Mukoma Wa Ngugi appears to have a very cynical view of human behaviour! There seems to be no room in his analysis for aid that is genuinely motivated by compassion, as opposed to “conscience cleansing”.

On the ground, it’s very hard not to come to the conclusion that whatever the politics of what “Africa” needs, many individual Africans do need aid just to achieve basic levels of housing, education, water and medical care.

While aid may not be the ultimate political solution (and I can see some of its destructive effects, especially the begging mentality), it’s hard to tell someone whose roof is leaking in the rainy season that the aid she is receiving is a bad idea.

I would not qualify that view is overly cynical. But you’re missing the point. Agreed, it is hard to refuse aid to someone that needs it to survive. But what if the very aid one gives prevents any possible resolution of the fundamental problems? Yet, that is exactly what aid does - it treats the symptoms, while giving the donors a blank check to continue feeding the disease.

Here are two examples of aid projects run in Africa by Australians. How do they fit these comments?

One is the Hospital by the River - a Fistula hospital in Ethiopia that has been run by two (now one) Australian doctors for 40+ years. The hospital has stayed open all that time, despite political upheaval. I think that it has been allowed to continue because it fixes a symptom rather than addressing the underlying problem. I don’t think the problem (fistulas caused by difficult births) can be laid at the feet of the west - the main causes are: pregnancies in very young mothers, female circumcision, and very limited medical care for pregnant women. The hospital has been enormously important to thousands of Ethiopian women who have suffered this condition. But the next generation of women will suffer the same problem, because nothing has changed. The donors - the two Australian doctors who have spent their whole lives running the hospital and fund raising for it - probably do have clean consciences because they have spent their lives helping others in important ways. Was it their job to try to change Ethiopian society? Have their efforts helped to perpetuate some unhealthy social practices by providing a bandaid to the symptoms? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who could say?

My second example is the School of St Jude, in Tanzania. It was started in 2002 by an Australian who married a Tanzanian. It turns out that she is very capable and a good fundraiser. In five years the school has grown to 850 children and a second school is being built. The school provides free education (plus meals and uniform and transport) to capable children from the poorest homes. In 40 years time, she will have educated literally thousands of children, right through to tertiary level, in a country where hardly any kids even finish high school. These educated people will be able to educate their children, and so the circle of value will expand with each generation. It is likely that many of these children will become community leaders at the local level, or even at the national, and international level.

I can’t see where Tanzania could be said to be losing with this kind of development aid, especially as the Govt itself has placed a strong emphasis on education and is trying to improve education as fast as its resources allow.

This is not just treating the symptoms, and I can’t see how it gives donors (like me) a ‘blank cheque to continue feeding the disease’.

Certainly the school founder has said that if the African problem was easy to solve, it would be solved by now. And she said it has been a million times harder than she anticipated to establish and grow her school. The very hardest aspect for her to deal with has been the endemic corruption and theft that she has learned to watch for. She says she has to think five steps ahead for all the ways that anyone may try to rip her off - because all of them will be tried. She is determined that the funds she raises should go toward educating capable children from the poorest homes. So, she has learned to be ‘a hard woman’. She also says that the person who said there is no such thing as an ugly child, must have been thinking of African children.

Perhaps her efforts will contribute towards a social change in her corner of Africa as thousands of children grow up learning that theft, lying, bribery and corruption are not the FIRST approach to every situation. There are SOME age-old traditions that will need to be left behind if African countries are to prosper.

Mukoma Wa Ngugi does well to criticise the corruption of African elite, but he should realise that this is just the tip of the iceberg — until corruption is reduced at all levels of society, Africa can’t keep blaming wealthy people when they don’t give aid, and blaming them again when they do!

The hand-out mentality is the same as ‘learned helplessness’. Handouts and charity are not the main causes helplessness, the main cause is the lack of predictability in the environment. Without predictability, the individual has no control over their choices - it doesn’t matter WHAT they choose because the results are out of their control. So, don’t blame the donor for the ‘hand out mentality’, the cause is the grinding lack of choice in a life of extreme poverty.

Having said all that, I have to agree with his first paragraph. I would just like to point towards the people hard at work in Africa who are NOT evangelists, pop stars, or Mother Theresa complexes.

Nicky Oppenheimer, the chairman of De Beers, in her article “No more the ‘hopeless continent” http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/01/opinion/edoppen.php, makes a case of no more handouts for Africa

[...] to Hope for provoking this reponse (!), and Karan for the IHT [...]