"You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?" Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish author, 1850-1894)
Humanitarian assistance and development was subjected to yet another bout of introspection and criticism with the publication in March 2005 of “Our Common Interest” the report of the Commission for Africa. The report was commissioned by Tony Blair, ably, one presumes, assisted by a number of influential people, mostly political leaders, public servants and private sector representatives from Africa. It was their job to define the challenges facing Africa, and to provide clear recommendations on how to support the changes needed to reduce poverty. Sounds familiar?
Reports such as these, all with good intentions, appear about twice or thrice a decade. They all say more or less the same things, all have a similar logic and all recognise the same weaknesses and suggest comparable solutions. They are well thought out and often have powerful supporters and support.
Why then do these noble intentions invariably come to nothing?
Why does Development not work?
Thousands, perhaps millions of hours, had been spent by many people, intelligent people, discussing this. Pressure on official development assistance funds and greater demand for public accountability over the last few years have placed greater focus on ensuring that Development achieves results, yet these pressures never seem to reach down to the implementation level where they are the most needed.
Why not?
Perhaps the roots of a solution do not lie so much in what is discussed publicly, as it lies in that which is alluded to constantly in private conversations, yet for some or other reason prohibited from being mentioned in the public domain.
Considering the extent of UN corruption that is now, with the Oil-for-Food scam, amongst others, reluctantly, becoming public, perhaps it is time for this type of discussion to become more open and direct. And to realise that even this cannot not do much more than touch briefly upon the tip of the iceberg of an industry characterised by incompetence, arrogance, paranoia and racism beyond belief.
How did Development, with all its incurable romantic allusions, its sense of moral superiority, its utopian faith blended with undimmed eighteenth century idealism regarding the perfectibility of man, become such an unmitigated embarrassment, the domain of all sorts of freeloaders, fraudsters and outright criminals?
And why is nobody even allowed to talk about it? Partly it must be because one cannot reduce issues of international importance to the level of juvenile truths. Nevertheless the first question vexed me for quite a while, until I started thinking, for no particular reason, about that other great failed human experiment: Communism. It was in the failure of this system that I saw the similarities with Development assistance as a human endeavour.
The Commission for Africa report suggests that; “When you are stuck with a really tough problem, Albert Einstein once said, you have to change your mental approach entirely. More of the same will not get you anywhere. You have to move your thinking to a different level. The same is true when it comes to Africa, and the question of how the world is to finance the changes that are required. The problems we are addressing are huge. They are the result of three decades of stagnation. To agree a few more incremental steps along the road already travelled will get us nowhere. Change requires a quantum leap.”
It then promptly refuses to make this quantum leap.
Let’s try and make it now.
Three main entities are mentioned by this report; National Governments, Donors and some vague thing called the International Community. Weaknesses and shortcomings in the first two are identified. Donors come in for special criticism when they are told to “change their behaviour and support the national priorities of African governments rather than allowing their own procedures and special enthusiasms to undermine the building of a country’s own capacity.” African Governments are chastised for not being transparent enough, not accountable and not responsive to the needs of its people, in other words that they are not democratic or that their democracies are too weak.
By the way, and this is a bit of an aside, it is ordinary people that make democracies work and not governments or even institutions.
What the International Community could be is not specifically defined (it will be somewhat arbitrarily defined as United Nations Agencies (UNA´s) and International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGO´s) for the purpose of this argument. Bob Geldof, Bono and Angelina Jolie may well be dismayed to find themselves excluded but they form part of a rather separate argument.), neither is it subject to much criticism apart from the very brief “and the UN must increase accountability for its performance at the country level” stuck in as an afterthought near the end of the report.
And it is exactly at the level of the UN - not much more than a hornet’s nest of ignorance, sloth and infighting - and INGO´s - individually and collectively an impenetrable bureaucratic labyrinth accountable to no one - where one finds the bottleneck that is the cause of much of the stagnation in Development Assistance.
What is of importance is also not so much these entities - National Governments, Donors and the International Community - and their respective weaknesses by themselves, but the way that they interact with one another. And it is here that the closest analogy can be found with Communism. Communism in its purest form is characterised by its level of central planning and the major difference with a free-market system is the extent to which the economy functions as a competition for resources instead of for market share. The most important priority for industry then becomes access to the central planners, those who can provide them with access to the resources they require. The customer in effect becomes an afterthought, often irrelevant and even a nuisance. It is the customer, ostensibly the rhyme and reason for economic activity, which pays the price in poor quality consumer goods, shortages and a reduced standard of living. The prime example of this topsy-turvy world is probably the ubiquitous “Five Year Plan.” These famous five year plans were introduced by Stalin in 1928 to force the pace of industrialization and build the backbone of the Soviet economy. This enshrinement of a centralised plan was probably quite well suited to the rapid transformation of a backward but emerging state into a superpower. Although it ensured rapid growth, exacting heavy sacrifices from Soviet citizens in the process, it hardly led to the clockwork functioning of the economy. In the long run it spawned rigidity, waste and lopsided development and proved hopelessly inadequate for resolving the more sophisticated problems of modernisation which caused the eventual downfall of the Soviet empire.
