What The Papers Say
The Times - London
Embezzled aid
Arguments about foreign aid always seem to generate more heat than light. In fact the crisis in Ethiopia provides an object lesson in the false premises and false practices of so much aid policy, which should not be overlooked simply because emotions have been aroused by the spectacle of so much human misery.Dr Charles Elliott formerly of Christian Aid, would like us to believe that the West is responsible for the Ethiopian famine. How right he is, though for reasons which are diametrically opposite to those which he puts forward. The Elliott argument contends that the Marxist regime in Addis Ababa has been deprived of funds from the West because of its Soviet orientation, and has thus not been able to develop the areas which are now suffering.
The facts tell a different story, though they lead to the same conclusion of Western culpability. Between 1978 and 1982, the Ethiopian regime received one billion dollars of Western aid. What happened to the money, most of which was chanelled through multi-lateral agencies which are not explicitly accountable to anybody and which, as we heard last week, tend to squabble among themselves about disbursements and whose main effect is to bolster recipient regimes, many of which are dictatorships, regardless of their internal policies?
One look at the records suggests that Western aid has helped the Ethiopian regime to finance its civil wars; or/and perhaps finance the absurd and extravagantly pretentious maintenance of the OAU whose potentates are gathering in Addis today while the rest of the world is struggling to save Ethiopian citizens from the follies and iniquities of their government. Certainly Western aid has enabled the regime in Addis Ababa to pursue policies which, without such help, would have brought it down much more quickly and saved Ethiopians from so much misery.
We have seen only too vividly that a billion dollars have not been used to pursue agricultural, social or economic policies which could have equipped the rural population far more effectively to cope with the drought. A billion dollars has provided the regime with foreign exchange, perhaps to help pay for Soviet tanks to use on its citizens and certainly to sustain conscription. It has helped the Dergue to suppress policies of private trade in favour of public monopoly; to expropriate assets, particularly American ones; to expel unpopular groups to cause major refugee problems in the Sudan.
The aid policy of the West has played into the hands of rulers such as Colonel Mengistu whose politburo now quite naturally reasserts its role as the organizer and distributor for foreign assistance. If Western aid agencies persist in giving money to rulers on the basis of the poverty of their subjects, that means that policies which persistently cause the impoverishment of local populations will in effect be rewarded though the rewards may only be visible in the amount of weapons bought or in the life style of officials in the capital. In that sense therefore Dr Elliott was right to blame the West for helping to disable Ethiopian peasants from meeting the challenge of drought, because it supported a regime whose active measures of oppression, large scale evictions and prevention of peasant agriculture have all contributed as much to this catastrophe as have the years of drought.
What is more perplexing is that the charitable relief agencies seem to have made so little of this themselves. To listen to Dr Elliott one would not gather that the regime for which he feels so concerned has destroyed 70 percent of Ethiopian churches (and Cardinal Hume in his BBC interview yesterday was surprisingly silent about this matter too, preferring the interview to be given over entirely to sentiment without any attempt to put this chronic African condition into some kind of perspective). The Christian charities might argue that they have kept quiet about Ethiopian oppression for fear of being prevented from doing any good. In fact they have themselves become so politicized on the side of so-called "revolutionary development economics'' that their demands for increased Western aid now have a hollow ring about them.
The enormous demands of Ethiopian relief command automatic support across the political spectrum, though it is incongruous that those who call loudest for Britain to go into Ethiopia unilaterally and increase its direct aid are normally those who would decry unilateral intervention in the affairs of other states however humanitarian the causes and would certainly favour an emphasis on multilateral rather than bi-lateral aid flows. In a crisis they demand direct action from Britain and receive it but they do not yet seem to absorb the full implications of that procedure, which would be to accept that multilateral aid is misemployed and incapable of effective action.
It will thus be regrettable if the Western Aid agencies are culpable for what has occurred in Ethiopia. Their culpability should cause Britain to review its aid policies and to concentrate most of foreign aid on bi-lateral programmes where parliament can scrutinize them more carefully and see that the funds are not being embezzled in the cause of dictatorship or otherwise abused.
The Punch, Nigeria
Reagan's Landslide
We deny that he was our choice. And we play no diplomatic niceties by showering praises on the man our country and continent have had a very unfortunate working relationship with during his tenure of office for the past four years. We are, however, constrained by hypocritical a la civilised norms to recognise the victory of Ronald Reagan, the next president of the United States. Hence the PUNCH pays a glowing tribute only to the victory of the democratic processes and procedures whence he emerged and from which we tried our first experiment and met our doom.In retrospect, the United States under Ronald Reagan's first four years had contributed internationally to the undercurrent of our economic depression. Prior to 1980, Nigeria was the second largest exporter of crude oil to the United States. But after 1980, and with Reagan's ascendancy to office, Nigeria slipped from that favoured position not by its will or pure economic determinants, but by the sheer political machinations of Ronald Reagan to cripple Nigeria and the rest of the third world...
That is the reality that the rest of the world can expect to relate to America for the next four years. But of more relevance to us, is how Ronald Reagan's America will relate to our interest on this continent and the rest of the developing world. If Reagan's first tenure is anything to go by, we have learnt that Africa is hardly on Reagan's mind.
