Stop giving us aid, say Africans
By Daniel Hannan Politics Last updated: May 19th, 2009

Telegraph, UK

I’ve just been talking to a very clever man. He’s called Thompson Ayodele, he’s from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer. The statistics he produces are jaw-dropping. They suggest a direct correlation between the receipt of development assistance and low growth. This is true whether you compare neighbouring countries, or whether you look at different periods within the same country. Foreign aid, he suggests, isn’t useless; it’s actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes. A similar correlation exists between debt remission and insolvency: countries which have their bills periodically written off become re-indebted more quickly than countries which don’t.

James Elles MEP, Thompson Ayodele and me

It’s quite a dilemma for Western governments – especially those of the Centre-Right. Socialists have a tendency to emphasise motive over outcome. Never mind that aid shields recipient governments from the consequences of their policy failures: the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you’re a caring person.

Fair enough. But if we genuinely wanted to help Africa, says Thompson, we wouldn’t give one more penny in direct grants. Instead, we would scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, open our markets and build infrastructure directly in situ: in other words, we’d fund (say) a new highway across Sudan and hold competitive tenders for local companies to build it.

The trouble is that if conservatives announced that they were going to cut overseas aid budgets, not everyone would believe that they were doing so as a result of Thompson’s cogent philosophy. They would be accused, rather, of doing it because they were selfish or because they didn’t care about people whose skins were darker than theirs. Hence, perhaps, my party’s determination, at a time of general economic retrenchment, explicitly to guarantee the international development budget against future cuts.

As Thompson puts it: “The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result”. Yup: but at least we’ll have shown everyone how nice we are.