By the same token, and twenty years after central planning has been discredited, the Development world is constantly presented with “Plans” - “Jubilee 2000,” “Millennium Development Goals,” “Vision 2020” to mention but a few - faultless blueprints that would invariably solve all problems.[1]
All programmes and projects are always based on a Plan, a plan invariably created by INGO´s or UNA´s; sometimes, but rarely, in collaboration with a government, and always in line with priorities and deadlines defined by a donor. The Plan is then proffered as the key to scientific management of manpower and resources, the unerring lever for achieving maximum results, the Utopian device for the co-ordinated function of a system ostensibly to solve some of the world’s most intractable challenges. The Plan becomes the fundamental law, one of the most incessant incantations of the Development world. Publicly, the Plan is treated with almost mystical veneration, as if endowed with some superhuman faculty for raising mortal endeavour to a higher plane, freed from human weakness. And with the Plan comes all the weaknesses associated with Communism; their Central Planning and “Five Year Plans.”
A co-ordinated plan, and a central financing procedure, is perhaps not such a bad idea for responding to emergencies, man-made and natural, but as a mechanism for responding to the far more complex, long term demands for sustainable development it is hopelessly inadequate, spawning, as in the case with Communism, rigidity, waste and lopsided development. With variations and embellishments programmes and projects follow the same trajectory with monotonous, and disturbing, regularity. Arbitrarily defined goals and outputs are followed religiously, pursuing equally arbitrarily defined deadlines, in spite of the reality, often in the face of changing circumstances and more often than not bulldozing over any comments, and even complaints, that beneficiaries and local staff may have.
In a village of fewer than three hundred people, only periodically accessible by road, three schools are being built by three different organisations, each complying uncritically with the demands of their respective Plans, to build twenty-five or fifty schools (these are always nice round numbers). The fact that, in addition to the lack of possible pupils, there would also be no desks, books or even teachers is not considered; it is not in the Plan. The representative of one organisation, upon hearing that a non-descript building in the same village had once been used a school, becomes ecstatic with the possibility that this can also now be rehabilitated. In addition to having to build schools, his Plan also requires him to rehabilitate a number (always a nice round number) of schools. Where they should be and how all of this must fit into the educational policy and priorities of a government is not stipulated in the Plan, therefore irrelevant. His only priority is to meet his targets.
These targets develop an iron logic all its own, totally divorced from any sort of reality. In addition, the chronic problems that bedevil all projects in spite of planning is staggering, protracted bickering over priorities within and between different organisations, on all levels, means that even if work do proceed swiftly, and has at least some relevance, the price is paid in quality. Projects can be self-defeating in ironic little ways. An eighteen month Water and Sanitation Project worth €1.8 million has no expenses for nine months but the recruitment and subsequent dismissal of a series of engineers. They are being dismissed because their recommendations run counter to the irrational demands of the Project Director, a fully qualified Graphic Artist, to save money for the donor. With no scientific training, and negligible relevant experience, combined with a total disregard for local people, her recommendations fall well within the realms of the absurd. Criticism and suggestions for improvement are countered by intimidation, humiliation and serial dismissals. Towards the end of the project this farce reaches its climax in an orgy of hasty, ill-conceived, “money saving” construction that succeeds only in depriving communities from access to water.
Everything is done for the benefit of the donor, thousands of kilometres away and ignorant and disinterested in what is done in their name.
The only thing donors know from all of this, are their brief visits to elaborately staged “Opening Ceremonies,” to water systems that deprive people from water; hospitals without equipment, beds or doctors; clinics with no nurses or medicine; schools without teachers; micro-credit funds that function as pyramid schemes and loan-sharking operations; all hidden behind glossy reports that wax eloquent about successes but fail to stand up to even the most basic scrutiny. This fanfare is often only a way of whipping up fervour and projecting prestige in order to be able to get even more money. Behind all of it lies a level of deceit that is obscene. From the distance at which donors view things everything can appear fine and nobody of any importance or relevance are ever allowed up close to where all this frantic activity reveals itself to be but window dressing. Projects belong to no-one, not to donors, or governments, or beneficiaries, and certainly not to the organisations implementing them, so no-one cares about it. Constant haggling and hassling over targets and objectives, short-changing, phoney figures and systematic deception exist on all levels. Cover-ups are the order of the day.
At the Danish Refugee Council in Angola, from whose amateurish and inept fiascos the above examples are taken, the most persistent mantra happened to be that “We do not lie to the donor.” What they meant by this in fact, was that under no circumstances whatsoever would they report anything other than outstanding success in any of their endeavours, even if this required them to systematically lie and misrepresent themselves and what they are doing. Likewise, persistent claims that they had excellent relations with their main donor, DANIDA, did not mean that these relations were based on open and honest discussions on their activities, discussions to adapt programmes and projects to changing realities, creating mechanisms to mitigate, often unintended, negative consequences or any other signs of the give and take normally associated with good relations between any two entities. What it meant was simply that they could get away with any degree of deceit without any sanction whatsoever from the donor. For the Danish Refugee Council, any notion of accountability and answerability began and ended with the donor.
This organisation is singled out simply because I have some experience of them, and thus the documentation to substantiate these claims, not because they are in any way fundamentally different or worse than any other organisation of this type. To the hypersensitive management any open admission of failure is unprecedented. Everybody has to pretend that all is well. And then the money keeps on flowing. It is all a pose but true to this intellectual environment everybody seems oblivious to the disquieting reality or the implications of their inability as they spout catechisms of optimism from every culture.
