Since the announcement of debt cancellation to a select group of highly indebted African countries who are said to have met some of the conditions for such a gesture, the gesture has been criticized by a motley intellectual crowd of African and non-African commentators. These critics of the Tony Blair initiative, if I may conveniently call it that, argue that Africa neither deserves what is commonly called debt relief/debt forgiveness nor has it proven itself worthy of increased aid. Extending debt cancellation and increasing aid to African countries, the critics argue, would simply be rewarding bad debtor behavior and would also be providing money to corrupt African governments that they claim mismanaged aid money in the past. What is needed in Africa, these critics contend, is not debt cancellation but a thorough reform of African states with the aim of eliminating wastage and avenues of corruption. 

Some critics have gone so far as to ask that increased aid be conditional upon the completion of, so far, largely elusive political reforms, or that aid be channeled outside governmental control directly to what they call the civil society, a supposedly autonomous domain of mobilization and civic action that is free of the problems that plague the state in Africa. In their effort to focus attention squarely on the internal dimension of the African predicament, some of these critics also seek to minimize the impact on African economies of unfair and hypocritical Western trade practices and of so-called free market conditionalities, which are often attached to Western aid and/or written into reform recommendations of Bretton Woods organs and debt negotiators.  Finally, the critics denigrate the efforts of Western anti-poverty groups, especially Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, which is critiqued as a feel-good, self-justifying jamboree of naïve Western entertainers and their equally naïve fans.

In this essay, I take on some of these criticisms, outlining their faulty premises, commenting on their weaknesses, and suggesting alternative paradigms of evaluating both governmental and non-governmental Western efforts to tackle Africa’s poverty problem.  Let me start by deconstructing the idea of “debt relief” or “debt forgiveness,” two innocuous but ideologically weighty and suggestive concepts which have come to dominate discussions on the debt cancellation package agreed upon at the recently concluded G-8 summit in Scotland.  The two concepts betray the extent to which notions of Western magnanimity have converged in the current analyses of Africa’s problems. Even African scholars and intellectuals have allowed themselves to be seduced by the faulty foundational assumption that the West is altruistically lifting a burden off of Africa. We should reject such misleading assumptions. Instead of the concept of “debt forgiveness,” I subscribe to the more appropriate and neutral concept of debt cancellation.

To people unschooled in the politically powerful art of using words and concepts to shape political discussions and reality, this distinction may seem like a pedantic semantic obsession. Far from being so, it is a distinction upon which the current discussion of Africa's debt problem revolves; it may even help determine what Africans negotiators are able to exact from on-going negotiations. Concepts deployed in international political discussions are hardly neutral; they are often carefully and strategically crafted to shape perceptions and discussions which emanate from such perceptions.

In fact, in this particular case, the medium is the message, to use a mass communication terminology. For the concepts of debt relief and debt forgiveness suggest that Africans do not deserve the gesture and that it is a magnanimous act of minimal or no self-interest on the part of the West. The two concepts also efface the nature and archaeology of these debts, which, as we know, emanate from dubious loans knowingly provided to African governments who, it was known, would, with the active assistance of rapacious Western businessmen, economic hitmen, and financial institutions, embezzle them to benefit themselves and their Western collaborators.

You do not forgive bad loans; you write them off or cancel them. The gesture of debt cancellation (as opposed to debt-relief) connotes, more than anything else, an important willingness on the part of Western governments to be self-critical and to admit a certain degree of culpability on their own part and on behalf of Western actors in the aid-corruption-Swiss-bank-accounts racket. The concept of debt cancellation, then, speaks both to a present programmatic imperative and a need for analytical/historical accuracy in the matter of African foreign debt. The concept of debt forgiveness, on the other hand, re-inscribes the same obdurate insistence on the part of the Industrialized world that it is merely coming to the rescue of a self-destructive Africa—an Africa wracked by a crisis devoid of Western culpability.

 

The Blair Plan and its Critics

Most critics have argued that the Blair plan simply endorses throwing money at a bad situation. This is a gross disservice to and a crude mischaracterization of the Blair plan; it reduces the plan to yet another attempt to raise and throw money at Africa’s myriad problems. It is an unfair caricature of a three-pronged, nuanced proposal, of which aid is only one aspect. Debt cancellation, which the plan calls debt relief, is another aspect. The most important aspect of that proposal—and this is what makes it radical in an unprecedented way—is its courage in calling for the abolishing of many anti-Africa Western trade practices, not the least of which are the agricultural subsidies which not only close Western markets to African producers but also belies the West’s rhetoric of free trade and globalization. The failure of the G-8 to reach an agreement on the issue is not an indictment of Blair’s proposal regarding it; it is an indictment of the unrelenting Western commitment to its global economic hegemony.

