Who would have thought that Africans – the main recipients of Western aid – would have the audacity to bite the hand that feeds them? Well, the Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo has done just that with her recently-published book Dead Aid, which convincingly argues that Africans have lived in a “culture of aid” for too long and that aid has failed to either reduce poverty or promote economic growth on the continent. She calls for the phasing out of aid altogether and for making African markets more efficient. Moyo’s prescriptions for an aid-free and prosperous Africa include more trade, foreign direct investment, capital markets, the bond market, remittances and microfinance. For her insights, she was named among TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people this year.

While I am in general agreement with the argument that aid has not reduced poverty in Africa, Moyo’s prescriptions seem to be focused exclusively on neoliberal models of development which fail to recognise that the mad race towards wealth generation and economic growth has social and environmental consequences, and that while the private sector needs all the support it can get, it also needs to be regulated. She is also reluctant to admit that her free market prescriptions have helped to sustain inequalities in this world, which have impacted the current global financial crisis. Offering these prescriptions to a fragile and complex continent may have short-term rewards, but may prove harmful in the end, especially if they increase inequalities and fail to address issues of social justice.

In addition, Moyo’s prescriptions need functioning and efficient institutions and human resources to sustain economic growth and to improve the living standards of the majority. As we have seen in many African countries, the development of efficient and effective institutions and human resources is hampered by none other than the largely corrupt African political elite – one of the biggest causes of underdevelopment in the region. Removing corrupt governments, increasing subsidies – particularly towards to the agricultural sector – investing in public infrastructure and putting in place just institutions and laws that will protect the majority and ensure that prosperity is equitably distributed will allow Africans to take charge of their own destiny and to stop becoming mere spectators in the business of their own development.

However, I am grateful to Moyo for echoing the sentiments of many of the authors in Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits (AuthorHouse, 2008), an anthology that I edited, and which preceded Moyo’s book by eight months (but with much less fanfare). Authors in this provocative anthology argue that the mess we Africans find ourselves in is not because our markets are not efficient, but because the policies and conditionalities (including liberalisation, privatisation and free markets) imposed on us by Western donors and multilateral organisations benefited a few at the expense of the majority. In fact, donor-inspired policies, particularly those imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions – pillars of the Washington Consensus – are largely to blame for Africa’s growing poverty and inequality.

While not offering prescriptions, the book does show the failings of the development industry in Africa, through essays penned by people working within the industry who have first-hand experience, either as implementers of aid projects, as beneficiaries or as observers. Journalist Victoria Schlesinger wonders whether Jeffrey Sachs’s Millennium Development Village in Sauri, Kenya, is really bringing “development” to this small rural community. Bantu Mwaura, Oloo Onyango, Issa Shivji and Firoze Manji show how donor-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) end up hurting, rather than helping, those they purport to “develop”. Lara Pawson, Achal Prabhala, Isisaeli Kazado and Binyavanga Wainaina show how dysfunctional and short-sighted humanitarian workers perpetuate myths and stereotypes about the continent. Parselelo Kantai and Kalundi Serumaga take a swipe at African governments for perpetuating poverty and underdevelopment in the region, while Sunny Bindra and Maina Mwangi make well-argued cases against aid to Africa.

Slipping through the cracks of good intentions

My own doubts about the development industry were sowed way back in 2002 during an interview that I was conducting with Mberita Katela, a woman living in Laini Saba, the densest and poorest section of Nairobi’s Kibera slum, who earned an average daily income of 50 Kenya shillings (less than the proverbial dollar-a-day) selling sukuma wiki and cigarettes to her neighbours. I had gone to Kibera to do what they call a “qualitative time-space analysis” of how slum dwellers spend their time and how much physical space they occupy while carrying out their daily chores. This activity was part of a larger and much broader global slum analysis being carried out by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), where I worked at the time, and where I am currently the editor of the State of the World’s Cities report series.

As I sat on one of two small stools in Mberita’s tiny wattle, daub and tin shack – which was only marginally bigger than my bathroom at home – I found myself asking her the most intimate details about her life, questions that I myself would not have entertained: what she ate for breakfast, how many people she shared her shack with and, most important of all, where she defecated. Through this exercise, I found out that she shared one stinking pit latrine with dozens of her neighbours and that the latrine was located less than ten metres from her shack, which she shared with her daughter and two grandchildren. Needless to say, the stench of raw sewage permeated the air within and around her neighbourhood.