“The government hears only its own voice while all the time deceiving itself, affecting to hear the voice of the people while also demanding that they support the pretence,” said Karl Marx in 1842. In his time there were no NGO´s and no UN, but undoubtedly he would have been able to recognise this not only in the largely undemocratic governments of his time, but also the prevalence of this attitude in these organisations in this age.
Many of these organisations, quite properly, have taken it upon themselves to chastise us for being wasteful of consumer items with built-in obsolescence and for squandering natural resources, the environment and energy. But even the most wasteful society is not as bad as the Development industry of people and ideas; which stifle not only critics but anybody with an urge to improve the system, able managers, researchers and technicians, whose ideas are regularly aborted or stillborn because the system so rigidly resists originality. The deep suspicion, the overreaction and narrow escapes from drastic actions to things trivial, quietens any possible dissenting voices; it is just too dangerous to speak out. Thousands of ordinary, dedicated people that do work hard, often with no outside funding, to make meaningful differences in their communities - people who experiment, evaluate, learn and improve - are frequently ignored, their efforts sidelined and often destroyed to make space for an International Organisation.
The top-down structure is essentially to blame, but not all bottlenecks can be blamed on the system.
The Commission for Africa is not far wrong in its assessment that “African voices often fail to be heard within the development sector, including in international processes. This is partly due to an arrogance that expert outsiders or domestic elites ‘know best’ and partly due to institutional pressures for quick, consensual and anticipated results,” but fails to delve deeply enough into the problem. The Plan is certainly the brake on its own growth and the donor driven agenda may explain why allocating aid to African countries remains “haphazard, uncoordinated and unfocused, why donors continue to commit errors that, at best, reduce the effectiveness of aid, and at worst, undermine the long-term development prospects of those they are supposed to be helping. It may explain why rich countries pursue their own fixations and fads, often ignoring the needs prioritised by African governments and why the amounts they give are so unpredictable. It may explain why they are insufficiently flexible when it comes to reallocating aid to new priorities in the face of a national emergency, or why they don’t respond quickly, or appropriately, when natural or economic disasters strike, such as droughts or floods, unexpected hikes in oil prices or falling commodity prices.”
What it cannot explain is the growth of a huge parasitic, criminal enterprise that has demonstrated its willingness to misrepresent political, social and cultural facts for financial gain, ignores charges of sexual abuse and harassment, even paedophilia within its ranks, turns a blind eye to its own obvious and at times devastating failures and to participate in inexcusable fraud and corruption.
The problem with this Development Enterprise is the fact that any organisation can mandate itself to participate in it absolutely without merit and without any risk. (UN Agencies like to claim that they are mandated by the General Assembly and accountable to this body, but that is simply a roundabout way to say that they are accountable to nobody.) And not only can they participate, almost entirely on their own terms, but they can compete against governments for funds with a comparative advantage, not based on any real results from their past performance, or representing anybody, but based purely on the perception of their integrity; a perception based on and perpetuated entirely by their own reports and their own propaganda about themselves. They operate almost entirely in an ethical vacuum of their own making, being legally and morally accountable to absolutely nobody and functionally immune to any possibility of prosecution.
Bizarrely there are now a huge number of public servants, none of whom are democratically elected, making decisions and affecting policy for countries of which they themselves are not even citizens. Within the UN a widespread sense of impunity and the confidence of not having to face the consequences of one’s actions, knowing that one can run from however much trouble one causes in one country simply by being promoted to a position in another country, is so pervasive that an entire generation of UN officials considers this sort of behaviour to be the most effective avenue to promotion within the system.
A Dane working for a French organisation funded by American money, based in Kenya and running projects in Somalia or Sudan is effectively as outside of the law a Libyan, planting, in Germany, a bomb on an American plane that explodes over Scotland.
Although the need for reform is recognised, it assumes that the International Community will reform and regulate itself, and to perpetuate the pretence a whole plethora of self-regulating organisations and coalitions have sprung up such as the “Humanitarian Accountability Project,” “Sphere Project,” and the “One World Trust.” All of them make a lot of noise about accountability, but none of them has ever pointed a finger at any of their members, nor do they have any executive powers with which to oblige their members to follow their guidelines. All of them are based in European capitals and run by Europeans. Since the 1950´s, the UN, for example, has faced a constant barrage of management studies, policy reviews, reform proposals and even actual reforms every now and then.
True African voices, truly African investigations, local solutions based on local knowledge are not countenanced or tolerated. This mentality does not invite an adequate response to the challenges facing these organisations. Furthermore, the very language used throughout their texts tends to be imposing, demanding and intimidating in many ways. It often suggests there are consequences associated with a failure to deliver the ideal outcomes as sought by donors. The language speaks for itself: “performance review,” “consistency,” “goals,” “objectives,” “results and ‘performance indicators’ that meet standards,” “effective,” “performance reporting,” “meets management’s expectations.” The result of being confronted with a rapid succession of such words is to create a language suggestive of a parental relationship. The pressures to perform (as opposed to learn and grow) – real or perceived – are considerable. It is not difficult to understand why – given this kind of language – project staff might bend over backward to tell a donor what it wants to hear.
The result, I maintain, is to create a culture, not of mutual learning (and there is a lot to be learnt from Africans), but rather to establish a relationship that is less than helpful to the improvement of institutions and practices relevant to development assistance. In the real world of development work, criteria and expectations that have currency in a donor’s context can be problematic amid the structural and cultural realities of Africa.