Critics such as Professor George Ayittey of American University argue that Africa has already received and absorbed the equivalent of several Marshall Plans; they argue that this invalidates calls for an African Marshall Plan. Comparing Western aid to Africa to the Marshall Plan of post-world War II Europe is misleading. The $450 Billion purportedly “pumped” into Africa between 1960 and 1997 was not free money but a plethora of soft loans, with conditions that are anything but soft. The Marshall Plan, on the other hand, was direct, free America aid, the only condition being that the nations of Europe had to form a collective and devise a comprehensive plan on how to spend the money. One could say the world has changed and that the political threats and goals which made the case for the Marshall Plan no longer exist today. That may be so, but who is to say that hunger, disease, destitution, and anger in Africa pose a lesser threat to the United States than did the advancing wave of Soviet Socialism?

It is also argued that no African government has been made to account for how it expended past aid money. This is a fair statement, for state accountability is indispensable to any transparent regime of aid disbursement. I have no doubt in my mind that the day of reckoning is coming for all the leaders who mortgaged Africans’ collective patrimony and destiny by taking and squandering foreign loans and aid on behalf of expectant and needy compatriots. But I have no illusions that the West will be the champion of such a project of accountability. The West will not demand such an accounting, not because of their anxieties and guilt over historical injuries inflicted on Africans; as anyone can see, the West has since shrugged off the guilt of the slave trade and colonialism, and mainstream revisionist histories which exonerate and assuage the West’s conscience now proliferate in academic and non-academic circles. Rather, the West will not pursue such a project because a full accounting will inevitably indict the West and its complicit financial institutions, not to mention some respectable Western figures who do business with African leaders and who are either in power in Western countries or have politicians in these countries that are beholden to them. Such a process of accounting will open Pandora’s Box and reveal the underbelly of the fraudulent, two-sided aid-loan-corruption poverty-producing machine. This is why the West will not demand full public accounting. They will not investigate their own institutions and practices.

Analyses which harp only on the misdeeds and corruption of African governments are, at best, one-sided. If African kleptocrats have yet to be held accountable for collecting and misusing dubious aid, no Western contractors and economic hitmen (apologies to John Perkins), who callously pushed dubious waste-pipe projects on greedy African bureaucrats and politicians, have been called to account for their destructive adventures on the continent. They, too, must not go scot-free.

Perhaps the most contentious argument offered so far against increased aid and debt cancellation is the claim that until Africa “cleans its house,” Western gestures will be meaningless to the continent’s peoples. On the surface, this appears to be a reasonable claim, and it would be a noble assertion were it not for the fallacy which inheres in it. How can Africa not be better off, even with all the corruption and waste, if it no longer has to pay the billions of dollars that it pays annually to service debts that were dubiously incurred; debts which ended up for the most part in the West with the active collaboration of Western institutions and persons? The example of Nigeria, where the country has spent more than four times the amount of the original loan amount in servicing, penalty, and interest payments and is still left with a rapidly appreciating principal, makes repayments of foreign debts and the withholding of so-called debt relief immoral. Nigeria’s example is a microcosm of the African debt situation. Is it morally unacceptable for a country to continue to pay interests and service charges on dubious debts for which servicing payments alone have eclipsed the original debt amount? If only the critics would temper their economics with some morality and humanity, it would be easier for them to lend a sympathetic understanding to the clamor for debt cancellation.

I do not subscribe to the notion of aid as aid. These aids—which need to be shorn of their soft loan character and the imprisoning strings which make them tools of hegemonic control—should also be seen as token restitutive and compensatory payments deserved by Africa and Africans as a negligible material compensation for the ongoing devastation of the continent. Such devastations result from the wanton extraction of the continent’s resources by environmentally nonchalant Western companies, and the resultant destruction of African ecologies and agricultural traditions, livelihoods, lifestyles, not to mention Western mavericks’ instigation and exacerbation of armed conflict and their repatriation of tax-evading profits to Western capitals. No amount of Western aid will adequately compensate Africans for these Western schemes or restitute for their devastating aftermaths.

 It sounds good to call for a complete reforming of African states and institutions as a prelude to increased aid and debt cancellation. Without discounting the need for transparency, is this complete cleansing feasible or possible—not only in Africa but anywhere in the world? Is this insistence on cleansing as a condition for aid in the interest of the suffering (and innocent) mass of Africans, some of whom depend solely on foreign aid handouts for survival? Is this not tantamount to withholding food and medicine from a child until its parents “clean up their acts” and start being financially responsible?

