Declaring war on aid
Lawrence Osborne
LORDS OF POVERTY by Graham Hancock
Macmillan, £14.95, pp,256
0 ver the last 20 years, the images of the world's poor — the crowds of gaunt and devastated faces that on occasion haunt the television screen — have become as familiar to comfortable Western house- holders as colour pictures of the earth or the opening celebrations of the Olympic
Games. They are a potent and militant symbol of injustice. Moved by them to noble sentiments of outrage, pity and Third World solidarity, the enlightened classes have flocked to fund-raising rock concerts, hurled contempt at' governments that have failed to increase their amount of foreign aid and generally assumed that all that is needed to save the humanoid stick-insects on the box from annihilation is a vast amount of money launched vaguely in their direction with all the urgency and passion of a benevolent ballistic missile. Aid is the valve of our better natures. It has been the sacred cow of the Eighties.
Against the rising tide of aid propaganda and the colossal amount of sympathy that the multilateral agencies attract in the media, Graham Hancock, former corres- pondent for the Economist in East Africa, has written a dense and enraged counter- blast which rakes the entire aid business, from top to bottom, with moral gun-fire. Surprisingly, he has managed to do this with bitter elegance and a complete abs- ence of anodyne bureaucratic jargon. He has taken a war-like position against aid and, in the footsteps of economist Lord Bauer, is unafraid to stick to it, with fortunate results both for the firm logic of his argument and the clarity of his style. Under the gaze of this cool and knowledge- able journalistic eye, the clichés of global philanthropy dissolve.
The central axis of Hancock's polemic is a close scrutiny of the backbone of official aid, the agencies that spend most of the $60 billion that passes in the form of aid from the North to the South: the World Bank, the IMF, the UN and its daughter agencies Unesco, FAO (the UN Food and Agricul- ture Organisation), Unicef, etc. As he points out, the sums despatched to the Third World by non-official aid are so small compared to any one of the above that their effect is drowned by the sheer volume of official aid. Hancock's real tar- gets are the big boys in Washington.
Much of the book is taken up, as many hooks on the Third World are, by litanies of costly and useless development projects foisted onto confused and even unwilling governments by Western agencies anxious to give kick-backs to their own national industries. The Chixoy dam in Guatemala, the Mogadishu-Kismaayo highway in Somalia, the Inga-Shabu Power Project in Zaire — the list of grotesquely inappropri- ate development projects is endless. But where Hancock's book really scores, and where it departs from most handbooks of the `What's Really Happening in the Third World' type, is in its descriptions of the utter futility, hypocrisy and blindness of everything these agencies do. Aid is not only no help, but is itself a corrupter: it spawns, supports and prolongs vicious, incompetent and corrupt Third World regimes; it fosters a culture of abject dependency among its clients; it has cre- ated a huge international nomenclature of nightmarish incompetence and uselessness. Take FAO and Unesco, for example. Eighty per cent of Unesco's global budget is spent in one city: Paris. (Indeed, 80 per cent of all UN expenditure is poured into personnel and related costs). Despite daily expenditure of $1.5 million, FAO, under the ruthless and undemocratic leadership of Eduoard Saouma, proved utterly incap- able of dealing with famine in sub-Saharan Africa — though more than capable of assuring a $813,272 six-yearly salary, ex- cluding enormous fringe benefits, to Saouma himself. The egalitarian voting system of both agencies — assuring one vote for each country — has enabled its directors to stay in office through the manipulation of large numbers of poor members. They appear to be accountable to nobody but themselves while frittering away millions of tax-payers' money through waste and extravagance (Unesco's boss, Ahmadou M'Bow, was legendary for his travelling expenses, said to run into several millions of dollars per annum).
Nor is the wider UN picture any more comforting. With gleeful derision, Han- cock lists the proliferation of quangos, committees formed to supervise committ- ees, the parasitism of the Pan Am Clipper Club brigade with their jet-set life-styles and enormous salaries, the absurd holier- than-thou seminars on world problems and the hundred and one scandals that lie hidden beneath the surface. Particularly distasteful are the stories of the child pornography ring organized from Unicef offices in Belgium and the furore among the pampered UN civil servants when it was suggested that $100,000 dollars spent every year on the provision of iced water to their HQ offices in New York might be considered a little excessive.
All of this, of course, might amount to no more than unpleasant but forgivable blunders on the part of the people who spend such vast amounts of our money around the world. But Hancock's argu- ment runs deeper. As Lord Bauer has insisted, it is aid that defines the Third World. Aid is a new phenomenon, essen- tially dating from the International Monet- ary Conference at Bretton Woods in 1944 and Truman's Four Point Plan of 1949. From the outset, aid was formed from a jumble of conflicting motives: blatant self- interest, self-flagellating post-colonial guilt, muddled philanthropy, self-deluding missionary zeal. Today it has come to dominate our notions of the Third World (and the term 'Third World' itself, coined by the economist Alfred Savry in 1953, is a product of the same age). It feeds us images of helpless, passive lumps of human ectoplasm who need the minions of De- velopment Inc. to help them. It perpetu- ates the notion of a 'Third World' that is monolithic, irremediable and totally de- pendant on Western tax-payers. The Third World has become an economic junkie hopelessly reliant on 'fixes' of Western cash filtered through the beneficent angel of mercy known as 'aid' and there is nothing to be done but increase the amount of money we give. But who, in actual fact, spends and receives this money? The answer is that the chain leading from tax-payer to Third World peasant has broken down. It is the middle- men who eat the cake. On the one hand, the world's best-paid, and sometimes most mediocre, civil servants and on the other people like President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, with his 50 Mercedes, 11 châteaux in France and Belgium and his luxury villa on the Costa del Sol, all paid for with 'aid'.
It is impossible to do justice here to the wealth of documentation, the relentless showers of facts and figures that make this text so solid and grave. But at the same time a warm, quick and hectoring style makes it equally readable and stylish. Hancock seems to have carried over from the Economist the habit of insolent little sub-titles (`The Voodoo That You Do So Well', 'A Rumble In The Jungle'), and these break up the pages into rapid, condensed paragraphs that prevent the catalogues of disaster, stupidity and avar- ice from bearing down too heavily on the reader. The moralising against 'develop- ment' certainly lapses occasionally into repetitive jeremiads smacking of what Car- los Fuentes has called 'a nostalgia of under-development', and the usual drama-
tic comparisons between Western spending and Third World need (annual toothpaste consumption of West Germany equals four years' education for half a million Indian children) are somewhat tired. But nothing detracts from the impetus of this polemic that is so desperately needed to make the Western public wake up from its enchanted honeymoon with aid and start asking exact- ly where its money is going.
Paris Dream Book and The Angelic Game by Lawrence Osborne are to be published by Bloomsbury next year.
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