Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Time for a Rethink: Why Development Aid for Africa Has Failed




Development aid to Africa has been flowing for decades, but the results have been paltry. Instead, recipients have merely become dependent and initiative has been snuffed out. It is time to reform the system.

Development aid to Africa is a blessing for all those directly involved -- both on the giving end and on the receiving end. Functionaries on the donor side, at least those abroad, earn good money. Many of those on the receiving end, for their part, know how to organize things in such a way that their own personal interests don't get short shrift.
There is no reason for these two groups to be interested in changing the status quo. Yet even so, some within their ranks are starting to suggest the situation as it stands cannot continue. The development aid of the past 50 years, they say, is hardly justifiable given the disappointing results. Even individual donors, who know little about how development aid works in practice, increasingly sense that something might be amiss.
They're right. The aid has failed to a large extent.
Donors have taken on too much responsibility for solving African problems. They have essentially educated them to, when problems arise, call for foreign aid first rather than trying to find solutions themselves.
This attitude has become deeply rooted in Africa. This self-incapacitation is one of the most regrettable results of development cooperation thus far. Poorly designed development aid has made people dependent and accustomed them to a situation of perpetual assistance, preventing them from taking the initiative themselves. It is this situation which represents the greatest damage done, far worse than the enormous material losses engendered by failed aid projects. And there are many. Africa is strewn with idle tractors, ruined equipment and run-down buildings.


Deeply Rooted Misconceptions
Tthe view has taken hold that donors  are primarily responsible for developing Africa. At the 2nd Bonn Conference on International Development Policy in August 2009, then-German President Horst Köhler, an experienced and dedicated African development activist, spoke about an energy partnership established between Germany and Nigeria two years previously. His conclusion:
"I cannot discern that the amount of electricity in Nigeria has increased since then. And I find it shameful for the industrialized countries, as well as for those responsible in Nigeria, that this large country, rich as it is in resources essentially, can't advance its socio-economic development because it hasn't yet managed to bring electricity to its rural areas. I find this shameful for the entire development cooperation that has existed for decades."
Here, the fact that Köhler mentions the industrialized countries before Nigeria when discussing responsibility for the failure is notable. More notable, however, is that he mentions the industrialized countries at all.
Are industrialized countries to be ashamed that one of the world's largest oil exporters isn't capable of providing its rural areas with electricity? Simply asking the question is enough to show how absurd the thought is -- and how deeply rooted the misconception.
This mothering mindset, widespread in industrialized countries for decades, is in direct violation of the subsidiarity principle. This principle states that providers of aid, whether private or governmental, should not assume any duties that could be carried out by the receiver country itself. Furthermore, it mandates that aid be given such that those providing it can cease giving as soon as possible.

Or are they all EHI-Economic Hit Men?