 It is a good thing that the critics of increased aid and debt relief offer some alternatives. The most bandied-around of such alternatives is what the New York Times calls smart aid. Smart aid, it is argued, would bypass the predatory African state and deliver help directly to the Africans in the traditional and informal sectors through civil society organizations. This is a sensible alternative, one which does not punish innocent Africans for the sins of their leaders and does not insist on elusive governmental cleansing as a condition for helping Africa’s needy populations. But this alternative makes a naïve and crucial assumption: it fetishizes civil society and ignores the organic connections and appendages which unite the governmental sector and the so-called informal sector.

The idea that civil society organizations and the informal sector are corruption-free and could thus serve as an accountable, efficient, and effective channel for aid distribution and implementation reveals a mindset that is hopelessly out of touch with realities on the ground. It is a fiction of self-congratulatory Western development experts symbiotically linked to careerist Western NGO personnel, whose organizations mentor local NGO’s and need to justify their relevance in order to have access to a steady flow of funds. The redundant bureaucracies, inefficiencies, and wastage that have resulted from this bureaucratic detachment from African grassroots problems and from the veneration of civil society for its own sake, are now part of the problem of the failure of aid to improve situations in Africa.

Moreover, since the African state is quite ubiquitous in terms of power, the smart aid proposal may not work as state officials will resist and/or undermine this usurpation of what they consider their jurisdictional prerogative. It is illusory to expect that state bureaucrats will not invade or interfere with the implementation of such a smart aid package.

Criticism of Live Aid as a Distraction

I disagree with certain hypercritical views on the "Live Aid" movement in the West, which compare the latter to the Berlin Conference or the Scramble for Africa that crystallized in it. The analogy is a little far-fetched. The Scramble was animated by a different set of historical forces and was characterized by a more brazenly explicit social Darwinist and racist ethos than the present global initiatives on Africa. What's more, it endorsed and formalized a process of physical conquest and rule, while the present movement, condescending as it is, portends no such scheme.

Certainly, one can sense some rhetorical congruence between the grandiose redemptive proclamations of the G-8 summit and the "save Africa" rhetoric of mid to late 19th century Europe. The spectacle of a self-righteous and arrogant Europe (this time joined by Japan, Canada, and US), pontificating on the failings and supposedly intractable problems of Africa is quite disturbing and reminiscent of similar proclamations in the past. It does conjure up images from a not-so-distant history of Africa's interaction with Europe. And, of course, no self-respecting African would find palatable the television and radio soundbites about do-good white men (and boys) once again raising money to help Africa's needy and hungry. One would wish not to encounter such images.

However, while I remain very critical of, among other things, the G-8’s unacceptable failure to make a deal on fair trade and Africa-friendly trade practices, I personally would not extend my criticism of the G-8 summit of political leaders to the "Live Aid" initiative. I have serious problems with the occasional cacophonous proclamations of the G-8 regarding Africa's problems, declarations which are not usually accompanied by sincere and comprehensive plans for redress, recompense and amelioration. Indeed the forum is more a gathering for Africa bashing and the repetition of an almost pathologized notion of Africa's hopelessness and dependence than it is a meeting for an honest quest for comprehensive solutions to the African predicament.

But I cannot honestly analyze Live Aid in the preceding terms. The "Live Aid" initiative is different in that it casts itself as a purely humanitarian and pressure-generating intervention. That such humanitarian interventions are always targeted at Africa is a cause for concern. The ways in which these initiatives are packaged and the rhetoric deployed to publicize them can be quite disturbing, paternalistic, and patronizing towards Africa and Africans. They are sometimes the stuff of media sensationalism. But these images are also the unfortunate products of the reality of the African situation. The truth is that certain parts of the continent are in dire need of urgent humanitarian interventions. It is sad but true that Africa is still the world's poorest continent and thus the poster face of global poverty. Let me hasten to add that my definition of poverty here rests purely on macro- and micro-economic indices and not on the presence or absence of resources and wealth-generating capacity. This reality of poverty is not the fault of Bob Geldof, Bono, or Madonna. It is the fault of a multitude of actors and circumstances ranging from corrupt African leaderships, to lethargic and indifferent African civil societies, to Western corporations and governments who participate in and tolerate shady schemes and policies which worsen the continent's economic fate.

Western musicians and actors at the vanguard of the anti-poverty movement have no moral culpability in the ruination of Africa. One could argue quite tenuously that they are culpable on a certain level, being vicarious and unwitting beneficiaries of some of the historical and contemporary Western practices that have contributed to Africa's present plight. But this would be a weak and ultimately untenable argument.

