DOGE And The Saturday Night Massacre - USAID And The Political Chicanery Of 'Doing Good'

'It's about time', said Carter Lane, veteran of four decades in the bush 'doing good', overseer of US government grants to African dictatorships, faulty programs whose beneficiaries, the poor, never saw a dime of American monies, and whose big men got as rich as Croesus by siphoning off most of the foreign aid to offshore bank accounts and gifting relatives and friends with the rest. 

Washington bureaucrats, enamored with Africa, Africans, and the black American diaspora, poured millions into corrupt, venal, exploitive regimes on the vain hope of improving the lot of the dispossessed and marginalized while only filling the coffers of tribal elites getting theirs. State Department planners, hungry for the continent's store of valuable energy resources and essential minerals, colluded with this idealism, lobbied Congress on national security and humanitarian grounds and assured that billions of dollars were poured down the sluice with rare conditionalities. 

The leader of a USAID mission to one African country challenged a top government official who was the liaison on all development projects, questioning his seriousness if not integrity after millions of dollars of aid were spent with little to show for it. 

The Secretary stood up, straightened his elegant linen caftan, and said, 'Mr. ____, I am here thanks to the support of my family, the loyalty of my tribe, the political support of my region, and lastly the generosity of the federal government, and I intend to repay them in that order.

 

A hard lesson for the team leader, an old progressive who had committed his life and career to bringing Africa out of the mire of misgovernance, corruption, brutality, and indifference; but an important one nevertheless.  The US government granted aid to those countries with certain geopolitical or economic interest.  In this case, the President was sitting on untold billions worth of rare earth materials necessary for cell phones and computers, and a new offshore drilling operation had discovered a deep sea oil field that beggared the imagination. 

Who in Washington cared what the country did with it paltry $10 million for health, education, and welfare as long as it voted with the US in international fora, allowed it access to its natural resources, and protected it from internal and external assault? In other words, keeping the big man in power no matter what. 

Critics have long known about the cycle of American venality and African corruption, and over a decade ago William Easterly wrote an article for the New York Review of Books entitled Foreign Aid for Scoundrels in which he criticized the international foreign assistance establishment and that of the United States in particular, for continuing to support corrupt dictators and to ignore their abuses of human and civil rights.  He referred to a seminal book by Dambisa Moyo:

Faced with this indifference to tyranny of even the most lethal kind, African intellectuals are increasingly beginning to protest. In her book Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo struck a nerve because she protested so eloquently against the paternalism, presumption, and double standards of the donor countries’ aid agencies. In many cases, foreign aid, as a review of her book put it, “fostered dependency, encouraged corruption and ultimately perpetuated poor governance and poverty.”

Paul Collier, writing in The Independent focuses on Moyo’s observation that foreign aid disenfranchises the very citizens it is designed to help:

One of her (Moyo’s) central points is that aid can, in effect, disenfranchise Africans, since the population cannot “hold its government accountable. The first stage in her argument is that aid is easy money. If governments had to rely upon private financial markets they would become accountable to lenders, and if they had to rely upon taxation they would become accountable to voters. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues.

Easterly collected data on the amount and proportion of US foreign assistance to dictators:

The proportion of aid received by democracies has remained stuck at about one fifth (the rest are in a purgatory called “Partly Free” by Freedom House). As for US foreign aid, despite all the brave pronouncements such as the ones I’ve quoted, more than half the aid budget still went to dictators during the most recent five years for which figures are available (2004–2008).

Paul Biya, the dictator of Cameroon had been in power for 28 years and was known for his brutal rule.  Yet, he received over $35 billion during his reign:

In February 2008, Biya’s security forces killed one hundred people during a demonstration against food price increases and also against a constitutional amendment that will extend his rule to 2018. Many of the victims were “apparently shot in the head at point-blank range.” The IMF justification for the newest loan in June 2009 noted laconically that these “social tensions” have not recurred and “the political situation is stable”.

 

Biya is not the only dictator to have so benefitted:

Helen Epstein described the support that aid donors give to Ethiopia’s tyrant Meles Zenawi, who has roughly matched Biya in aid receipts in a shorter period of time. Peter Gill in his excellent recent book Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid (2010) documents Meles’s misdeeds further, which rise to the level of war crimes in his counterinsurgency in Ethiopia’s Somali region (I reviewed the book for The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010).

Other long-serving aid-receiving dictators include Idriss Déby in Chad ($6 billion in aid between 1990 and the present), Lansana Conté in Guinea ($11 billion between 1984 and his death in 2008), Paul Kagame in Rwanda ($10 billion between 1994 and the present), and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda ($31 billion between 1986 and the present).

 

Easterly concluded with this ringing indictment: 

Aid agencies exist to give aid, so they must keep the money flowing. The department of an aid agency assigned to help a country may not get a budget next year if its officials don’t disburse to the country’s ruler this year; so they hand out funds no matter how autocratic he is. (The autocratic recipients know this and know they can ignore any “raised concerns” about democracy, including human rights.) Only the most well-publicized and egregious violators of democratic principles—like Robert Mugabe—get cut off.

Mali was the favored child of the US State Department.  Here democracy could grow and be an example of a country which did things right, followed American principles, and had a chance to be the bulwark against the anti-democratic forces of al-Qaeda increasingly present in the vast northern desert.  Mali would vindicate State Department/USAID programs in Africa, many if not most of which had little or no impact and served to prop up tin pot dictators.  The Secretary of State could report back to a restive Congress that things were going well, the Department’s missions were succeeding, and there were many success stories that could be reported back to African-American lobbyists. 

In 2012, however, events in Mali exposed the total illusion of these assumptions. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cited Mali as a gem, a bright star of nascent democracy; but the wool had been pulled over her eyes, and in a bloody coup, her favored, knighted president was overthrown by the military exposing his endemic corruption. 

 

For decades the American government has propped up dictators and looked the other way as taxpayer dollars went down the rathole as long as African governments remained loyal.  As a result of this political indifference and feigned interest in human welfare, the continent sank farther and farther into a miasma of poverty and bullying governance. 

Of course American complicity is not the only reason why Africa is still Paleolithic.  Its tribalism and some undiscovered cultural trait which has kept it from the rapid, remarkable development of Asian countries which were at the same economic levels as Africa scarcely thirty years ago and are now international political and economic giants, are involved. 

Yet such complicity at the very least prolonged the worst of Africa's endemic underdevelopment.  US aid did little economic or social good and simply perpetuated government ineptitude and corruption. 

So, it is about time that finally and hopefully once and for all US foreign assistance is at an end.  African countries will finally be held responsible for their corruption and will be forced to borrow from European capital markets for any development loan.  The nonsense, chicanery, faux idealism, and geopolitical ignorance will end.  Elon Musk and DOGE are the avant garde.