Development should be for people as much as about them and the institutions that are supposed to serve them.
Yet nothing will be meaningfully reformed as long as those who are responsible for creating these needs, whose mismanagement has resulted in the abuses so endemic within the system, are also responsible for driving the reform process. They certainly do not support a thoughtful and constructive reform process aimed at creating stronger and more effective institutions. Throughout the Commission for Africa report the weaknesses of the International Community is glossed over, ignored or it is assumed they will magnanimously sort themselves out. The report assumes that the forces that create poverty, exclusion and injustice exist only in governments, public policies and market institutions. They lie within the so-called International Community as well. The large number of common deficiencies with the services provided by this sector include: limited coverage; variable quality; amateurish approach; high staff turnover; lack of effective management systems; poor cost effectiveness; lack of co-ordination; and poor sustainability due to dependence on external assistance and no connection to or representation of the people that they are supposed to assist.
INGO´s and UNA´s have had a choice in the way they respond: they could acknowledge that it is precisely in times like this that it is important for them to reset standards, that the only way to force governments to be accountable is by demonstrating accountability themselves, yet they have largely been ignoring calls to clean up their act; choosing instead to perpetuate the rather unhelpful attitude that they are “superior.” They encourage us to think that their organisations behave in ways that are inherently different from other kind of organisations, such as donors, government departments or businesses.
Yet all accountability mechanisms presume that the integrity of organisations is not protected by good intention or by a heavenly gift, but are acquired by hard work, vigilance and respect for good practices. Both governments and business function in an environment of risk; the risk of a backlash by the population for failed policies, the risk of periodic elections, the risk of prosecution and imprisonment for bad business practise and deceit, and especially the very immediate risks of losing market share and legitimacy. Within the International Community no realistic and applicable risk mechanism exists. INGO´s and UNA´s may be different from other organisations in some respects, but in many others they operate in the same way, and are subject to the same universal human weaknesses and temptations. Because the Development Industry is now more powerful - certainly the sector considered as a whole, but often as individual organisations in their own right - they should apply this reasoning to their own behaviour. They should stop seeing themselves as fundamentally different from other kinds of organisations, somehow cleaner and more immune to the diseases of power and privilege. They should accept that they have similar responsibilities to report on their activities, follow agreed principles of behaviour, and be accountable when they fall short. Even if their motives are more idealistic, they are no less subject to human imperfection. These values may, in certain instances help them to perform well; this does not mean that precautions against short-sightedness, self-interest, temptation, even incompetence and irrelevance, are not necessary. On the contrary, respect for the values that this sector represent requires, if anything, a higher sense of vigilance and a higher degree of risk.
Although the analogy with Communism may well explain many of the weaknesses in the Development Community, it falls dramatically short when trying to find solutions. The weaknesses of Communism can be overcome by moving to a lesser or greater extent into free-market systems. Nevertheless the strengths of the free-market system do not readily translate itself into solutions in the development context. A free-market system in theory responds to the demands of the market, in other words the consumer. One must also realise that economic endeavour is perhaps the most important activity for the development of societies and for individual fulfilment and that it is this very importance that provides the impetuous to make it work. Also it generates much of its own resources with which to regulate and police itself. In the areas where it fails to look after itself, the government is usually sufficiently motivated by the importance of the economy for its own survival, to regulate - and finance the enforcement of these regulations - from its own resources. A plethora of gatekeepers and regulators keep watch – lawyers, auditors, commissioners; a wide range of international agreements and arrangements, many of which are enforceable.
Conceded, things still go wrong; Multinational companies indulge in slave labour practices in China and Indonesia; there is Enron, WorldCom and ImClone. Yet high level officers of the economy loose their jobs, they do get prosecuted and sometimes even go to prison.
Even in Africa, where formal justice systems can be weak, the economy is based to a large extent on cultural and social networks that are founded on reciprocity, trust, dependability and above all, some degree of honesty.
None of this can be usefully applied to the concept of Development assistance.
In a sector that diligently strives towards mediocrity and avoiding responsibility; pointed questions are rarely asked of its leadership, no one has ever been prosecuted and a number of individuals that should be in prison hide behind immunities they do not deserve and should not have. The economy is complex, multifaceted and multi-layered; consisting of many mutually supporting, reciprocal arrangements and benefits, where one person’s raw materials are another’s end-product, where the line between consumers and producers is blurred, a complex self-regulatory and self-perpetuating system.
By contrast Development assistance is a simple linear continuum, an almost entirely unnecessary activity, except insofar as it is an acknowledgement that things had gone wrong, and often had gone wrong dramatically; with donors, and their priorities, at the one extreme, and beneficiaries, and their demands, at the other.
The Commission for Africa echoes many other voices in its constant repetition that “It is also about delivery and results. These are powerfully strengthened when local communities are involved in decisions that affect them.” It is a noble idea, one that would require the International Community and donors to respond to the demands of their beneficiaries, in theory; “the People,” in practice; hundreds of thousands or even millions of clamouring and disparate voices, largely the poor and disenfranchised, by definition unable to “put their money where their mouth is.” In line with our economic analogy it would also need to assume that beneficiaries of Aid, like consumers who can choose whether or not to buy a product, can choose whether they accept Aid or not, or from whom they are prepared to accept it. That would mean that different organisations would need to compete with one another for a share of the beneficiary market, in the same way that commercial enterprises do for customers. It is not certain that such a model would be either practical or desirable. It is also important to look at people as communities, societies and individuals and not simply as consumers.
