Africa needs property rights, not aid
by John Hollaway, The Conservative Woman:
LORD Peter Bauer (1915-2002) was Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He described aid as ‘money taken from poor people in rich countries and given to rich people in poor countries’.
In my experience that is broadly correct; taxpayers in wealthy nations provide aid money which, if it gets there at all, ends up mainly in the pockets of the urban elite of the third world.
However, Lord Bauer’s obituary in the Guardian noted that a review of his work by six development economists in the Journal of Development Studies accused him of ‘low standards of logic and evidence’ and ‘gross exaggeration’. His views, they said, were based on ‘frighteningly flimsy intellectual foundations’. He was ennobled by Margaret Thatcher.
Billions of dollars of development aid has continued to flow to third world governments, particularly in Africa. Some of this has been enormously beneficial. To name three successes: the elimination of smallpox, the supply of vaccines such as BCG anti-tuberculosis which perhaps a majority of African babies now receive, and the provision of clean water.
Nonetheless, now in my ninth decade, almost all of them spent in crumbling African nations, I have to acknowledge that most of the African continent is in a state, as Lytton Strachey said of Keate’s Eton, of anarchy tempered with despotism.
It is possible to pick out two commonalities in this ongoing catastrophe.
[Editor’s note: I fundamentally disagree with much of what the author says, but thought it would be good to leave it as a conversation starter. What are the best ways of giving aid to Africa? Holloway does not mention one of the most successful: the work of local NGO’s, funded by aid, working in communities to train people to help themselves and make governments more accountable in an emerging democratic process. He also doesn’t mention the thousands of mission projects run by churches, most of which are a partnership between local initiative and help from resources from wealthier countries. If ‘bilateral’ ie government to government aid is mired in corruption, the answer is not necessarily to try to turn African populations into property-owning Western style democracies, but to work with and empower godly and hard working citizens at the grassroots, many of whom will be Christians.]
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