Killing with kindness

When I wrote a regular column on Africa for this magazine’s left-wing rival, I was always intrigued by the contrast in responses to any sceptical article on aid. ‘This reactionary bigot is clearly happy for millions of Africans to starve,’ pretty much summed up the fury of white readers at having their Oxfam direct debits questioned. ‘No, she’s right!’ replied my defenders. ‘These corrupt, thieving governments should be cut off without a penny.’ Those ones always came from Africans.

The assumption that foreign aid is an unalloyed good runs so deep in the guilt- ridden, post-colonial West, people are often shocked to discover that many Africans, far from showing appropriate gratitude or begging for more, regard these contributions with both distrust and suspicion. No wonder this book is causing a stir.

While most critics are content to dismiss aid as largely inconsequential or simply over-sold, Dambisa Moyo — a Zambian economist who spent eight years at Goldman Sachs — goes about six steps further. Writing with tangible exasperation, she argues that aid is the worst thing to happen to her continent in the last 60 years and the biggest favour the West can now do Africa is to turn off the taps. A warning phone call, followed by five years to allow for adjustment, should just about do it, she reckons.

Those of us whose hearts sank on reading the American economist Jeffrey Sachs bestselling The End of Poverty, a book which helped persuade a generation of rock stars and well-meaning Western voters that the only thing wrong with aid to Africa was that there wasn’t enough of it, will find it hard to control a surge of relief upon reading Moyo.

The steady stream of funds from abroad, handed over with little oversight or follow-up, she says, has encouraged government corruption, actively undermined development, fuelled political instability and kept the continent ‘in a perpetual child-like state’.