The aid Africa can't afford
African development is high on the list of topics for the leaders of the Group of 8 countries meeting in Hokkaido, Japan. The host country has already pledged to double its aid to Africa from the current $6.9 billion over the next five years. President Bush, arriving in Japan on Sunday, made it clear he planned to push other G-8 nations to meet their 2005 promises to increase African aid.
Representatives of rich countries seem united in their belief that Africa would benefit from more international assistance and oblivious to the harm that aid has already inadvertently caused to African populations by propping up Africa's most dysfunctional states.
Instead of serving their people, most African states function as vehicles for the self-enrichment of political elites that have inherited none of the public-spiritedness of their colonial predecessors but all of the latter's contempt for the African masses. The remedy, therefore, might be to let Africa's failing neocolonial states disintegrate totally -- so that organic African political structures can emerge.
One of the key innovations that made the birth of the modern state possible was the emergence of a fundamental distinction between the government and the state. Over time, "states" came to mean the permanent territorial institutions that belong to all citizens, while "governments" denoted groups of people with temporary control of the machinery of the state. That crucial distinction nourished the ethos of public service that makes the embezzlement of public funds and all other abuses of state resources not only illegal but shameful.
The historical process whereby individual loyalties to families and clans lost ground to loyalties to states spanned many centuries in the West. Up to colonialism and after, original family and broader in-group loyalties remained largely intact in Africa.
When the colonial powers imposed the machinery of the modern state on Africa, complete with tax collectors, customs officers, police officers and soldiers, they did not instill an ethos of public service in local populations. After all, they meant to govern with their own officials. When Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960, for example, it had only three Africans in the entire civil service and only 30 university graduates.
