Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa Read Online Free PDF Page A

for economic growth. In the absence of any significant domestic savings and lacking the physical and human capital to attract private investment, foreign aid was seen as the only way to trigger higher investment, which would thus lead to higher economic growth. As far as policymakers could see, there was no obvious alternative.
    There were of course other reasons why Britain, America and to a lesser extent France turned their attention to Africa. By the mid-1950s Africa was undergoing profound changes – with Western powers loosening the chains of colonialism, many countries were gaining their independence. Countries such as Ghana in 1957, Kenya in 1963, and Malawi and Zambia in 1964 broke from the colonial fold to become independent states between 1956 and 1966; in all, thirty-one African countries did so. Independent theymay have been on paper, but independence dependent on the financial largesse of their former colonial masters was the reality. For the West, aid became a means by which Britain and France combined their new-found altruism with a hefty dollop of self-interest – maintaining strategic geopolitical holds. For the US, aid became the tool of another political contest – the Cold War.
    While the Cold War was peppered with outbreaks of physical hostility (for example, in Korea), much of the battle for world hegemony between the US and the USSR was fought economically and on foreign soil. The choice of weapon – aid. Africa saw many such battles. Aid became the key tool in the contest to turn the world capitalist or communist. The Soviet Union was, of course, a staunch supporter (and financier) of some of Africa’s greatest communists – Patrice Lumumba in Congo and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. And the US, by contrast, rewarded its supporters, such as Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko.
    As such, the aid imperative took on an added dimension: not how deserving a country might be or the nature of its leadership, but rather the willingness of a desperately impoverished country to ally itself with one camp or another – benevolent leader or vicious tyrant, as long as they were onside, what did it matter?
    It is impossible to know for sure what the true motivations for granting foreign aid to Africa were, but granted it was.
The 1960s: the decade of industrialization
    By the beginning of the 1960s some US$100 million in aid had been transferred to the African continent. This was a mere trickle compared to the avalanche of billions of dollars of aid that would eventually make its way to Africa.
    The early part of the 1960s also saw the underlying shift towards a greater focus on aid funding for large-scale industrial projects. The prevailing view was that because these projects had longer-term pay-offs (for example, the funding of infrastructure projects such as roads and railways), they were unlikely to be funded by theprivate sector. One such example is the double-curvature, hydroelectric, concrete arch Kariba dam that straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe; it was built throughout the decade. The dam, whose construction began under British colonial rule in the mid-1950s, was finally completed at a cost of US$480 million in 1977. Today it still ranks as one of the largest dams in the world.
    By 1965, when around half of sub-Saharan Africa’s roughly fifty states were independent, aid had already reached at least US$950 million. Ghana, which had won its independence from Britain in 1957, had received as much as US$90 million in aid flows. Zambia, Kenya and Malawi, all independent by 1964 had, on average, received about US$315 million each by the end of the decade. Statistical records from the 1960s are scant, and estimates of the miles of tarred road and railway track, the numbers of bridges and airports, that aid helped build remain unclear. As such, the true value of the surfeit of aid that had gone to Africa remains open to debate, but by the beginning of the 1970s there was still not much