Mberita’s story – or rather, the state of her living conditions – was published in a UN-HABITAT publication, and was subsequently picked up by the American author and urbanist Mike Davis, who used parts of the story in his provocative book Planet of Slums to illustrate the dehumanising living conditions experienced by the world’s urban poor. Meanwhile, Mberita has remained oblivious of the fact that her name now appears in a book, a magazine and in cyberspace (a Google search this month yielded 61 results). The publication of her story had little or no impact on her living conditions; the most it did was create what development workers like to call “awareness” among some people and gained me a few Brownie points within the development fraternity. I had turned her into one of those people who, in the words of British columnist A.A. Gill, “slip through the cracks of good intentions” to become “slices of pie chart and exclamations”. I was sub-consciously doing what many people in the so-called development industry do: I was objectifying her, seeing her as part of a problem that needed to be solved so that she could be neatly compartmentalised into a “target group” category. This allowed me to perceive her as being “different” from me and bestowed on her an “otherness” that clearly placed her as my inferior, worthy of my sympathy. Like most professionals working in the development industry, I had failed to see that my work and the structures within which I operated were self-serving.

Since the birth of the United Nations in 1945, the notion of development has become a sacred cow within the international community, one that can not and must not be questioned. Not too long ago, when a dissident intellectual named Ivan Illich questioned the very idea of development (which he even had the audacity to refer to as “planned poverty”), he was quickly dismissed as a provocateur. His ideas, however, were propagated by various critics of development, including the environmentalist and author Wolfgang Sachs, who claimed that “the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape” and that “delusion and disappointment, failures and crime have been the steady companions of development”. Sachs even went as far as saying, “It is not the failure of development that has to be feared, but its success.”

These critics argued that development is more than a socio-economic endeavour; rather, it is “a perception that models reality, a myth that comforts societies and a fantasy that unleashes passion”. Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits shows how development can be easily subverted by vested interests – be they donors, NGOs or governments. For instance, one of the authors, the late Kenyan performance artist Bantu Mwaura, argues that theatre in Kenya has totally been consumed by development issues that concern donor communities; hence the emergence of what he calls “Aids-driven theatre” which often has an underlying HIV/Aids theme. This obsession with donor-focused agendas has led to the death of local, indigenous theatrical performances and practices. Professor Issa G. Shivji of Tanzania shows how policy-making, an important aspect of sovereignty, has been wrenched out of the hands of African governments by donors, relegating the former to mere beneficiaries rather than active participants in their own country’s development agenda. Firoze Manji, editor of Pambazuka News, makes a strong argument against what he calls “the depoliticisation of poverty”, in Africa which fails to address historical and other injustices that perpetuate poverty and conflict on the continent. Sunny Bindra and Maina Mwangi show how the aid habit has prevented African governments from seeking home-grown solutions to their own problems. African governments have also come under scathing attack in many of the essays in this anthology. Kenyan journalist Parselelo Kantai shows, for instance, how post-colonial governments have facilitated, if not encouraged, the underdevelopment of the Maasai community in Kenya.

The arguments of the various authors in the anthology revolve around three basic premises:

• That the development business and all those those who work for it are motivated by the need to impose new systems of domination on people of the Third World – in other words, that development is just another way that colonialism can be perpetuated without being labelled oppressive;
• That development models, such as those imposed by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other donor agencies, favour the rich at the expense of the poor and are, therefore, instrumental in perpetuating poverty in the so-called developing world; and
• That the worldview, intentions and mindset of development practitioners are paternalistic, arrogant and totally ignorant of the reality of poor people’s lives. The notion of “development” is also rejected because it is closely associated with “Westernisation”.

Very few people in the development industry wonder why the biggest recipients of foreign aid, such as Ethiopia and Tanzania, remain among the most impoverished countries in the world. Failures of aid are largely attributed to corrupt governments, whose excesses can be curbed through what the World Bank terms as “conditionalities”. Until Moyo came along, few Africans could readily admit that aid itself was the problem. The small circle of academics and mavericks who questioned the effectiveness of aid and development assistance were by and large not taken seriously by the international development community. Their ideas may have appeared in some text books or speeches; they might have even provoked discussion and debate within post-graduate courses and seminars, but they were seen as aberrations, lone voices in a Bono-Bob Geldof-driven development industry that is convinced that the ingredients of lifting the wretched of the earth out of poverty include higher economic growth, liberalised markets, good governance, better-funded NGOs and, most important of all, more aid.

Moyo has added to the debate, but I am afraid that given her unflinching faith in free markets as the ultimate solution, and her silence on social and historical injustices, she has not managed to take the debate far enough.

Rasna Warah, a columnist with Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, is the editor of 'Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits' (AuthorHouse, 2008).