CIDA - Cold Facts

Dambisa Moyo's claim that corrupt thugs and dictators in African nations sucked up scandalous amounts of aid dollars for their own purposes and dynasties is clearly true. Bringing attention to that reality, however, has already been accepted and understood, prompting the international community to demand more accountability for aid. The results of those kinds of contingencies have now begun to bear fruit.One of her greatest oversights concerns not the results of aid given but the motive for distributing it in the first place. The decades-long Cold War played out like some giant chess game between the West and Communism. While the Soviet Union and China sought to influence struggling Third World countries in their orbit through foreign assistance, the West was actually doing exactly the same thing. While citizens of North America and Europe might have believed that foreign aid was being dispensed for noble purposes, the view from the Pentagon, military alliances, defense departments and even the corporate sector was one of assuring access to markets and labour, as well as keeping Communism itself in check.In Africa, the independence movements of numerous African nations in the 1960s were quickly swallowed up in the larger game being played by these international institutions. In London, England, eventual leaders of many of these soon to be independent nations met over the course of weeks to determine how best to develop Africa's future. Following their return to the continent, great hope emerged that Africa would assume its place as one of the key players on the world's stage.It was not to be because, sadly, neither the West nor Communism itself could afford to let that happen, lest the particular countries involved opted to partner with the larger enemy. And so the KGB and the CIA, along with countless other intelligence agencies around the world, sought to buy the favour of revolutionary African leaders. Billions were poured into leader's coffers just to keep them faithful and, unfortunately, many of those participants in the London process succumbed to the temptation. As the chess board played itself out over the next four decades, the African continent devolved into anarchy while both main world players and their allies had to keep pouring money in to preserve their loyalty.This all made sense at the time, but it led to gross levels of corruption. The point here is that billions of the money given at that time was merely disguised as aid and served as a smokescreen for larger geopolitical reasons. If Moyo wants to claim that African leaders corrupted the system, that's fair enough, but that sense of leadership decline was largely aided and abetted by the larger players who controlled the board. By the time the Cold War ended, adding up the damage of such diabolical maneuvering became hugely disheartening. Nevertheless, Moyo gathers it all up in one easy basket and claims that foreign aid never worked. It's far more complicated than that and she knows it.CIDA began involving itself in numerous African nations in the 1960s, as the Cold War began to expand its paranoia. But as the larger players delivered their guns disguised in medicine crates, a cash money hidden in food bags, CIDA built schools, established health clinics, treated malaria and began the slow process towards women's empowerment. Important for our consideration here is that these programs led to clear successes and outcomes - something completely unacknowledged or purposely ignored by Moyo. She confused blood money for aid, and geopolitical realities for international compassion.Moyo could have done us a great service if she would have linked the sometimes wastefulness of aid with our own moral culpability in manipulating African nations to our larger purposes. She could have provided a clear breakdown of the billions that were spent for the Cold War but were disguised as aid, but she refuses to that kind of spadework. Yes, there has been significant wastage in Africa, but we were often the corrupters and, as with the fallout from climate change on Africa itself, we are morally responsible for recovering the damage. Aid is now proving to work the farther we get away from the practices of the Cold War. It's now time to repair what we have ruined by dispensing more aid the way it should have been given in the first place.