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Hong Kong, CHINA - The dust has now settled on the G8 Forum. The jamboree is over and the powerful leaders have gone away to deal with more pressing national matters. Perhaps they are congratulating themselves on having struck a blow against poverty for their African cousins. It is time to take a sober look at what summit meetings like that at Gleneagles really mean for Africa in the long term.
Ken Kamoche The blow that was struck, for a start, doubling aid to $50 billion in five years' time, has been described by some as too little too late. If it was to make any impact it should have been effective right away. Five years is a long time to wait when millions are dying of preventable disease and poverty across the continent.
But to me there's another crucial question, which is what did Africa really expect either from these powerful leaders or Band Aid artists like Bob Geldof who didn't even seem to realize that Africa has produced 'world artists' for the main Live 8 features? That. in itself, was a sad reminder that Africa cannot take anything for granted, which includes foreign aid, whether it comes in the form of cash or emotional goodwill. The question as to whose interests are really being served remains moot.
How Africa came to be lumbered with such back-breaking debt in the first place sheds some light on the West's obligation, moral or otherwise, to write some of this debt off. As they emerged from colonialism with little in the way of functioning economies, many African countries were forced to borrow heavily to finance domestic investment including building infrastructure and primary production such as agriculture and mining.
They gambled on getting rich quick by selling their coffee, cocoa, gold, oil and diamonds to resource-gobbling western economies. Unfortunately the combined effects of oil shocks, a slump in commod ity prices, high interests and world recessions, from the 1970s onwards, derailed these aspirations.
Does the West have any obligation to help African economies weather the economic storms that have so devastated them? The West has a vested interest in helping fight poverty in Africa for the same reason that rich people in any society have an interest in ensuring some form of equitable distribution of opportunities and wealth. Deprivation breeds crime. And we have seen how in many rich countries the right wing often blames immigrants from poor countries, more so those countries where the sun shines more harshly, turning complexions darker, for all manner of crimes.
African economies made ill-advised investments, like we all do from time to time. And we cannot always blame those we transact business with unless they deliberately misled us or simply conned us. Nevertheless, the term caveat emptor comes to mind.
The problem here is that in looking at Africa's problems we tend to gloss over the classes or social groups. Africa is not by any means a homogenous community, no matter how similar we like to think we are, culturally, if not ethnically. We need to ask some tough questions, like who were the people who entered into those ill-advised investments supposedly on behalf of their citizens?
Were those presidents, ministers and other senior government officials and advisers representing our collective interests or their own narrowly-defined ones? Chances are they are sitting pretty in their fortress-style mansions while more than half the population ekes out a living on less than one American dollar a day. Therefore, it is not, strictly speaking, correct to claim that Africans brought their problems upon themselves.
The issue becomes clearer when we recognize the role that corruption itself played and continues to play in the impoverishment of Africa. We can blame the world economy and oil shocks only up to a point. Rampant corruption, perpetuated on a gargantuan scale by one leader after another, has been one of the major causes of squalor and suffering for African people.
Some observers estimate that the amounts being bandied about by the debt-cancellation brigade pale in comparison to the fortune stashed away illegally in foreign lands -- either in bank accounts or investments, including property.
This is where the collective guilt or complicity of key stakeholders in the West comes through more clearly. Did the World Bank, the IMF, and the host of donors -- be they banks or governments -- not realize that much of the money they were lending out to dictators was ending up in personal accounts in Switzerland, Bonn, London and New York?
The idea that these top-notch economists, bankers and supposedly astute leaders could not put two and two together and understand what was really going on beggars belief. It is more probable that they turned a blind eye because it was politically and ideologically expedient to ignore corruption perpetuated by 'friends and allies' in the fight against common enemies like communism.
They allowed 'free market-oriented' leaders to milk their countries dry in order not to alienate them into embracing monies from across the ideological divide. But now it is the ordinary Africans who are paying the price because they have to bear this burden and yet they derived no discernible benefits from this curious study in Western magnanimity.
Writing off debts will not help the ordinary Africans who have become accustomed to being neglected by their own leaders anyway. A debt cancellation policy in and of itself is completely meaningless if it is not accompanied by specific strategies to ensure that mechanisms are put in place to direct that money previously ear-marked for debt-servicing towards education, health, poverty-alleviation and building infrastructure. Ordinary people did not see this money work for them before. They will not see it work for them now so long as the corrupt regimes are still intact and as long as there are no clear-cut conditions associated with debt-cancellation.
It is a natural reaction to rail against conditions imposed on foreign aid and loans, especially where those conditions are seen as compromising a country's sovereignty. But we should not forget that the donor and lender are perfectly within their right to negotiate a disbursement and funding regime which protects their interests and ensures they can recoup their investment. However, if they approach the task with greed, cunning and bad faith, they jeopardize their rights to compensation if the debtor subsequently defaults or demands debt-forgiveness. This is the situation the global creditors are now faced with.
Similarly, we need to rethink this tendency to hide behind so-called sovereignty. This term has too often been abused and misused by privileged individuals who would have us believe that their own personal interests are synonymous with those of the State.
If a lender is acting in good faith to protect the interests of the ordinary people by imposing restrictions on how the crooked politician, banker and economist can act, then the sovereignty of the nation is, if anything, protected. It is not compromised, from the viewpoint of the ordinary people, because the local crooks are thus identified as the real villains. The real enemy is the local fellow who siphons off millions ear-marked for the peoples' welfare.
By a similar token, I would argue that if debt-cancellation were accompanied by strict conditions as to how the funds thus saved would be channeled into socially-responsible investments, the only thing that is threatened is the capacity of the ruling elites to continue impoverishing their people. Not the national sovereignty. Africans must set up the conditions and mechanisms themselves without waiting for the West to dictate to them how to treat their economies and their people.
Africans should free themselves from the culture of relying on aid and start by demanding that the stolen funds are returned and put to work in their countries. If all these funds were to be repatriated to Africa, where they belong, there would be little need for Africans to go around begging for debt cancellation and pie in the sky pledges about aid that will be dispatched in years to come.
If we are to approach anyone with a begging bowl, we should start with our fellow Africans who stole our wealth in the first place, before boarding a flight to the cities of the West, or China for that matter, as African presidents have started doing recently.
If the west feels it wants to assuage its guilt over this whole debt scandal, it must start by helping African people trace and recover their stolen wealth. It makes very little sense for Africa to continue giving aid to the West, which is exactly what corruption has facilitated for the last thirty years. And it is time for the likes of Band Aid to sing a different song.
KEN KAMOCHE was born in Kenya. He completed a BCom from the University of Nairobi and then earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study management at Oxford, where he took MPhil and DPhil degrees. He taught at Birmingham University in England and is now Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Ken has recently had a number of short stories accepted for publication and is now trying to have his first novel published. Email: kkamoche@yahoo.com. This is his third article for The World's Magazine.
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