Yet another significant difference with the economy is that the customer is also the one with the money. The beneficiary of any product or service in essence has absolute control over that product or service through the very simple expedient of having the financial power to purchase it or not.
Throughout the Commission for Africa report we are told “for accountability to be effective, a government’s policies, actions and systems need to be open to scrutiny by its people. This openness is not just a question of attitude; it has to be woven into the very systems through which the state operates.”
Yet scrutiny by itself is meaningless, and without a significant change of the system, ordinary people will remain helpless and only able to express its outrage at the situation.
The report states further that “Clearly, the responsibility for managing resources lies with the state. But the international community also has a role to play in maintaining high standards of governance. If it does so in its own activities – and demands it in the activities of private sector agents, like the multinational companies active in developing countries – then it will be better positioned to encourage similar high standards in the way African countries manage the cash from their natural resources.”
But in order for the International Community to play a role in running world affairs it must also be able to run itself.
It has emphatically shown that it is not able to do that.
Giving voice to people - and assuming that those that need assistance most are able to articulate their needs and thus receives assistance instead of the International Community simply assisting only those most able to articulate themselves - consistently run into the difficulty of who these people can complain to.
A government may be unresponsive but there always exist the possibility of complaining in the international press and embarrassing the government; government officials are known by their names; there are also demonstrations, strikes, passive resistance, even revolutions and armed uprisings if necessary. Governments have nowhere to run to, dictators may in some cases disappear to become ordinary citizens or fugitives in other countries, but as a rule they tend to hang around and try to reach a compromise with their people. Unreasonable civil servants can be replaced with more reasonable ones. Even dictatorial governments know that power through fear is inherently unstable and strive to gain power by consent. (Exceptions of course only serve to prove the rule.)
Unfortunately much Development for all intents and purposes these days rests with a plethora of NGO’s and United Nations Agencies over which weak and struggling governments in Africa often have very little, if any, control. They are completely removed from ordinary people. They can have a lot of power, but it is a strange sort of power based not on fear or consent or legitimacy, but a power based on agreements made entirely amongst themselves and a power that they can exercise on any number of different stages; invariably the most convenient stage at any moment in time being the one where they cannot be held accountable. They have no connection to people, no constituency but themselves, and an uncanny tendency to disappear when funds dry up or when they had caused so much resentment through consistent failure and arrogance as to make their further presence untenable (to then reappear somewhere else).
Many of the Commission for Africa recommendations sound excellent but have no possibility of success under current practice. For example: “(I)mpact has been greatest where they integrate with public health systems. African governments should enable community involvement to improve health outcomes as well as increase accountability.” Perhaps because the health sector provides such excellent opportunities for pretending to do any work, and because it is a relatively simple activity that so obviously appears to be doing good, there exist today several hundred so-called Emergency Health Organisations. The overwhelming majority of them have absolutely no capacity to respond to any emergency and usually appear in droves after an emergency[2] (or even in places where there has never been an emergency) to provide a haphazard, inconsistent, very expensive and very basic service just when a country needs sustained, co-ordinated and cost effective effort to improve their health services.[3] They invariably stay for as long as they have funds; usually three to six months, sometimes up to a few years. Usually overwhelmed by unfamiliar surroundings, foreign cultures and completely uneducated as to the needs of the people that they are supposed to serve it is inconceivable to imagine any of them listening to the voices of anybody but themselves. The last thing that they want is for their actions and systems to be open to scrutiny by people.
These are the quintessential vultures of the Humanitarian Aid world, arriving in that window of opportunity after every emergency, when it is safe enough to operate and travel but before the emergency funds have dried up or had been redirected to development (sometimes they manage to attract some of these funds to only then work totally outside of their emergency mandates, and cause even more harm).
Invariably these organisations, as well as a number of disaster tourists, have their eyes firmly fixed on the donor and are ardent followers of the “Plan,” the plan in this case often being a project proposal written and submitted for funding months before they had even arrived in a country. Whatever people may have to say would be very unlikely to be included in the “Plan,” in other words irrelevant to them.
Even in the unlikely event that people could have the resources to identify and track down the managers and leaders who make the decisions that affect their lives, these individuals would in all likelihood be surprised and probably offended that “People” would be so arrogant as to want to speak to them and ask them pointed questions.
For all the Commission for Africa’s urgent lamentations that the voices of people should be heard, and as noble as this may appear, the sad fact is that the majority of decisions made on behalf of people in the developing world are made, not by elected officials, but by the self-appointed and self-mandated managers of organisations headquartered in far away countries. A disturbingly large segment of this management tends to be arrogant, contemptuous and racist. Even a short visit to any African country by any concerned individual, quickly and amply demonstrates the extent to which many international organisations are managed through fear, humiliation and intimidation of local authorities, staff and beneficiaries.
Drawing once again from my experience with the Danish Refugee Council whose staff had for a number of years raised a series of concerns over the way in which the organisation was mismanaged by the fully qualified graphic artist and the abuse they suffered from her. Their concerns were supported and echoed by the authorities, by beneficiaries and even by other NGO’s, local and international.
