Kenyan interests: A break from propaganda

Kenya should lead the 'No Aid to Africa' campaign

Story by RASNA WARAH
Publication Date: 10/15/2007
 
ALTHOUGH THERE IS MUCH to complain about regarding the performance of the current Government, Kenyans have to accept that one of the most under-rated achievements of the Kibaki administration is the fact that it has managed to wean itself away from donor aid.
 
Last week, President Kibaki told Kenyans that domestic taxes are now able to finance more than 90 per cent of the country’s budget. This means that the development that the country is seeing (or not seeing) can be directly attributed to the Kenyan taxpayer, not to a foreign taxpayer or a donor government.
 
Now, less donor aid may not seem like an achievement to the average Kenyan who got used to the country getting virtually no aid during the Moi regime.
In those days, we cursed the Government for turning Kenya into a “non-performing recipient country” that is shunned by donors.
 
Unlike our neighbours, Tanzania and Uganda , which received “star performance” status within the international development community, and received (and continue to receive) high levels of donor aid, or rather, loans, to finance their budgets, Kenya was considered the rogue state that did not deserve any funding because its Government was behaving badly.
Once the leader of the rogue state was removed, it was expected that donors would rush in to fund the new democratically-elected government’s priorities. And indeed they did. Donor agencies bent over backwards to fund free primary education and other Government initiatives.
 
But someone somewhere in the new administration made a wise decision - not to rush out and accept every dollar, pound or kroner handed out to it, but to improve domestic tax collection so that the country could become self-reliant. This decision, supported by an economic growth rate of more than 6 per cent, has seen the country become the most financially autonomous in the region.
Why is this a good thing? Well, for one simple reason. No country can claim to be sovereign if decisions about where and how it is should spend its money are made in foreign capitals, and if the debt accumulated as a result of the aid (which often comes with punitive conditions attached and is largely in the form of loans) impoverishes the country further.
 
Loss of sovereignty is a huge price to pay considering that official development assistance - money that rich governments allocate to foreign aid programmes - comprises less than 1 per cent of rich countries’ gross national product.
 
Taxpayers in the UK, Japan or Sweden hardly feel the pinch, but recipients of the aid not only feel the pinch, but ache from it several years afterwards.
MOREOVER, DONOR FUNDING IS not sustainable. One day, the donor taps will run dry, and when that happens, the country may be too donor-dependant to stand on its own feet. Which could explain why African countries - the largest recipients of aid - continue to wallow in poverty.
 
Besides, one has to ask whether donors have other motives besides compassion and altruism. Why is it that countries that are most aid-dependant end up as “darlings” of the West, when the ultimate aim of aid should be to make countries less dependant on that very aid?
 
Could it be that aid serves the interests of the giver rather than the receiver? Could it be that, as Susan George, author of A Fate Worse than Debt put it , “debt is...much better than colonialism...because you have the continuous low prices for raw materials, everyone is forced to export at the same time, and you have political control over the government”?
 
Recently, William Easterly, a former World Bank economist and author of the much-acclaimed The Elusive Quest for Growth, wrote a scathing opinion on the media blitz that Africa is currently enjoying and the calls for more aid to the continent by celebrities such as Bob Geldof, Bono and Jeffrey Sachs.
Easterly echoed the sentiments of many African economists by claiming that these calls were doing more for celebrity careers than they were for the people of Africa.
 
“In truth”, he declared, “Africans are, and will be, escaping poverty the same way everybody else did: through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home, not through PR extravaganzas of ill-informed outsiders.”
 
Although the push in the international community is to increase the aid given to African countries, a consensus seems to be emerging among a younger generation of Africans that aid is, in the long-run, a bad idea.
 
Recently, for instance, Bono was shouted down by Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda who asked the rock star a question that few in the development industry have been willing to ask: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?”
 
The “No Aid to Africa” campaign is gaining currency in some circles, but is yet to become conventional wisdom. Perhaps Kenya should lead the way in making it a reality.
 
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