Who exactly is benefitting from foreign aid given to African countries?

Self-reliance and poverty reduction are the ultimate goals of foreign aid to any country. Foreign aid is supposed to influence economic growth and promote the sustainable development of the country receiving aid. It is supposed to make a difference in the lives of people and increase their self-reliance. Foreign aid, comes in three different forms namely, economic development assistance, military aid, and humanitarian relief assistance, which all generally aims at promoting development through, economic and political reforms that promote human rights, good governance and democracy, through investments in technological innovations and ideas that make land, capital or labor more productive, through investments in physical and human capital and through institutional and capacity building with technical assistance. Apart from these “standard assumptions” cum motives for foreign aid, empirical evidence and literature reveal that there are other disguised motives for foreign aid. Foreign aid is and has been a tool of statecraft often used by the government providing it to encourage or reward politically desirable behavior on the part of the government receiving it. It has been an instrument of coercion and a tool for the exercise of power over poor nations by donors. Donor countries have been known to attempt to influence the policies of poor countries by promising to provide, or threatening to withhold financial or material assistance. Such a leverage may be exercised not only in the direct interest of the citizens of the poor countries but also in the direct political or economic interest of the donors. During the Cold War era aid was part and parcel of international power struggles between the West and the East and was given to developing countries in order to keep them in the same camp or prevent them from allying themselves with the other side. Economic development assistance in Africa has over the decades been used as an instrument by the donors to achieve a variety of non-economic objectives such as a containment of communist expansion in Africa. Therefore foreign aid to Africa more frequently reflect political considerations of donor countries rather than the real needs of the recipient nations.

Despite the flow of foreign aid to many African countries over the years since the 1960’s, Africa, continues to wallow in seemingly perpetual states of misery, poverty, crises, hunger, and chaos despite massive foreign aid being poured in. Paradoxically, most of the countries that are basket cases of lethargy and poverty, including Zimbabwe, have been recipients of massive amounts of foreign aid since their independences. Despite the massive infusion of billions of dollars in aid into Africa, there is little to suggest that aid has succeeded in either stimulating self-sustaining economic growth or improving the plight of the marginalized Africans. Africa’s development record has indicated that greater aid intensity has not necessarily led to sustainable development, improved institutions improved infant mortality rates, increase in primary school enrollments, improved life expectancy or good governance. The paradox is, how can massive inflows of aid coexist with massive economic deterioration? So who exactly is benefitting from foreign aid given to most African countries? Almost every African country in crisis today has received abundant foreign aid. Aid was found to primarily benefit a wealthy political elite and not the poor citizens it is meant to benefit. Most of these countries have slid into anarchy and unspeakable abuse of human rights of their citizens while abusing foreign aid to oppress the poor and sink them deeper into poverty. Indeed, foreign aid almost certainly helped create and aggravate problems in most African countries by subsidizing dictators and corrupt regimes. So often in Africa, and throughout the Third World, the main function of foreign aid seems to be to finance the emergence of kleptocracies and then entrench a powerful new class of rich people amidst the poor, destitute, and miserable. Many parts of Africa face daunting problems of extreme poverty, overpopulation, civil wars, crumbling public infrastructures and environmental degradation. The fact that these problems have persisted and in many respects actually worsened despite massive foreign aid is a prima facie evidence that foreign aid to Africa has failed to produce the results it is intended to produce. Africans are mainly to blame for not channelling the foreign aid towards sustainable development but they are not the only ones to blame. The donors themselves are also to blame because foreign aid programs are donor driven in the sense of being tied to the donor government’s non-developmental objectives and having program design and implementation tightly controlled by the donors. Therefore foreign aid, has often amounted to economic and technical advice that might have worked in the West, but that is grossly inappropriate for Third World countries with limited indigenous resources, poor infrastructure or uneducated work force.

I am of the view that foreign aid is supposed to be temporary. Once the capacity for self – sustaining growth has been achieved, aid would no longer be required. But far from growth and development, most Third World countries seem to be more dependent on aid than ever. In fact, these countries are addicted to foreign aid. Decades of financial transfers have not fostered economic growth and, worse still, almost every African country in crisis today has received abundant foreign aid. The net effect of aid in Africa, as several development experts have observed, has been a culture of dependence that erodes self-confidence, creativity, and pride of citizens and leaders. Aid dependence has eroded and undermined the moral authority of African leaders to govern. It seems aid does not help ordinary people to help themselves, but systematically empowers and enriches the very forces that most efficiently stifle the initiative and resourcefulness of peasants, nomads, slum dwellers and villagers throughout the Third World. Most of the poor people in most poor countries most of the time never receive aid in any tangible form. There is ample evidence to show that during the past decades of massive aid flows, Sub Saharan Africa has lost the self-sufficiency in food and agriculture production it enjoyed before the injection of humanitarian food aid. Africa has now become a beggar continent that cannot feed her own people.

Africa would you please come up with sustainable development projects that will make you self-reliant so that you can wrench free from the addiction of donor funding,