This organisation dealt with these complaints by heavy-handedly, and often brutally, threatening staff, prompt (and illegal) dismissals sending a clear message that no criticism will be tolerated.
In the words of one local staff member: “We are barely considered as human beings, much less as individuals who can think for ourselves and express an opinion. Whenever we do express ourselves, this mere fact causes such offence within the management that any notion of redress or response becomes out of the question. Their only reaction is immediate and severe punishment.”
The last thing that managers and staff of many of these do-good organisations want is for the “victims” in question to really end up making a contribution to whatever gets done in their name - and, God forbid! - to cease to be victims.
All that is really expected of them is to merely stand around whilst foreigners erect meaningless structures all around them and screw up their water supplies.
Even the new jargon of ‘rights-based programming’ simply lead to labelling poor and vulnerable communities as essentially powerless victims or potential victims of crisis rather than as actors. More and more studies are exposing organisations that are supposedly in charge of looking after the poor and excluded but instead guilty of extensive violations of the rights of those dependent upon them.
For far too long too many donors and leaders of both the developed and developing world were content to allow this foolishness to continue, and to continue funding it. And it will only stop when a sufficient number of concerned people, and organisations that do in fact represent the aspirations of ordinary people, point to this collective ineptitude and insist to put an end to this abuse and the horrible waste caused by it.
For all the emphasis that the report place on Democracy - an emphasis based no doubt on the general regard and prestige that democracy enjoys (and in most instances deserve) – and the consistent harping on accountability – a word threatened to loose any meaning unless it can become associated with consequences – it should recognise that Democracy has its limitations. Assistance in Development is inherently an un-democratic affair where people with money offer to assist people that do not have any money. In such a scenario there will always be a stronger partner and a weaker, often silent or fearful, partner. It is our inability to move away from the notion of “charity” - and the arrogance that comes with it - and closer to a notion of assistance and co-operation that lies to a very large extent at the root of the problem. Little good ever comes from charity.
Historically, it is hard work that rescues the poor and unfortunate from their plight, not charity. If the poor, the marginalised and the incapable ever do have much success at looking after themselves, it will be largely to be through their own efforts, and through the fact that they are fortunate enough to live in societies where they are entitled to sell the results of their own efforts, however small the effort and however miserable the price. The only important contribution made by the benevolence of richer people is that these have very, very occasionally had the good sense and the decency to understand this elementary truth about poverty and how to relieve it, instead of merely salving their unthinking consciences by throwing a few coins out of their gilded carriages.
If Development is the moral imperative of the developed world to assist the undeveloped world it is the moral responsibility of the Development world to hold the agents that act on their behalf legally responsible for their actions and to punish them if they do not act in morally responsible way; in other words they should be held accountable.
It is a management and leadership issue, not a democratic one, and the structures required should be enforcement (investigating and arresting wrongdoers), judicial (putting them on trail) and punitive (sending them to prison).
If African governments are to become more democratic and more accountable to their people as the report urges, it is imperative that they be allowed the tools and the authority to monitor and, when necessary, take steps against foreigners and International organisations spending other peoples’ money on behalf of their citizens. A report that can suggest how this can be done would be far more useful than the current one with its emphasis on truism and hyperbole.
This brings us to three specific aspects of the Commission for Africa report that should be clarified within the context of this argument. Under the heading “Delivering existing commitments, better international leadership and co-ordination of aid” one hopes to start reading about many of the arguments elaborated above, alas, only to discover that the authors of this report is simply using it as a ruse for asking for more money and accusing “the international community (for) not coming up with the money to match its promises.”
The report appears to be a bit vague, and contradictory, when talking about money.
The authors do not mention how much money they think is being spent currently on Development aid. Either they do not know, as I do not myself know, or they are not saying, but they remain persistent, if somewhat contradictory, in their demand that it should be increased: “we call for an additional US$25 billion per year in aid, to be implemented by 2010. Donor countries should commit immediately to provide their fair share of this. Subject to a review of progress then, there would be a second stage, with a further US$25 billion a year to be implemented by 2015.”
“That is why we are suggesting a doubling of aid to Africa within the next three to five years.” “The major programme of reform we have outlined – in governance, public investment and social expenditure – will cost, we estimate, an additional US$75 billion a year.”
“Aid to sub-Saharan Africa should increase by US$25 billion per annum over the next three to five years.”
“Aid to sub-Saharan Africa should be doubled, that is, increased by US$25 billion per annum, over the next three to five years to complement rising levels of domestic revenue arising from growth and from better governance. Following a review of progress towards the end of this period, a further US$25 billion per annum should be provided, building on changes in the quality of aid and improvements in governance”
“Within these aid budgets, particularly in the context of a potential global increase in aid of US$50 billion. . .”
Whatever one wants to make of all these statements, it is clear that the amount of money currently being spent is not small - it should be in the order of US$30-40 billion per annum - and the issue probably more appropriately discussed under the heading “Delivering existing commitments, better international leadership and co-ordination of aid” should perhaps be why such an amount of money is having so little effect.
More importantly it should be asked first how much money can be untied by making the system more effective, instead - and definitely before - asking for yet more money.
