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!

Editing and Updating Blog!

During the third day of the training that is conducted by VIKES and MISA-TAN, we learned how to edit different stuffs in our personal BlogSpot. One of the most interesting parts for me was on how I could provide links to my publications let say links that could lead a reader to the original document in a site. For example, since I and my colleagues read about a speech of Rupert Murdoch when addressing American newspaper editors’ meeting on the issues of the new trend of online news versus traditional newspaper; it is simple to link the original URL to my post so as to provide easy accessibility of the original speech.

Also I learned how to update my blog by editing date, time zone and also providing a link list for other people’s blog. The link that we provided was for blogs of my fellow trainees where if you happen to visit my blog, you will be able to visit my fellow trainees’ blogs easily.

Since I ended up my day at midday, I was not able to learn about fact finding. Yet, I have been informed that my colleagues have learned simple way of finding simple facts such as population of Iringa, contact information of TANAPA and the US president; things that I can easily catch up.

Yet to find out more about today!

‘Internet is a Threat to Newspaper Business’, Says Murdoch.

Mr, Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul in Australia.

Newspaper journalists are required to be aware of the dramatic change of news consumption from traditional newspaper reading to the internet so that they can find a better way on how to go along with such changes.

Mr. Rupert Murdoch has given a speech to the newspaper editors in America, with the intention of raising a challenge to the newspaper journalist on issues of internet usage and how newspaper industry can make users to select newspaper websites once they want to get information. 

The other challenge that was raised was the issue of business market as there is a threat of losing money from the advertising industry since advertisers prefer the fastest channels that reach people.
  

Apart from that Mr. Rupert Murdoch has mentioned on the digital gap that people are facing by pointing to the groups of digital immigrants and digital natives who differ in the way of application of different digital technologies and according to Rupert’s speech, most of old aged people are in the group of digital immigrants whilst the young ones are the natives.

With such groups, it brings about challenges to the use of news media such as traditional newspaper and online news which raise to the big trend of news consumption to youngsters from using traditional newspaper to the online sources for several reasons such as different expectations that the young generation have about the kind of news they will get, time frame, origin of the news and the person who create such news.

In his speech to the newspaper editors in America, Mr. Murdoch has mentioned the research conducted by Carnegie Corporation on how youngsters have changed in habit of news consumption, there is a dramatic revolution in news as the statistics show that 44 percent of the respondents have said that they use portal for news, while 19 percents do not. Also it shows that 39 percent of people are expecting to use internet to learn about the news while 8 percent is in favor of the traditional newspaper.

he added that this dramatic change is also a cause for people especially young ones to want to have a control over the media since they can access kind of fast news they want to read/hear in a way that they prefer because of the interactivity that internet provide.

In order to go along to such change, Mr. Murdoch has advised the newspaper journalists to find out whether people want the story instead of insisting on writing stories that people won’t prefer. Murdoch has added, “I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers. Too often, the question we ask is “Do we have the story? Rather than “Does anyone want the story?” he concluded.

The Changing Brain.

From today’s session, I have managed to realize the powerfulness of the internet in our social life, works, and much more in our minds. That change is created only if a person is highly exposed to the internet (like what Gebner’s Cultivation theory ascertains that the heavy Television viewers are receiving changes more than the light TV viewers).

From alexa.com, Tanzanians are utilizing facebook than any other webmails or news sites. The reason behind may be the convergence of mobile phone with the internet to which every person who is owning a mobile phone device that can be connected to internet can easily participate in facebooking!

Different internet sites such as facebook, Yahoo messenger and others have been a dominant to our mindset,, as some other people are turned to be addicted to the usage of such sites.

In the journalism world, internet has managed to create a close link between the media house and its correspondents as they can easily send stories with audio or video clip to their editor from upcountry. Also the technology implied for editing or sending the information is easily accessible, compared to the previous time. Still the service providers are sometimes letting down the internet users because of poor internet infrastructures. This is the case as to why most of African countries are ranked as least countries that are their people are either connected or use internet facilities.

Not living Skype, Ovoo, Intervoip and other Voip engines; people can have a serious chat concerning different issues such as business matters, schooling and other social needs.

Yet there is a big gap between the internet know-how and the know-not. The digital divide has brought this gap between the most developed countries and the least developed; between the rural and the urban dwellers, the elites and non elites and such groups in the society.

The main challenge is on how to impart knowledge and skills to Tanzanians mainly youngsters on how they can employ internet in a positive way. Still internet security is another thing that brings a lot of challenges on how plagiarism can be controlled and how personal privacy can be attained.

Yet, during the day, we have managed to open our BlogSpot where by everyone was supposed to post or edit in his/her blog. The technique is simple despite having challenges on internet connections. 

ON THE FIRST DAY OF TRAINING!

My name is Zuhura Selemani. I am a Tutorial Assistant at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication of the University of Dar es Salaam. I am a journalist by profession, specialized in radio production and broadcasting.

The whole of this week, I am attending training on the training on the effective use of Internet in modern journalism world; that is conducted in Dar es Salaam city centre.

The training discussion is on how internet usage has changed the world in every sphere of life.  Also how internet can facilitate fact finding, research, news monitoring and publication in news media.

The very main expectation that I have is to acquire skills, knowledge and experience from the facilitator and my colleagues regarding this topic so that I can be in a good position of sharing the acquired expertise to my students and co workers.

SESSION ONE:

On the first day of the training, I learned how use internet to perform several online actions such as online booking for a train from Helsinki to Turku. I also learned how to book for a flight-Fast Jet to and from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza. 

Apart from that, I get to know different websites that are very potential in the sense of online shopping sites such as eBay and Amazon, internet games such as miniclip.com, online video and audio such as You Tube & napster.com, investigative sites such as wikileaks.com and other information giving sites such as Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. 

What I liked most during the session was the fact that we were doing things in a practical way. Being taught about how we can do online booking was meaningful after we had a practical part of it. Again, the fact that we are discussing about internet-which creates network; therefore the introductory part was meaningful as it enabled participant to know each other. It is my hope that this is the beginning of a creation of a new network that will enable participants to create a network which will help them now and in the near future.