The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Waters shoulders the burden March 11, 2008

 Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

What do John Waters and John O’Shea of Goal have in common? Not the fact that they’re both self-promoting bores who are the darlings of radio discussion programmes less for the insight of their opinions than for the shrillness of their hysteria. No, they both care deeply about Africa; they care so deeply in fact, that they realise it might be necessary to destroy Africa in order to save it.

Waters’ most recent column in The Irish Times (sub req’d) could be taken straight from the John O’Shea book of wisdom. He points to the success of an ongoing project run by Bóthar Ireland in partnership with Heifer Project International, which provides heifers to families in Uganda who use the dung and urine in order to produce energy.
At the scale at which they operate, initiatives like Bóthar’s can be extremely successful in lifting individuals out of extreme abject poverty. There are few who would argue with Waters’ statement that:

There are no absolute, objective reasons why a country such as Uganda should have poverty or inequality on the scale that exists. The land is fertile, the rainfall regular.

The main problem is an impoverished culture, to which many basic skills have been lost. The key resources required are know-how and a jump-start. After that, the people are capable of taking charge of their lives with passion and energy.

However, where the column starts to go off the rails is where Waters states that:

Those responsible for dispensing official western government aid say that such initiatives can only scratch the surface unless accompanied by systemic, infrastructural development, which can only come about through partnerships between western donor states and African governments. The problem with this, as John O’Shea and others have been pointing out for aeons, is that Africa is rendered developmentally incontinent by corruption.

From the traffic cop who invites the defaulting motorist to “share” the fine (pay half and he’ll tear up the ticket) to the kleptocrat at the cabinet table, the ubiquity of graft and theft render much of the continent unamenable to systemic intervention.

This is precisely the line taken by John O’Shea whenever the issue of direct government aid is raised. While on the face of it, it seems like a strong, principled approach to tackling corruption, on deeper inspection it’s actually completely defeatist or entirely self-servign.

It is certainly true that corruption is a serious problem in many African states, and that it limits the potential of substantial social and economic progress. However, it is equally true that the only way to tackle such corruption – at any level – is to engage with the national governments and civil societies in those states and try and use the lever of direct support (including direct Budget support) to encourage reform. Such an approach is, of course, anathema to someone like John O’Shea who believes that that all aid to Africa should be channelled through NGOs (like, conveniently, GOAL). O’Shea’s mindset is neatly ridiculed in a recent letter to The Irish Times:

One might conclude that Mr O’Shea is now so blindly prejudiced against African governments that even when they do something right his Pavlovian reaction is one of condemnation. This is not the basis for a rational evaluation of events.
– Yours, etc,
EOIN DILLON, Ceannt Fort, Mount Brown, Dublin 8.

These aren’t easy issues, by any means. The idea that aid intended to develop the infrastructure of an impoverished state and help raise the living standards of its citizens is actually being used to support what are often corrupt authoritarian regimes can leave a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth. But if one is serious about achieving the Milennium Development Goals which go beyond basic survival to address issues such as primary education and gender equality – what choice does one have? GOAL might be able to build an individual school or clinic, but only a functioning state can develop and maintain a health or education system.

This is a point well made by Amartya Sen in his Development as Freedom, where he demonstrates that strong social growth (that is, respect for human rights, the rule of law, gender equality, civil society) is a prerequisite for sustainable economic growth which enhances the well-being of all citizens in a state. Of course, it goes without saying that even substantial government-to-government aid isn’t sufficient to create a society where all citizens are able to achieve a quality of life on par with that enjoyed in the West. The wealth of the West is, to a large extent, built on the poverty of the developing world and without a real political will to addressing this (for example in relation to WTO negotiations or reform of the CAP) this is not going to change. However, in terms of the discussion about humanitarian vs. development aid, this is something of a side issue.   Indeed, the debate on how best to achieve real progress and reform, economically and socially, in the developing world is one that’s far too broad to be tackled in this piece.  What is certain, though, is that it won’t be achieved through electricity from cow shit alone.

The balance between delivery of humanitarian aid where needed and defending human rights (or, rather, not abetting the violation of human rights) is a very difficult one. It’s addressed in a somewhat different context in Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flame where she describes how Sergio Vieira de Mello was often required to negotiate and compromise with particularly unpleasant individuals, and gloss over serious human rights abuses in order to ensure that humanitarian aid reached those who needed it most. However, for the likes of John O’Shea, and his new disciple, John Waters, these issues are very simple, and with a rather nasty, racist undercurrent. Africans can’t be trusted to do things for themselves; the only aid that should be provided should come from Western aid agencies (of course, ignoring the fact that the same kinds of messy compromises made at governmental level with African regimes are made, at a micro-level, on the ground every day by aid workers in order to ensure that they are able to deliver humanitarian aid and do their jobs effectively). The fact that this effectively condemns hundreds of millions of people to a subsistence level existence does seem to cause them much concern. Far more important that we stay morally pure in dealing with them. 

Waters concludes his piece by stating:

Intervening at the lowest level of necessity, they move people off the subsistence line and, over time, create functioning micro-economies which allow communities to become self-sufficient and optimistic. It is difficult to resist the idea that, coupled with a multiplier of some kind, such thinking might be the key to a more equal and functional Africa.

Difficult to resist? It’s easy to resist, as it represents the height of sanctimonious wishful thinking. Certainly initiatives like Bóthar’s may lift people from the subsistence line, but they’re not going to build road, install IT infrastructure or train doctors. That’s something that requires moral compromise and a willingness to make tough decisions. However, if one believes that Africans aren’t capable of that kind of progress (or don’t deserve the opportunity to try), it’s easier and cleanier to see them as ‘Half-devil and half-child’, dependent on the generosity of the Man from GOAL.