It’s better to spend money probing worthiness of CIDA than wasting it on foreign aid

March 29, 2010

PETER WORTHINGTON, QMI Agency

Anyone who has travelled in Africa, especially in war zones, knows that foreign aid can have the opposite effect on those whom it is intended to help. Too often over the last 50 years, foreign aid has been used to prop up tyrannies instead of feeding and helping people. In the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, Canadian and American food aid often wound up in the kitchens of the Ethiopian army, or on the local black market.

A CTV documentary team in Tanzania some years ago found Canadian aid rotting and rusting on the docks, while a massive Canadian bakery put innumerable small bakeries in Dar es Salaam out of business.

When Eritrea won independence from Ethiopia, its president, Isaias Afwerki, curtained foreign aid, pointing out that aid agencies paid higher than local wages and stole the sort of people that the country needed to sustain itself.

He also criticized members of the African Union for looting the till and blaming Israel and colonial countries for all problems. Leaders practised tribalism, drove Mercedes cars, travelled to international conferences, opened Swiss bank accounts and lived in luxury while their people went hungry. Corruption was endemic and Isaias Afwerki’s candour won him unpopularity.

The Globe and Mail’s Africa correspondent, Geoffrey York, has written about how Canada’s $15-million aid program against sexual violence in the former Belgian Congo has been a bust, with money going for T-shirts, vests, caps and posters and little of substance reaching the victims of rape and sexual violence. Rape is a weapon of war in Congo. Sexual violence has increased since Canadian aid to deter it began in 2006.

Congo is at war within itself. For 20 years, neither victory nor peace is in the offing. Aid people, including CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency), need four-wheel drive vehicles, nice residences, good salaries, all of which are financed from the aid pool. Administratively, CIDA’s bureaucracy absorbs much of its budget.

Despite criticism from those on the ground in Congo, CIDA officials purport to be pleased with the way things are going. (CIDA always says things look good ­— hitches are relegated to the past). Things are not going well in Congo. How could they? There’s no effective government and chaos and war have thrived since independence in 1960.

CIDA claims 36,000 victims have received health services, with legal assistance to 1,863 rape victims; 188 perpetrators pay compensation. Nonsense! Legal assistance in a country of anarchy? Health services to 36,000 victims — that figure alone testifies to failure. Better to spend the money investigating the worthiness of CIDA than wasting it on foreign aid where it does actual damage.

I recall, during the civil war in Angola, CIDA aid going for a shoe factory in the town of Ucua which, when I mentioned it to UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, caused outrage. He said Ucua was in the possession of UNITA and there was no shoe factory there. So into whose pocket did the CIDA funds go? We’ll never know.

Humanitarian aid to a war zone can be folly. To Congo it’s double-folly. We even screw up aid to Afghanistan where we have soldiers. In Congo we have nothing. Someday, maybe a Canadian government will grasp reality and acknowledge that aid to some countries is useless, and at worst can exacerbate the existing disaster