It is not unrealistic to believe that up to 80% of current funds are lost because of unaccountable budgetary processes that prevent the people of Africa to see how money is raised and where it is going, the lack of the kind of transparency that can help combat corruption; money and assets stolen from the people of Africa by corrupt leaders and managers that must be repatriated. It is widely known, although one is not allowed to admit it, that money given to any United Nations administered Trust Fund is invariably money lost to Development. A suspiciously large percentage could probably be found in the bank accounts of UN officials should the Commission for Africa’s recommendation of “Foreign banks must be obliged by law to inform on suspicious accounts” be followed up.
Simply releasing the funds currently lost or misspent in misguided effort would provide more than sufficient funds to kick-start the development of Africa.
For an industry that has failed so spectacularly, in spite of receiving such large amounts of money, it is remarkably naïve, not to say arrogant, to ask for even more money. And if development aid is to start providing results, as the report promises, the amount of aid needed over time should become less and less and not more and more as the report is requesting. In spite of the inconsistencies in the report’s lament that more money should be given; it is when this report starts to offer suggestions as to where this money should come from that they seem to throw reason and justification out of the window.
Granted it does suggest that to “provide the critical mass of aid . . ., the aid should be front-loaded through the immediate implementation of the International Finance Facility,” perhaps not such a bad idea in principle and one that could be discussed further. Yet the report does not elaborate on this idea, harping rather on the notion that “Rich nations should commit to a timetable for giving 0.7 per cent of their annual income in aid.”
It then goes further to say that “Several nations have recently committed themselves to reaching the UN target of giving 0.7 per cent of their national income in aid. Other G8 and EU nations should now follow this example and announce timetables for reaching the 0.7 percent target.”
It is important to note that the United States, perhaps by far the largest provider in absolute terms of Official Development Assistance to developing countries, nevertheless apparently provides only about 0.1 percent of their Gross National Income, the G8 on average only 0.3 percent with only five countries, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden having reached the target by 2003. Recently, Finland, Spain, the UK, France and Belgium had announced timetables to reach this target. America refuses to try and reach this target; preferring to concentrate rather, with high level support from Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, on the improvement in the quality of aid.
Unfortunately, even in this instance, improvement in the Quality of aid is intimately linked to American Foreign Policy and almost totally divorced from the needs and desires of ordinary people.
This magic number of 0.7 percent is something recommended by the Pearson Commission in 1970. I must admit that I had never read the report of this commission, at the time my reading was limited to Noddy books, and do not know the reasoning behind this particular percentage. But just to put this into context; the report was written before the 1973 oil crisis, before the Nixon-Brezhnev ‘Détente’; a decade before Gorbachov’s ‘Glasnost’ and the Ethiopian famine; almost two decades before the collapse of Communism, three decades before 9/11.
It is remarkable that the only justification that the Commission for Africa, in spite of their supposed influence, can come up with is a recommendation made by a report written thirty-five years ago.
That is clearly not good enough but not nearly as frightening as an alternative suggestion hidden in a few afterthoughts and asides scattered throughout the report.
The report suggests legitimately that “A number of other innovative proposals have been suggested to help address the funding gap. Further work should be undertaken to come up with specific practical proposals,” but then goes further with “Practical proposals should be developed for innovative financing methods such as international levies on aviation, which can help secure funding for the medium and longer term” and “An additional and complementary approach is to raise finance through international taxes, levies or lotteries. One example would be a voluntary levy on airline tickets to reflect the costs inflicted by carbon emissions.”
This is a continuation of a notion from Boutros Boutros-Ghali in the early 1990’s to give the UN taxing powers that, alarmingly, simply does not want to die. The idea then was to raise taxies by charging for shipping lanes or a small percentage of speculative transactions that would raise the UN income to potentially hundreds of billions of Dollars.
Other ways of raising additional funds for the UN that have come up in the past include levies on arms sales, transnational currency transactions, international trade (or sectors of it, such as polluting materials, mineral raw commodities), and international air or sea travel, an annual “United Nations Communications Day” with levies on all postage charges and telephone calls accruing to the UN, and an annual UN lottery. Zealous and misguided supporters of the United Nations are simply trying to give the organization powers it does not need and should not have. They assert that imposing a global tax on “speculative” currency transactions is an idea that deserves consideration. Such “speculative” transactions, a term that is not defined, could easily net some $150 billion a year for the United Nations’ coffers.
This is sold as a means to give the United Nations an independent source of revenue so that the organization would not be dependent on payments by member states. Advocates of the tax assure sceptics that it would be imposed at a rate of only 0.1 percent, a minuscule burden on wealthy international currency speculators.
One shudders to think what is likely to happen if the United Nations ever gains the power to tax. Merely redefining what constitutes a “speculative” transaction could net the United Nations additional hundreds of billions of dollars. Leaving aside the danger of escalating taxation, the United Nations should not have an independent taxing authority on general principle. The member states already have precious little say over what the corrupt, unaccountable and ill-managed UN bureaucracy does. They would have no input whatsoever if the United Nations had its own source of funds.
Whilst the injection of hundreds of billions of Dollars into humanitarian assistance may seem to be a good idea, it would be frightening to put this sort of money into the grubby little paws of such an incompetent, unaccountable and un-transparent organisation as the United Nations. Nevertheless, the arguments presented here may be seen by some as a radical, perhaps vindictive, attack on conventional development practice.