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man


excerpt from
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
by John Perkins
P R O LO G U E
Quito, Ecuador’s capital, stretches across a volcanic valley high in the Andes, at an altitude of nine thousand feet. Residents of this city, which was founded long before Columbus arrived in the Americas, are accustomed to seeing snow on the surrounding peaks, despite the fact that they live just a few miles south of the equator. The city of Shell, a frontier outpost and military base hacked out of Ecuador’s Amazon jungle to service the oil company whose name it bears, is nearly eight thousand feet lower than Quito. A steaming city, it is inhabited mostly by soldiers, oil workers, and the indigenous people from the Shuar and Kichwa tribes who work for them as prostitutes and laborers.
To journey from one city to the other, you must travel a road that is both tortuous and breathtaking. Local people will tell you that during the trip you experience all four seasons in a single day. Although
I have driven this road many times, I never tire of the spectacular scenery. Sheer cliffs, punctuated by cascading waterfalls and brilliant bromeliads, rise up one side. On the other side, the earth drops abruptly into a deep abyss where the Pastaza River, a headwater of the Amazon, snakes its way down the Andes. The Pastaza carries water from the glaciers of Cotopaxi, one of the world’s highest active volcanoes and a deity in the time of the Incas, to the Atlantic Ocean over three thousand miles away.
In 2003, I departed Quito in a Subaru Outback and headed for Shell on a mission that was like no other I had ever accepted. I was hoping to end a war I had helped create. As is the case with so many things we EHMs must take responsibility for, it is a war that is virtually unknown anywhere outside the country where it is fought. I was on my way to meet with the Shuars, the Kichwas, and their neighbors the Achuars, the Zaparos, and the Shiwiars—tribes determined to prevent our oil companies from destroying their homes, families, and lands, even if it means they must die in the process. For them, this is a war about the survival of their children and cultures, while for us it is about power, money, and natural resources. It is one part of the struggle for world domination and the dream of a few greedy men, global empire. That is what we EHMs do best: we build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.
Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure —electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build allthese projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.
Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest.
If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh.
This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money—and another country is added to our global empire.
Driving from Quito toward Shell on this sunny day in 2003, I thought back thirty-five years to the first time I arrived in this part of the world. I had read that although Ecuador is only about the size of Nevada, it has more than thirty active volcanoes, over 15 percent of the world’s bird species, and thousands of as-yet-unclassified plants, and that it is a land of diverse cultures where nearly as many people speak ancient indigenous languages as speak Spanish. I found it fascinating and certainly exotic; yet, the words that kept coming to mind back then were pure, untouched, and innocent.
Much has changed in thirty-five years.
At the time of my first visit in 1968, Texaco had only just discovered petroleum in Ecuador’s Amazon region. Today, oil accounts for nearly half the country’s exports. A trans-Andean pipeline built shortly after my first visit has since leaked over a half million barrels of oil into the fragile rain forest—more than twice the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez.2 Today, a new $1.3 billion, three hundred–mile pipeline constructed by an EHM–organized consortium promises to make Ecuador one of the world’s top ten suppliers of oil to the United States.3 Vast areas of rain forest have fallen, macaws and jaguars have all but vanished, three Ecuadorian indigenous cultures have been driven to the verge of collapse, and pristine rivers have been transformed into flaming cesspools.
During this same period, the indigenous cultures began fighting back. For instance, on May 7, 2003, a group of American lawyers representing more than thirty thousand indigenous Ecuadorian people filed a $1 billion lawsuit against ChevronTexaco Corp. The suit asserts that between 1971 and 1992 the oil giant dumped into open holes and rivers over four million gallons per day of toxic wastewater contaminated with oil, heavy metals, and carcinogens, and that the company left behind nearly 350 uncovered waste pits that continue to kill both people and animals.
Outside the window of my Outback, great clouds of mist rolled in from the forests and up the Pastaza’s canyons. Sweat soaked my shirt, and my stomach began to churn, but not just from the intense tropical heat and the serpentine twists in the road. Knowing the part I had played in destroying this beautiful country was once again taking its toll. Because of my fellow EHMs and me, Ecuador is in far worse shape today than she was before we introduced her to the miracles of modern economics, banking, and engineering. Since 1970, during this period known euphemistically as the Oil Boom, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, and public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion. Meanwhile, the share of national resources allocated to the poorest segments of the population declined from 20 to 6 percent.
Unfortunately, Ecuador is not the exception. Nearly every country we EHMs have brought under the global empire’s umbrella has suffered a similar fate.6 Third world debt has grown to more than $2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it—over $375 billion per year as of 2004—is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of third world households accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all private financial wealth and real estate ownership in their country; the actual percentage depends on the specific country.
The Subaru slowed as it meandered through the streets of the beautiful resort town of Baños, famous for the hot baths created by underground volcanic rivers that flow from the highly active Mount Tungurahgua. Children ran along beside us, waving and trying to sell us gum and cookies. Then we left Baños behind. The spectacular scenery ended abruptly as the Subaru sped out of paradise and into a modern vision of Dante’s Inferno A gigantic monster reared up from the river, a mammoth gray wall. Its dripping concrete was totally out of place, completely unnatural and incompatible with the landscape. Of course, seeing it there should not have surprised me. I knew all along that it would bewaiting in ambush. I had encountered it many times before and in the past had praised it as a symbol of EHM accomplishments. Even so, it made my skin crawl.
That hideous, incongruous wall is a dam that blocks the rushing Pastaza River, diverts its waters through huge tunnels bored into the mountain, and converts the energy to electricity. This is the 156- megawatt Agoyan hydroelectric project. It fuels the industries that make a handful of Ecuadorian families wealthy, and it has been the source of untold suffering for the farmers and indigenous people who live along the river. This hydroelectric plant is just one of many projects developed through my efforts and those of other EHMs. Such projects are the reason Ecuador is now a member of the global empire, and the reason why the Shuars and Kichwas and their neighbors threaten war against our oil companies.
Because of EHM projects, Ecuador is awash in foreign debt and must devote an inordinate share of its national budget to paying this off, instead of using its capital to help the millions of its citizens officially classified as dangerously impoverished. The only way Ecuador can buy down its foreign obligations is by selling its rain forests to the oil companies. Indeed, one of the reasons the EHMs set their sights on Ecuador in the first place was because the sea of oil beneath its Amazon region is believed to rival the oil fields of the Middle East.8 The global empire demands its pound of flesh in the form of oil concessions. These demands became especially urgent after September 11, 2001, when Washington feared that Middle Eastern supplies might cease. On top of that, Venezuela, our third-largest oil supplier, hadrecently elected a populist president, Hugo Chávez, who took a strong stand against what he referred to as U.S. imperialism; he threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States. The EHMs had failed in
Iraq and Venezuela, but we had succeeded in Ecuador; now we would milk it for all it is worth.
Ecuador is typical of countries around the world that EHMs have brought into the economic-political fold. For every $100 of crude taken out of the Ecuadorian rain forests, the oil companies receive $75. Of the remaining $25, three-quarters must go to paying off the foreign debt. Most of the remainder covers military and other government expenses—which leaves about $2.50 for health, education, and programs aimed at helping the poor.9 Thus, out of every $100 worth of oil torn from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to the people who need the money most, those whose lives have been so adversely impacted by the dams, the drilling, and the pipelines, and who are dying from lack of edible food and potable water.
All of those people—millions in Ecuador, billions around the planet—are potential terrorists. Not because they believe in communism or anarchism or are intrinsically evil, but simply because they are desperate. Looking at this dam, I wondered—as I have so often in so many places around the world—when these people would take action, like the Americans against England in the 1770s or
Latin Americans against Spain in the early 1800s. The subtlety of this modern empire building puts the Roman centurions, the Spanish conquistadors, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonial powers to shame. We EHMs are crafty; we learned from history. Today we do not carry swords. We do not wear armor or clothes that set us apart. In countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Indonesia, we dress like local schoolteachers and shopowners. In Washington and Paris, we look like government bureaucrats and bankers. We appear humble, normal. We visit project sites and stroll through impoverished villages. We profess altruism, talk with local papers about the wonderful humanitarian things we are doing. We cover the conference tables of government committees with our spreadsheets and financial projections, and we lecture at the Harvard Business School about the miracles of macroeconomics. We are on the record, in the open.
Or so we portray ourselves and so are we accepted. It is how the system works. We seldom resort to anything illegal because the system itself is built on subterfuge, and the system is by definition legitimate.
However—and this is a very large caveat—if we fail, an even more sinister breed steps in, ones we
EHMs refer to as the jackals, men who trace their heritage directly to those earlier empires. The jackals are always there, lurking in the shadows. When they emerge, heads of state are overthrown or die in violent “accidents.”10 And if by chance the jackals fail, as they failed in Afghanistan and Iraq,then the old models resurface. When the jackals fail, young Americans are sent in to kill and to die.
As I passed the monster, that hulking mammoth wall of gray concrete rising from the river, I was very conscious of the sweat that soaked my clothes and of the tightening in my intestines. I headed on down into the jungle to meet with the indigenous people who are determined to fight to the last man in order to stop this empire I helped create, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt. How, I asked myself, did a nice kid from rural New Hampshire ever get into such a dirty business?

