Opinion
The bloated, arrogant aid industry will not let Africa go without a fight
So it is that even as Africa’s economies have rocketed in the new millennium, aid agencies have used their vast budgets to blanket newspaper front pages and billboards across Western capitals to portray a continent that has never been worse. The only way out, so the chorus goes, is more aid.
Those who live outside Africa can be forgiven for being blind to the aid business’ self-interest. Faced by its excruciating blackmail – an image of a starving baby – and not knowing any better, who would dare call it out? Inside Africa, however, that image is seen for what it is: a misrepresentation so gross it approaches a lie – whether of Africa, or its needs, or the ability of aid to assist it. It is, literally, the infantilizing of an entire continent.
In today’s Africa, money is giving ordinary people the means and authority to push back at anyone still pushing them around. Who are these last false prophets who would keep them in their place? Africa’s last few dictators, its newly resurgent jihadis – and aid workers. While they may differ substantially in motivation and intent, they share the presumption that they can tell Africans who to be and how to behave. That has always been arrogant. Increasingly it is wrong.
Because here’s the other thing about development: if its economic implications are profound, its social and political ones are even more so. If the world’s primary division is between rich and poor, more money brings Africans closer to the day when all human beings really are created equal. It removes the last argument of racism: the contention that if attainment varies with race, it is no accident.
Most important to the aid agencies, since if the continent’s new narrative is no longer be about weakness but resourcefulness, it will kill off forever the notion that development is something rich people in rich countries do to poor people in poor countries through charity.
In this newly assertive Africa, no longer will Africans allow speaking up for the continent to become speaking for it or defending their interests become deciding them. Half a century after Africa won its formal liberation, it is now winning the substance of it. Once Africa’s final struggle for freedom ends, our differences should feel less of a partition or a basis for arrogance than an expression of diversity. The end of poverty by 2030? Quite possibly. But if the activists in New York were honest – about Africa’s development and how it really happens – they would add a second aspiration: the end of aid.
Alex Perry is a freelance journalist and author. who has covered has covered Africa, Asia and the Middle East and contributed to TIME magazine. This article was originally published in the Daily Telegraph.
