Is Foreign Aid Really the Solution to Africa's Terminal Indigence?

Brown vows £8.5bn in crusade to educate world's poor

The Telegraph - fairly recently- succinctly expressed the idiocy of Gordon Brown's prodigious efforts to educate (indoctrinate) the world's poor in three concise points:

1) It will encourage the fallacious belief that a good education is chiefly a question of state spending.

2) The subsidies will confirm the view of many Africans that they should look to the outside world, rather than to themselves, for better government.

3) As well as infantilising Africans, they infantalise British taxpayers.

Gordon Brown is by no means an evil man. However, when you have someone who eminently believes that the nation's wealth belongs to the state; who has undoubted immense altruistic instincts, you know the taxpayer is in for a fun time.

Should taxpayers' money be used to alleviate the world's alleged education deficit? I don't think so. What annoyed me even more though was the impassive exhibition Gordon Brown produced when he announced that £8 thousand millions (£ 8 billions if you come from North America) was to be parceled out to the deserving poor. We know why he was so casual about it; they'll always be more.

I perhaps wouldn't mind so much if the money was spent wisely. But, like most government initiatives, it just isn't. If only politicians would address the real causes of the problem rather than the resultant symptoms. Instead I have to put up with a priapic Gordon Brown displaying his philanthropic credentials across Africa - something a genuine philanthropist wouldn't be caught dead doing.

As the Daily Telegraph leader states:

The beauty of Africa, for a British politician, is that it is about mood, not results. Mr Brown will be able to pose for photographs with laughing children. Everyone will feel slightly better at the sight. He will have demonstrated his benign motives, and will then be able to move on, happy in the knowledge that no one will ever hold him to account.

There is a simple reason why the global community continually fails Africa: all solutions have been expressed through state intervention or the redistribution of private wealth. Any charity, public or private, can make anyone richer - for a temporary time. However, hand-outs won't eliminate poverty, they will actually mask the causes of it; more importantly they will help to entrench the habits that perpetuate poverty.

Poverty may be used to justify these international programmes, but the aid is almost always given in the form of government-to-government transfers. This very inherent bias towards state control and the politicisation of the actual process stifles, rather than encourages reform and anabiosis. Foreign aid then inevitably augments and encourages the resources of government compared to the private sector. Once the aid is then in the hands of a nepotistic bureaucracy the state uses the aid for purposes conducive to the ruling regime’s own desires. One only has to look at the examples of Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Even when aid does finally does reach the consumer it has the same debilitating effect as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It is typically forgotten that most of the recipient countries have local industries and farms. How are they expected to survive the influx of free goods? It is no different to the dumping of subsidised European produce in African markets. In practice, the developed world's short-term solutions eventually manifest themselves in the the protracted difficulties of the future. Aid acutely destroys the possibility for sustained economic growth by driving local producers, especially farmers, out of business.

This is why taxapayers' should not support Gordon Brown's massive redistribution policies. For a start, it is their money, and by association they will be giving open-ended support to the pathologically corrupt regimes which propagate the poverty.

Capitalism and globalistion are then not responsible - despite the BBC's insistence - for the existing inequalities in the world. They have in fact done more to increase wealth and lower prices then any other mechanism in history. Lasting and protracted poverty has it roots firmly entrenched in an abyss of cultural and political corruption. For instance, if capitalism is so destructive and encourages inequality, why do foreign companies based in Africa provide the best education and healthcare services for their employers? It doesn't help that the United Nations fails to even recognise private schools in their calculations for how many children fail to receive any formal primary education.

Central to the question of foreign aid is the belief that formal education and health services can only be provided by state funding. It is simply a fallacy. What existed before the inception of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom? Ask anyone now and they believe - it is subliminally taught at state schools - that there wasn't any discernable health care system in operation. Where do they think the infrastructure came from? If one did exist they are probably told it involved the poisoning of working class children. Either that, or they were complict in some naughty eugenics programme in Scandinavia.

Africa's problems stem from irrationalism and collectivism - all throw-backs to the aftermath of colonial rule. Some of this blame can be apportioned on the developed world. That blame is not exploitation or the systematic rape of a continent though. I'm not sure how you can even rape a country of its resources when it doesn't have the capacity to utilise them. Without Western technology I doubt even the Middle East could extract its oil. The developed world's real crime is to have burdened African nations with a failed socialist ideology. A combination of misgovernment, the heaviest regulated markets in the world and endemic corruption that would shame an Italian politician (or is it Brtish now?) has transformed these countries from moderately prosperous enclaves into the apotheosis of the most miserable and pathetic place imaginable. The continent itself is still rich in resources, but the incentive to produce has been destroyed by government policy; the real cause of Africa's enervation.

Why are these acts of recidivism being allowed to continue and in such a profligate demeanour?

The blame can be wholly attributed to the lack of moral fortitude exhibited by the liberal-right. The Left didn't even have to resort to irredentist behaviour to plant the Red Flag. This is because ever since the 60s the Right has actively vacated issues on foreign aid and development. This has then left the authoritarian-left with a completely unchallenged monopoly on how Africa's plight is addressed. A moral case must then be made: that the Left must no longer command a cartel on third-world issues.

A start can be made by acknowledging that the world's impoverished nations are poor for a reason: they have nothing to do with free and liberal markets. Africa's autocratic leaders are corrupt, intrusive, and actively restrict political and economic freedom. The real inequality then is that the political culture of Africa is illiberal, whilst most of the developed world has a semblance of freedom to acquire and posses wealth. The question that needs to be asked is: not what makes someone poor, but what makes them wealthy?

It is for this reason that British taxpayers' do not owe the third world an apology for their relative wealth. Their wealth has been earned through their own enterprise and productivity; they are not parasites who prey on the poor around the globe by stealing their natural resources. Consequently, they are not responsible for the tragic problems that afflict that 'vast, beautiful [and] pitiful continent.' The poverty that exists in Africa is a terrible shame, but that shame should not be thrown on to the British taxpayer through the Chancellor's guilt-ridden self-loathing. Africa's decline can only be reversed through the active support of democratic institutions, responsible private charity and unflinching support for the individual. Only then can a renascent Africa emerge after almost 40 years of decline.

Africa's problems are self-inflicted. Only when we acknowledge that fact and treat these nations on the same moral basis as all other governments will reform and development finally be possible. Bob Geldoff can then at last retire from public life, or campaign in support of male victims of domestic abuse, and Bono can go back to writing his music. Actually, on second thoughts, please continue showering Africa with foreign aid.