Monday, February 25, 2013

How ‘economic hit men’ conspire to impoverish the Third World with aid


How ‘economic hit men’ conspire to impoverish the Third World with aid
By JOHN MBARIA 

As Kenyans enter into a national dialogue on whether we can do without the West should Uhuru Kenyatta win the presidency, everyone ought to read a book that reveals how the West, the Bretton Woods institutions and giant multinationals take everyone for a ride so that they can rake in billions of dollars generated in the developing world.
It is a book you can never find in Kenya. But the shocking, best-selling gem ought to be read by everyone, particularly those who have been harping loudest on the great mercies of donors.
The moment you are through the Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins, you will look at the “donor world’ through a different prism.
For Perkins tells a convincing story of his own inner struggles as he graduated from a willing servant of big capital to a crusading advocate for the rights of oppressed people in developing countries.
Though the man was recruited by the US National Security Agency, he was also on the payroll of an international consulting firm which enabled him to tour of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Colombia and other countries.
His job was to implement policies that promoted the interests of what he terms “corporatocracy” – an unholy alliance of the US Government, banks, and other corporations. As he did this, he was expected to make high-sounding but deceptive noises about tackling poverty in the relevant countries.
Published in 2004, the book gives an unforgettable insight into the sneaky world of the “unseen” men who gang up with political, business and religious elites in developing countries to snatch away the very basis upon which poor people depend for survival.
In a startling confession, Perkins reveals that his work was to convince the political and financial leaders in the relevant countries to accept huge loans from the World Bank, USAid and other organisations. And most of the elite would go along as long as their cut was assured.
Such leaders would grow immensely rich from kickbacks and amass political power particularly because unsuspecting masses ended up crediting them with initiating industries, highways, power plants, airports and dams. But their countries would end up with debts they could never hope to pay.
Together with other “economic hit men”, Perkins helped to bankrupt such countries by making them remain greatly indebted.
Consequently, the countries would become so vulnerable that they would readily accept such demands as dishing out military bases, voting along with the West in the UN, and giving the West unfettered access to natural resources.
However, as the countries struggled to repay the debts, they would greatly impoverish their people since they cannot finance basic health services, education and other public amenities.
On its part, the international media would be deployed to portray the same enslaving projects as acts of generosity on the part of the West.

Perkins describes “economic hit men” as extremely bright, highly-paid professionals who transfer the cash loaned to poor countries by the World Bank and other “aid” agencies into the accounts of big-time corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control much of the world’s natural resources.
To do this, the corporations employ fraudulent and highly optimistic financial reports and projections, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. “They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization”.
After playing his part in the grand manipulative schemes for years, Perkins could not handle his conscience. He went into inner struggles especially after realising that he was a vital cog in it. When he came face-to-face with its victims, guilt overwhelmed him; he got depressed and quit his job in 1980.
Unfortunately for us in developing countries, this grand deception did not end after Perkins published his book. It is a scheme that is so well-crafted that the victim becomes dependent on it and often begs those behind it to continue stealing.
It is no wonder then that most Kenyans would not hear of breaking the shackles of “donor” dependency even when it is crystal clear that there is very little to show for it in the way of tangible, long-term development.
enyans ought to know that when “donors” give a shilling, they take away a billion!

Mr Mbaria writes on development and environmental issues (gatumbaria@gmail.com)