Dead Aid: The Controversy Over African Resources

 

Dr.Dambisa Moyo, the author for Dead Aid:Why Aid is not working and How There is a Better Way for Africa

Basically the book ‘DeadAid- Why Aid is not working and How There is a Better Way for Africa’ is posing serious assertions over the distortion of the power of African to stabilize their own resources and wealth without depending on the Western aids.

The author of the book explains how provision of aid from the developed world to the underdeveloped world (rich countries to poor countries) is putting these aid receivers’ countries in a more critical stance-in the area of economical, political and social welfare.

From my opinion, Dambisa has put some allegations on how these aids are turning to be a hotspot for the African communities; from creation of vicious cycle of aid dependence, to the raise of political and social unrest. The fact over the civil unrest is in a way that there is a dirty deal conducted between African leaders and the donors to the extent of imposition of rules and regulations by donor countries; to which some country’s leaders would accept and some would not. The reference could be made to the 2011 Common Wealth meeting done in Australia where the strong debate raised after the Prime Minister David Cameroon had announced that some African countries (Ghana and Uganda were mentioned to be the top of violating this human right) will receive economic sanctions because of objecting existence of the same sex marriage. This is just one of examples that are happening for the aids seekers or receivers. 

To add on that, this unrest is the outcome of failures of the local communities in accessing or benefited from their resource in the area they live. Maybe a good example can be the unrest in the Niger Delta oil region in Nigeria and the DR Congo mining areas that are witnessing a lot of unrest. The people in the area believe that their resources are not benefiting them because of the presence of the outsiders in their country. Why would the visitors gain more than the indigenous?  Probably the dead treaties were made by some of our leaders.

Hardly the help to Africa would be brought without some rules and regulations to the aid beneficiaries! With this point of view, Dambisa is arguing that the free money giving is putting some African leaders to be passive in setting good economic strategies that can enhance good use of such ‘aids’ for community development, instead the leaders enrich their pockets and forget about the voters.

Also there is the rising level of dependence of aid in a way that aid-receiving country could not run on itself without receiving something from donor countries. As a result this syndrome is creating laziness and in activeness in different ways of thinking, innovation, exploration and implementation of different development strategies.

Still Dambisa is making assertion that the flow of aids to poor countries (to which she is targeting more of African countries) influence more on the civil unrest by the way that (sometimes) the aid providers bring more than cash-aid, but also some war appliances which then facilitate civil war amongst different communities of the same country. For example, one of the long time examples about this assertion is the coming of the colonialists to African countries which with other things, the colonialists were succeeded in planting hatred between communities that have been living together for decades. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is mentioned to be the conflict that was resulted by the colonial divided rule among the Rwandan.

The Controversy:

From my point of view, there are several factors that can trigger the underdevelopment of Africa. Few to mention; people’s behavior , deadly corruption, fake treaties that our leaders are signing on behalf of the nation, are the cause to African countries everlasting dependence. There are some critics raised about the book which try to explain the mentioned cause and effect as an opportunity for African countries to prosper.

Foreign aids bring positive and negative outcome to the receiver. from my perception, I could see some negative part of it overruling the positive ones because the rules and regulations that are packaged with the aid are a bit controversial to the African culture and tradition, African resources management and usage  that may exploiting African  skills on financial care. The question I would like to raise is on how Libya (before the revolution) survived without dead aid? Therefore, as we are thinking on how aid has benefited us, let us also think on how much do we loose our natural resources and the level of development that most of the African countries have achieved so far!