Letters | 17 January 2013

Aid waste

Sir: In Andrew Mitchell’s response to my article ‘The Great Aid Mystery’ (5 January), he asks ‘what about the 11 million children in school who wouldn’t be there’ if it weren’t for DFID’s aid efforts. It would be hard to come up with a more representative example of the dishonest marketing rhetoric that is the standard aid industry response to outside questioning. Not only is there the inevitable reference to children, there’s also a classic bogus statistic. Yes, the British government may have paid for 11 million school places over the years, but even if DFID had proof that 11 million real children were genuinely enrolled in schools as a result of UK aid (itself a dubious claim), that does not mean that they actually attend those schools, or that the schools have teachers, or textbooks, or electricity, or are more than half-built wrecks. Mr Mitchell is either deliberately stretching the truth in this claim, or he knows startlingly, dismayingly little about the realities of aid delivery.

As for his boast about vaccinations ‘every two seconds throughout this parliament,’ Mr Mitchell must know that vaccination programmes form a minuscule proportion of the DFID annual spend and hardly justify an expansion of the department’s bloated budget. May I suggest a book that might help him? Aiding And Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures And The 0.7  Per Cent Deception, available from Civitas.
Jonathan Foreman
By email

Sir: I refer to your excellent article ‘The great aid mystery’ (5 January). For some eight years, we at my charity Homes in Zimbabwe have watched with incredulity at the way DFID aid is deployed in Zimbabwe. During this time some £500 million of UK taxpayers’ money has been spent on, among other things, funding the Zimbabwe civil service, education and health programmes. No doubt some of this money has been spent wisely, but not a single penny has gone to assist the aged and destitute pensioners — many who fought for this country in the second world war or are their widows — whose assets were effectively stolen by the Mugabe government in the great inflation.

Why on earth should UK taxpayers foot bills that should have been paid for by the Mugabe government? If Mugabe had not wrecked the economy to keep himself in power and then allowed the theft of the Marange diamond fields by his cronies in the army and police, his government could easily have afforded to pay for the services currently funded by UK taxpayers through DFID — in the current year, over £85 million.