Foreign Aid for Scoundrels

Foreign Aid for Scoundrels
November 25, 2010
William Easterly

Orban Thierry/Sipa Press







Little Bookroom / Amsterdam by Hand

Even this rhetoric seems to disappear when aid is explicitly under discussion. An important aid event, the recent UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in New York, was telling in this respect. UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg gave a speech to the summit in which he did not mention democracy; yet two days later, speaking to the UN General Assembly, he said that we must “fearlessly project the ideals of democracy, equality and freedom.” Similarly, the UN itself issued a statement on World Democracy Day, September 15, 2010: “Democracy has the real potential to empower inclusive development.” Only five days later, three different senior UN officials gave opening speeches to the MDG summit without mentioning democracy.







To be fair to the donors, they do sometimes show concern for democracy. Donor countries became involved in internationally supervised elections in formerly war-torn societies like Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Donors such as the US also applied pressure to Kenya to conform to democratic principles after the longtime autocrat Daniel Arap Moi left office, and again in 2007–2008 when there was a seriously flawed election.11 However, other flawed elections happened with little complaint from donors (such as in Nigeria in 2007), not to mention the farcical “elections” in the aid-supported dictatorships I have mentioned. Moreover, the democratic standards endorsed by donors have generally been inadequate, concerning primarily the mechanics of elections, while ignoring such important issues as protection of human rights and freedom of speech. How can voters have a fair choice if opponents of the regime live in fear of arrest and torture?


A more important political motive for aid is independent of cold wars or wars on terror. Aid agencies exist to give aid, so they must keep the money flowing. The department of an aid agency assigned to help a country may not get a budget next year if its officials don’t disburse to the country’s ruler this year; so they hand out funds no matter how autocratic he is. (The autocratic recipients know this and know they can ignore any “raised concerns” about democracy, including human rights.) Only the most well-publicized and egregious violators of democratic principles—like Robert Mugabe—get cut off.

Donor countries that claim they are politically neutral are not. Aid increases the slush funds available to the government, financing more repression of democratic opposition. The government can deny aid to opposition supporters, as a new Human Rights Watch report found occurred in Ethiopia in 2009–2010. As one farmer told HRW, “[Village] leaders have publicly declared that they will single out opposition members, and those identified as such will be denied…access to fertilizers, ‘safety net’ and even emergency aid….” Aid also increases the incentive to stay in power, making the government all the more unwilling to risk the voters’ verdict.12 The African writer and economist Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid (2009) observes this tendency. “With easy access to cash,” she writes, “a government remains all-powerful, accountable (and only then nominally) to its aid donors.”13 How can donor countries and agencies live with such hypocrisy? From the very beginning, aid history is awash with rationalizations for donors supporting autocracy.

The existing aid system took hold during the late colonial era, at a time when colonialism (autocratic itself, obviously) was expected to endure. A longtime British colonial official named Lord Hailey pushed through the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940. Hailey said, “A new conception of our [colonial] relationship…may emerge as part of the movement for the betterment of the backward peoples of the world.” This was at a time when the Colonial Office said that “most Africans are still savages” and “they will probably not be fit for complete independence for centuries.” This story is told in detail in an undeservedly obscure book, Lord Hailey, the Colonial Office and the Politics of Race and Empire in the Second World War (2000) by Suke Wolton, who summed up the prevailing view of the time:

The major powers would continue to be able to determine the future of the colonial territories—only this time the source of their legitimacy was based…on their new role as protector and developmental economist14

A recent book by Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (already reviewed in these pages, but not from this angle), tells a similar story.15 A key figure in the founding of the United Nations was the South African Jan Smuts, who actually drafted the famous preface to the UN Charter that committed the organization among other things to “the economic and social advancement of all peoples.” In a speech to the UN Conference in 1945, Smuts said he was “including dependent peoples, still unable to look after themselves.” Smuts too expected colonial empires to last, and the UN Charter said nothing about the independence of any colony.