By Stacey Patton

“If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime,” so says the old Chinese proverb. The newest political media darling, former Goldman Sachs banker and author Dambisa Moyo, is proposing that the continent of Africa learn how to fish without hook, line or sinker in waters still muddied by centuries of slave voyages and imperial escapades, and seasoned with the bones of millions of dead Africans littering ocean floors.

Dambisa Moyo, photo by Helen Jones

In her new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa, the Harvard and Oxford-educated Zambian native argues that wealthy western countries providing billions of dollars in aid to the continent have failed to feed and teach Africans how to cast their own nets so they can be self-sufficient.

It is a “great myth “, Moyo contends, that western aid has helped reduce poverty and increased economic growth. In examining the postwar development policy of the past 50 years, she found that more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been poured into the continent.  Despite a deluge of aid, she writes that poverty has escalated, economic growth rates have steadily declined, and millions of Africans continue to suffer because most of the money pays for armies or ends up in the bank accounts of the elites instead of the people who need the most help.

Moyo posits that overreliance on western aid and little pressure to reform governments or their economies, has trapped Africa’ s developing nations in “a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the ‘need’ for more aid,” and “aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower.” She further asserts, “With aid’s help, corruption fosters corruption, nations quickly descend into a vicious cycle of aid. Foreign aid props up corrupt governments – providing them with freely usable cash.”

For Moyo, it also doesn’t help that celebrities like rock star Bono and moguls like Bill Gates help foster “dependency ” by urging western governments to increase aid to Africa with images that invoke guilt. At a recent forum held at NYU, Moyo criticized Bono and other entertainers for fueling media images of Africans as helpless, dependent victims rather than as individual countries of diverse peoples with unlimited potential. And she said that while Gates’ health programs help many impoverished people, they also enable African leaders not to take an assertive role in helping their own.

But Moyo’s argument reeks of the same kinds of themes of the early to mid 20^th century isolationist critique pushed by elements within American conservatism. Hers also echoes the racist critique that argues that black people deserve no government support of any kind.

For example, Moyo accuses Bono, Gates and other westerners of usurping the voices of African leaders who should be speaking on behalf of their nations. But she is essentially doing the same by designating herself as a spokesperson for all of Africa. Dead Aid, lumps together 47 independent Sub-Saharan countries, treating them with a broad analytical stroke. Though they each have their own track records of progress or lack thereof, Moyo effectively paints Africa as a giant welfare state – the ‘white man’s burden’ of the 21^st century.

She does not account for those African nations such as – Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Tanzania, Uganda and others – all that have thriving democratic governments with improved leadership and whose economic growth has increased over the past decade with improved efforts to create jobs, educational opportunities, and to combat poverty and disease.

Recent studies have shown that in the last decade, the strongest growth in Africa corresponds with increased aid, debunking Moyo’s central premise that aid prevents sustained growth. Reports from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank, International Development Association (IDA), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Heath Organization (WHO) and others challenge the wholesale negative depiction of Africa in the West.

So what is the best way to combat extreme poverty in Africa? Moyo is traveling around the world, meeting with western leaders to propose that aid to Africa should be cut off in five years. She says that China and countries in the Middle East will line up to invest in Africa. She naively believes that the free market will save the continent even as the global capitalist dynamic has become alarmingly apparent across the globe.

I agree with Moyo’s point that aid can be bad, misused, and abused. But has there been any form of aid anywhere in the world at any time in human history that has been free of corruption? There are significant examples of how American foreign aid has been significantly affected by widespread corruption in recipient countries. To name a few, aid given to Iran under the Shah of Iran; the Philippines under the rule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos; Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and several of the former Soviet republics; Mexico and our “friendly” states in Latin America; Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush administration.

Africa doesn’t hold a monopoly on corruption, except in the popular western discourse and in the mind of Moyo, an expatriate and daughter of privilege whose ideals were nurtured in the elite halls of London and Cambridge.

NGOs and other aid organizations working on the ground in Africa have responded to Moyo’s polemic, reporting signs of good governance on the continent. They note that community leaders, journalists, churches, schools, and ordinary citizens are have been banding together to hold governments accountable for how aid is spent. For example, last September, more that 100 countries signed up to the Accra Agenda for Action, which is being overseen by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an organization which makes aid more accountable to its poor citizens.

In the mid-90s, various educational sectors got with the accountability program. In Uganda where education aid failed to reach students, local parent teacher associates together with the Ministries of Education and Finance, and donors worked to improve checks and balances to ensure that monies arrives at schools. A plethora of dispatches from Africa provide even more examples of progress linked to western aid.

Despite these specific examples of aid producing positive results in Africa, Moyo’s argument has clearly struck a nerve among some western commentators. That it has, speaks to a larger perception about Africa’s and Africans’ intrinsic value and their membership in the world community.

Why is Moyo’s argument that foreign aid is not valid, is seemingly applied only to black Africans? (This of course is the same argument that has long been applied to poor black, but not white, welfare recipients in the United States.) This kind of extremist foreign policy has never been applied to the countries mentioned above. Proposals to cut funding to certain countries bedeviled by rampant corruption and such other flaws have never gained any significant traction. Instead, the focus is always on fixing the problems.

In whose interests would it be to cut foreign aid to Africa even as the continent has shown significant progress? African countries’ mineral rights have drawn the concerted attention of China and other global competitors. It is absurd to cut aid to Africa and thereby allow global competitors to establish uncontested influence on the continent. Such a lack of competition for Africa’s friendship would also undermine these countries’ ability to profit from their own developable resources.

Cutting aid to Africa would have enormous foreign policy ramifications. Foreign aid is a business and a lubricant; it is how countries do both commercial and political business with each other. If America cut off aid to Africa, how would that affect relationships between us and African countries and corporations? What kind of political relationship would be destroyed especially as the U.S. continues to seek allies in the fight against global terrorism?

Dead Aid proposes an apartheid scheme that calls for Africa’s expulsion from the world community. Ironically, it doesn’t take too much thought to see that in this era of global capitalism and technological advancement which have drawn nations ever closer together. Those nations who sign on to such schemes would find themselves significantly out of step with global realities.

In fact, Moyo’s book is not a prescription for the present. It is homage to an old imperial view of Africa. The same kinds of arguments have been made in previous books such as: William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell, and Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions. Moyo is having a dialogue in an echo chamber with largely white right-wing conservatives eager to use this attractive, young, intelligent and ‘articulate’ African woman as an exotic pawn of domestic and international conservatism. Moyo is to Africa, what Shelby Steele and friends are to black America.

It is a shame that she neglects to include the voices or perspectives of the Africans she writes about. Dead Aid is dead wrong and naïve. Moyo’s blend of patronizing ignorance and arrogance is definitely not what the doctor ordered for a continent as complex, dynamic and valuable as the cradle of civilization.

Stacey Patton is Senior Editor/Writer for TheDefendersOnline and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. She is also the author of That Mean Old Yesterday – A Memoir.