Aid has let Africa down, says wealthy donor

WASHINGTON - Even as President George W. Bush pledged to speed up aid to Africa, United States foreign policy experts and at least one prominent private donor wondered if traditional aid has done more harm than good.

"Aid is the one commodity Africa has never been short of, and it has failed dismally time and time again," De Beers chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said in a speech replayed in Washington yesterday at a forum of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Oppenheimer, a member of one of Africa's richest families, said in the decades since colonial powers had left Africa, the continent had received more than US$1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) in aid - a figure much higher than the US$400 billion others estimated.

Oppenheimer said the heavy flow of aid had sometimes hurt those it was meant to help.

"For all the talk of partnership between Africa and donor nations, aid develops dependence on the donor to the extent that in some of the poorest countries, where it constitutes more than 50 per cent of the national budget, it has surely become a form of neo-colonialism," he said.

One path out of poverty for Africa was the lifting of trade restrictions.

"It is more politically expedient to pour aid into Africa than for Europe and America to cut farm subsidies, which enable their own farmers to dump their produce in Africa and impoverish African producers," Oppenheimer said.

"While those subsidies and tariffs remain in place, the campaign to lift Africa out of poverty will remain mired in hypocrisy."

Oppenheimer's original critique in London came on Tuesday, the same day Bush told African leaders he would work to accelerate aid under the Millennium Challenge Account, which offers assistance to nations that agree to make political and economic reforms.

Three years ago, Bush proposed US$5 billion for the programme, but at this point only US$117,500 has been paid out, with US$220 million committed to Africa.

Finance ministers from the Group of Eight industrialised nations agreed last weekend to write off more than US$40 billion of debt to some of the world's poorest countries, most of them in Africa.

But debt relief, although valuable for some impoverished nations, was no panacea, said Edward Jaycox, a former World Bank official. "I don't think it should be across the board, necessarily, particularly for countries that are not making any effort at all."

Jaycox and Oppenheimer stressed the need to differentiate between those African countries that were succeeding with reform and economic development - 25 of the 50 in the continent, said Jaycox - and those that were failing.

Princeton Lyman, director of Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said before the forum: "Debt forgiveness is an important step. It's not the be-all and end-all."

- REUTERS