Development Aid_Reflection Memo

International and development aids in Africa are a particularly difficult matter to handle as it is enveloped in a mist of vagueness. Through the readings and the debate that took place in class, one particular aspect of it occurred to us : aids in all its form is not necessarily good, even though it is meant to be constructive, especially in Africa and thus for many reasons. It seems that we can in all likelihood ask ourselves why development and international aids, as abundant as they can be, fail to efficiently reduce poverty and all the social challenges African countries are facing, even though most of them display more than promising growth rates. Based on the class debate, it seems that one of the most important hindering factor to an efficient application of development aids is corruption. Indeed, in Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo mentions on one hand the case of Mobuto Sese Seko, Zaire's president, using development funds for personal matters and on the other the case of Nigeria where development aids only benefit a marginal group of the Nigerian population which is favoured by the clientelist power in place. It has also been mentioned that some commodities coming from international aids were hijacked in favor of local militias and insurgent groups. It seems therefore that in order to benefit entirely from development aids, these countries need a good and strong governance, the establishment of a purely democratic regime which would, according to all the moral and political codes linked to it, promptly preserve its citizens' interests. However, it might be misleading to consider that democracy would be some kind of panacea. One can invoke the neo-patrimonialism concept to show the limits of such a reasoning. Indeed, it is clear that many countries like Zaire or Nigeria are ruled by hybrid powers, at the crossroads between traditional way of ruling based on tribal models and Western state models. This obviously has an effect on population and on how it perceives the leader. In a nutshell, the latter is still considered as a patriarchal figure meant to protect his subjects. He remains therefore completely legitimate as a ruler even though his actions and resources management do not necessarily benefits the population. As Johannes Fabian put it, « the power is eaten whole » (in the original French, « le pouvoir se mange entier »), which alludes to the fact that the ruler is expected to exercise power with authority, subject only to an equal treatment of all citizens. In practice, it has been seen that this kind of regime leads to cronyism, in Nigeria for instance, which may lead to popular ire and contestations of such practices. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily shatters the leader's influence and this autocratic model remains deeply culturally rooted, which hampers any attempt of instituting a proper management of international and development aids. One can argue that donors can suspend development aids for uncooperative regimes in order to coerce them into establishing an solid and efficient governance. Indeed, in virtue of article 96 of the Cotonou Agreement, the European Union can suspend its development aids and has done so for Burundi and Togo, among other countries. Nonetheless, even though this suspension has been deemed successful by the European Union in Togo insofar as it helped strengthening the democratisation process, it has been absolutely devastating for Burundi's economy, which has been worn out by such a sanction. Zimbabwe was also deprived of its European development aids during Robert Mugabe's presidency and as it turns out, it was not as successful as expected. Furthermore, we can also ask ourselves about the issue of dependency on these aids. Indeed, the case of Mozambique has been mentioned. As it has been presented to us, it is one of the most aid dependent countries and it keeps benefiting from aids as the Mozambican government appears to be particularly cooperative. However, if the Mozambican government stops meeting its donors' political agendas, leading to a suspension of the aids he receives from them, how will it sustain its economical stability ? From this point on view, one can argue that development aids can actually and paradoxically be an obstacle to development, specifically political and perhaps even societal development. All in all, it seems that development and international aids are closely intertwined with the notion of governance. The fact remains that the myth of international aid is largely based on the Marshall Plan and the fact that it brought back stability in Western Europe and rejuvenated its economy in the aftermath of World War II. However, it is clear that a comparison between the Marshall Plan and the aids benefiting African countries is more than irrelevant, mainly because colonialism and the decolonization process left most African countries in a deep political doldrums.. By granting tremendous aids to fragile and unwilling goverments, donors are actually hindering the development that they try to induce. Finally, one can also argue that African development needs to be comprehended other than through a European and American point of view. Owing to its ethnic and cultural background, solutions to African precarity need to be elaborated in light of the population' specificities. It is most certainly not the concept of development aids that is so harshly criticized but its inadequacy with the African political and cultural context, especially when it leads (as we can see it in Mozambique) to a situation in which cutting development aids would have dramatic consequences and in the same time, maintaining them does not necessarily leads to an enhancement of living conditions.