As such, they will inevitably be treated with a certain degree of scepticism, given our fear of the unknown, our resistance to change, and the sense of the impossibility of adapting and modifying a vast and complicated system which has been dedicated to pursuing a particular approach.
The daunting challenge is that of shifting the paradigm of both the approach and the system - organisational, procedural, and methodological.
Yet if the challenge is rejected on these grounds - and there are no other grounds on which to base a rejection of at least the possibility of the validity of these arguments - then there is little option for anything other than an increasing cynicism with respect to this development endeavour. We know already that the development sector is struggling to achieve its supposed goals; it is difficult to escape this conclusion when looking at the achievements, or rather the shocking lack thereof, to date.
Cynicism, manifested as an increasing dependence on confirmations generated by adherence to, and so-called “successful” applications of, current organisational realities rather than on developmental impact itself, is already rampant within the development sector.
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we cannot deny this creeping paralysis.
Alternatives are called for.
It will require enormous effort of will for individuals to begin to challenge the conventional.
And there can be no doubt that change will depend on individual initiative - the system will not change all at once, and it will not change unless individuals begin to make that change happen.
Prof. William Easterly, an economist that used to work for the World Bank, warns that: “This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by “searchers”, both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way.”
Perhaps a few pre-conclusion comments may be in order here and worth adding in the form of a personal note.
I am uncomfortably aware that many of my lamentations are not very well received in the world of humanitarian aid and development assistance.
All I can say in my defence is that I have given a lot of thought during recent years to the issues I have elaborated. I have pondered how I and my associates can contribute effectively and ethically to the development of our continent, who wants it, why, and why it makes sense for people to accept and appreciate our efforts, and how, and how I can find satisfaction, perhaps even fame and riches, through being and having been involved in this endeavour.
In other words the advice I give to others is advice I am trying to follow myself. One of the most serious criticisms I face, and face routinely, is my insistence on associating the essential goodwill of others with crime.
In general, many of my remarks about the criminality of aid are based upon critical introspection and not merely an attempt to offend or stir controversy.
Of course aid, development assistance and crime are not the same thing. Morally they are absolutely distinct.
But what they all have in common is that they are both something-for-nothing sorts of activities, that the receivers on the one hand of aid and on the other hand of ill-gotten gains are in neither case giving much, if any, thought to what they might give to the world in exchange for what the world is giving them.
Criminals after easy pickings naturally gravitate towards an industry in which there are the combination of large amounts of money and very little, if any, controls, over where that money is going. Aid, just like crime, feeds on the non-productive; it empowers the criminals in their battles against their most typical victims, the productive poor.
It is acted out on a tragic scale in the Third World where entire countries have become the possessions of criminal gangs, who live off aid from richer countries.
Potentially profitable societies are wrecked without a second thought, either by direct thieving, or else by follies paid for by foreign donors, which derange local markets and divert scarce local resources into ill-conceived fantasy projects.
Of course, I consider that whenever one claims to be doing one thing when actually, intentionally or unintentionally, doing something very different also constitutes a crime.
I know all about the temptation to describe moral failures as evidence of moral excellence. Perhaps one of the reasons you read so little about the idiocy of aid, and why the blame for rampant fraud and corruption is routinely shifted onto governments and recipients of aid, rather than on the givers and administrators of that aid, is that the kind of organisations that should publish pieces like this one tend to be organisations themselves depended upon the current system functioning the way that it does.
Even so, I maintain that helping people is difficult.
To help even a very small number of people - really to help them and not just throw money at them - demands huge commitments of time and intelligence.
Also, given the complexities of human society, it requires a great deal of learning in the characteristics of that society merely to avoid making matters far worse, with projects which only seem helpful on the surface but which are in fact enormously harmful. If, despite all of our best efforts, huge human problems remain, this should not prove that we are wicked. It should merely prove how hard human problems are to solve.
Why then does aid persist?
The simplest answer is that aid is not all stupidity. It is, however, something difficult to restrain, and for that reason much more harmful, a sensible way of behaving that has gotten out of hand. Just as aid and goodwill have a way of merging into each other, so, in a morally opposite setting, do crime and aid.
The world needs no more big reports by important people telling us what the problems and challenges are and how to solve them. It has become time for the poor and marginalised to define their own problems and to embark on the journey to have these solved and for us to discard the patronizing confidence that the Planners, those who had put themselves in charge of our collective destiny, know how to solve other peoples’ problems better than the people themselves do.
Everybody, especially the poor, understand the need for democracy and accountability.
There should not be any more demands for more money, by people who have amply demonstrated that they are unable to spend it where it is most needed.
Reduced poverty and human suffering comes from the self-reliant efforts of the poor themselves in free societies.
Make sure somebody is actually held accountable for making THIS intervention work in THIS place at THIS time.
Concerned individuals should demand a system of accountability whereby people and institutions that make grand promises and then fail to deliver are held to account; and if they cannot explain themselves, prosecute them and put them in prison if necessary.
[1] Yet this does not prevent the Commission for Africa report to predict that “the Millennium Development Goals will perish as yet another pious aspiration.”
[2] Emergency – A sudden condition or state of affairs calling for immediate action. In other words a war, a flood or a tsunami, amongst others. AIDS, in spite of constant claims to the contrary, is not an emergency; it is not a sudden condition and it does not call for immediate action but for sustained effort.
[3] There can be up to a hundred such organisations in a single country.
No comments:
Post a Comment