambisa Moyo does not pull her punches. ‘In a perfect world,’ she writes, ‘what poor countries at the lowest rungs of economic development need is not a multi-party democracy, but in fact a decisive benevolent dictator to push through the reforms required to get the economy moving.’ In other words, rushing to elections before economic growth has got underway is a recipe for failure. But her most radical proposal comes in the form of a question. ‘What if,’ she asks, ‘one by one, African countries each received a phone call . . . telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off – permanently?’
The phrase ‘shock therapy’ fell into some disrepute in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Yet that is precisely what Dambisa Moyo wants to give her African homeland. It may seem draconian. Yet it is worth remembering that, as she points out, ‘just thirty years ago Malawi, Burundi and Burkina Faso were economically ahead of China on a per capita income basis’. Foreign direct investment and rapidly growing exports, not aid, have been the key to China’s economic miracle. Africa needs to learn from Asia.
This is strong medicine that is being prescribed. But no one who reads
Dead Aid
will doubt that Dambisa Moyo’s primary motivation is to reduce, not to increase, hardship. This is an African
view of Africa’s economic problems. The result is a book that manages to be, at one and the same time, hard-headed and bighearted. This reader was left wanting a lot more Moyo, and a lot less Bono.
In July 1970, ninety students graduated from the University of Zambia, in the country’s capital, Lusaka. Among them were the university’s first black graduates (including some ten young women), and my parents were two of them. They were both studying for undergraduate degrees – my father reading linguistics, and my mother English. They came from different tribes, from different parts of rural colonial Africa: my father, the son of a miner in apartheid South Africa; my mother, the daughter of a man who would later train to be a teacher. My mother did not speak my father’s language, and hence they mainly conversed in English. They met and married while still students.
Zambia (formerly known as Northern Rhodesia) had been independent from British colonial rule for just six years, and the excitement at the prospect of what amazing things lay ahead was palpable. Although, upon graduation, my mother had eleven job offers (at the time companies were very eager to employ black graduates), my father wished to continue his studies. He was offered a scholarship at the University of California at Los Angeles in the USA and, very soon afterwards, my parents packed up my sister and me and decamped to America. Our move was all planned. My parents’ goal was for my father to further his education (later my mother would complete an advanced degree in Britain), and then return to Africa.
The 1970s were an exciting time to be African. Many of our nations had just achieved independence, and with that came a deep sense of dignity, self-respect and hope for the future. My parents lived, worked, and studied in the USA for eight years and upon my father’s Ph.D. graduation, in 1978, they promptly moved back to Zambia, convinced that their future, and the futures of their
children, lay in their homeland. My parents have never lived abroad again – remaining steadfastly committed to the view that they can help their country, their continent (contributing in their own small ways), to one day become politically and economically great. My mother has forged a career in banking – starting as the first Zambian woman bank manager, and rising to be Chairman of one of Zambia’s leading banks. My father has stayed true to academia but has involved himself in broadcasting and also run an anti-corruption organization.
I spent my formative years in Zambia – primary, secondary, and tertiary school; ending up studying Chemistry at the same university as my parents seventeen years earlier. But in July 1990 my studies were interrupted by an attempted coup against the then President, Kenneth Kaunda. Although it didn’t last long, the disruption was enough to shut the university down and have the students sent home. This would be the trigger for me to leave Zambia and, like my father before me, I ended up in the United States on a scholarship, eager to complete my higher education. And, like both my parents, I was certain that I would soon return.