These anti-poverty activists have, for the most part, earned their livings honesty from their creative expressions. They do not have to care about poverty in Africa. They do not have to do anything. After all, they are not the Western politicians, bureaucrats, bankers, and businessmen who have contributed and continue to contribute to the impoverishing of the continent through dubious schemes, intolerable environmental and ethnical practices, the fuelling of conflicts, and hypocritical trade practices. These young musicians are not the Western politicians and corporations who will benefit from a prosperous and stable Africa or suffer the adverse but logical consequences of a poor, unstable, and badly governed Africa. They are not the ones invested in the emergence of an Africa made safe for Western investment by a revitalization of the civil society and the restive rural and urban underclass sectors.

In spite of this mental, moral, and material distance from the African predicament, these privileged men and women in the Western anti-poverty movement have the humanity, sense of compassion, and conscience to craft a humanitarian initiative that could bring immediate relief to the hungry, the diseased, and the needy in many parts of Africa--people who do not care about the nuances or contradictions of the Live Aid initiative or the matters of culpability, causality, and racialized imagery associated with current discussions of the African situation; people who just need immediate humanitarian help. In the interest of their own existentialist preoccupations, these Africans are willing to look past the unpalatable suggestions and connotations associated with Live Aid and similar initiatives.

I don't think we Africans gain anything for ourselves or for our struggle for basic human comforts and dignities by mocking or trivializing the efforts of the anti-poverty movement in the West. It is, at best, a distraction from the challenge of awakening major stakeholders in the African situation to their obligations and responsibilities.  We can point out the near-revolutionary naivety and Utopian idealism which inevitably color Western anti-poverty movements. But in the end, the Bonos and the Geldofs deserve praise and commendation for their extraordinary humanity, and for using a private anti-poverty initiative to put pressure on Western officialdom, which, so far, is behind Oxfam, Bono, Geldof, and others in appreciating the dire need for action and change on the continent and for a departure from faulty premises of problem-solving.

There is room in Africa for both the grandiose, bureaucratic (elusive and pretentious) plans of the G-8 and the humanitarian gesture of Live Aid. The former, if it ever materializes, is a long-term systemic initiative calculated, at least in rhetoric, aimed at generating economic growth, curbing corruption and bad governance, and increasing responsible social spending. The latter is aimed at providing immediate relief for Africans whose life may depend on such help and who cannot afford to wait for the ever-elusive international Marshall Plan for Africa to materialize, if ever it will.

Small, ad-hoc, and target-specific steps like Live Aid [Live 8] should not be derided; they go a long way, and fill niches that often get forgotten in highfalutin international discussions on African problems. Live Aid does not remove from the table the need to devise feasible developmental plans for Africa; it does not obliterate the need to encourage and fight for democratic reforms in Africa or the need to curb corruption and its internal and external props. In fact Live Aid complements these goals and draws a popular, show-biz attention to them. For good or ill, entertainment has proven to be a great tool of activism and awareness in our world. Caring, if self-righteous, Westerners who recognize this convergence of entertainment and social consciousness and are willing to put their show-biz celebrity status at the disposal of the movement to fight poverty in Africa deserve a lower critical standard than the Western politicians who have so far refused to do the right thing regarding Africa because of a plethora of economic and political pressures from their countries.

In fact, it would be nice to see Africans become Bonos and Geldofs, sidestepping the endless political analysis, discussions, and the complex and long-term "salvation plans" for Africa to save lives, feed hungry stomachs, and deliver medicine to those who need them on the continent. I recognize that initiatives like Live Aid have their own red tape and don’t always translate smoothly or mechanically to relief and comforts for needy Africans. But one gets tired of endless, trite, repetitive analysis of familiar African problems and of reading countless developmental models for Africa calling for elusive political, economic, and social actions which may take decades to happen, and most of which mean nothing to the needy in Africa.  At least Western anti-poverty initiatives are not hamstrung by the pressures of the domestic politics of Western countries, a problem which is the bane of most Western-originated governmental initiatives for Africa.

What is particularly impressive about the latest Live Aid movement is that, while raising money for humanitarian actions on the continent, it is also focusing attention on the major dimensions of the African crisis, namely, debt cancellation, increased, more responsible, but unconditional aid, fair trade, and political and economic transparency in Africa.

For all these laudable efforts I am willing to forgive the problem of image and rhetoric which has plagued the latest Live Aid installment and which admittedly hurts my pride as an African. I am willing to subordinate my African pride to the imperative of saving and nurturing a few African lives where possible. Africa is not a concept whose honor should be preserved at the expense of its human inhabitants.

 

Moses Ochonu, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.