Following President Yoweri Museveni’s signing of the
Anti-Homosexuality law donor countries were falling over themselves to cut and
re-evaluate their aid programs with Uganda in protest.
The debate on whether he should have signed or not will
probably continue until the cows come home but you have to sympathise with the
donor governments.
Aid is packaged as help from external donors to bridge our
own financing gaps. So for instance we don’t raise enough tax to finance our
health or education needs, the donors cover the deficit so we can be healthier
and our children go to school and they can they can show up their benevolence
to their constituents.
"What for obvious reasons is not highlighted, is that aid is used to maintain influence over recipient nations, if we needed any proof of this the righteous indignation of the last week speaks volumes in this direction....
It’s a long story but this is how the aid industry works in
a nut shell. Governments decide they will allocate a certain percentage of
their budgets to aid, they dish out this money according to recipient nations
budgetary or project needs.
Then things get interesting.
According to statistics from the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) donor countries retain as much as nine in
every ten dollars in aid disbursed in the case of Greece. Japan comes in as the
country that retains least aid at seven percent.
The aid that stays in donor countries is mainly spent on
administration – hiring and procurement, student scholarships, refugee costs,
development awareness activities and debt relief.
One need not wonder about the back scratching that takes
place in awarding tenders and employment during this process. So there is a
local constituency to be serviced with this aid money at home.
"In the recipient country a significant amount goes on administrative costs, meaning fat salaries and hardship allowances for aid workers, both local and expatriate and brand new four wheel drives to whiz around the ”pot hole” ridden Kololo avenues....
So there are a lot of voters in the donor communities who
would not appreciate rocking the aid gravy train.
In the recipient
countries too, contrary to the analogy of leaders roaming foreign capitals
begging bowl in hand often times this aid is actually unsolicited and woe onto
the country that deigns to refuse the aid.
A few years ago Uganda was criticised for refusing more aid
to the health sector. Uganda argued that the amount of aid being proposed would
disrupt the delicate macro-economic balance of the country negating any gains
the money may have brought. Government officials were vilified as baby killers
and worse.
Beyond the altruist function of helping government pay for
services it can’t handle on its own, aid is also a tool of influence with poor
countries.
A threat to pull the plug on aid or even the promise of more aid in the future is often enough to keep the political elite of these poor country dancing to the pipers tune...
And this is where the
donors probably need our sympathy, where you can see their dilemma.
On the one hand their moral rectitude dictates that they
should deprive countries who do not live up to their high standards of good and
bad, while on the other hand to make them pariahs would be to forgo the
aforementioned influence.
No country is inconsequential.
When George W. Bush cobbled a coalition of the willing to
attack Iraq he roped in the obscure island republic of Palau to make up the
numbers.
Donor nations are also reluctant to sever engagement with
developing nations because no sooner have they rolled back their engagement
than another donor nation jumps in to fill the gap – and we are not talking
about China or India.
Images of diseased, malnourished African children on foreign
TV are useful to justify to their tax payers deploying their money to help
human beings in need, the real reason
however is often to maintain influence over foreign nations for strategic
reasons – political and commercial.
The current standoff will put this thesis to the test.
"If they are truly appalled by our lack of respect for human rights and feel this overrides any other of their interests there will be a scramble for exits, but if as suggested, there is more at stake to them, they will huff and puff for a little while longer before settling down to the serious business of furthering their own national interests....
