January 2002
In the Footsteps of Foreign Aid
by Filip Palda
Paul Martin's budget promise of $1 billion of foreign aid is proof to dictators and bribe-starved bureaucrats in Africa that yes, there is a Canadian Santa Claus. Our version of Santa is all-forgiving. There will be no rusty nails or burnt potatoes for the naughty cadres of sub-Saharan Africa who have swindled the West of aid for decades. This Christmas, their stockings will bulge with aid dollars plucked from 30 million somnolent Canadians.
If Jean Chretien were owner of a national chain of bookstores, he would surely ban In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by reporter Michela Wrong. Wrong describes the pathetic eagerness of Western politicians to hand money to corrupt African rulers. Our politicians know the money will end up in Swiss bank accounts but they are desperate to look generous and are starved of ideas for helping the poor. Budget speeches are a time to show the world Canada's heart and its prowess at wiring aid dollars into the administrative void of Africa.
The book makes unpleasant reading for technocrats in Ottawa who earn their living by nuzzling into the food chain that stretches from the Canadian treasury to the air-conditioned offices of politicians in Maputo and Kinshasa. No giver of foreign aid could read this book and not worry that his money may be helping to keep in power the sort of people who keep the third world in its economic mire.
Not that we need to send forensic accountants and project evaluators to Africa to confirm that our style of foreign aid is a blight on the destitute. Canada runs a third world laboratory known as the Department of Indian Affairs. The $7 billion dollar annual experiment this laboratory runs shows that the feds are unable to police how Indian reserves use the money it sends their way. Ottawa's aid helps keep in power unaccountable band leaders who govern their people as do tribal African oligarchs. There is even evidence that one band used the money a federal minister had granted them to fund that minister's election campaign. Mobutu Sese Seko, former dictator of the Congo, would have tilted his leopard skin cap in salute. He was a master at lavishing emoluments on compliant Western aid officials.
Canada's aid policy fails because it sprinkles money from the cumulus cloud of the Canadian International Development Agency onto the canopy of Africa's political jungle. Little money makes it to the forest floor where the poor scratch out a living. Foreign aid would be a blessing to Africans rather than a blight if aid could somehow be decentralized and so less open to corruption than it now is. Criminals find it harder to attack each of a million depositors than to rob the bank in which they place their money.
We could thwart aid criminals by making the intended recipients come to the money rather than sending the money to the intended recipients.
The University of Toronto invites doctors from third world countries to hone their skills in Toronto hospitals. After their internships these doctors return to their countries to radiate the knowledge and expertise they have gained here. Our foreign aid could encourage not just doctors but citizens from all professions and trades in third world countries to work in Canada, gain skills, and return to their countries as ambassadors of expertise, entrepreneurship, and the civil society.
Instead of sending money to Africa, Ottawa should spend money to help Africans travel to Canada. Simultaneously, it should strengthen immigration policing so that once their stay is over, these aid recipients return to Africa.
Few politicians will find this sort of Marshall Plan in reverse an attractive policy. Almost all money spent on this form of aid would rob politicians of discretion. They could no longer pick which aid projects to subsidize. When you decentralize aid, the aid recipient, and not an official swiveling in a leather armchair, chooses whether he will take the chance to amplify his skills in Canada.
Famed British legal scholar A.V. Dicey warned that rule of law could only work if citizens could keep the politicians' arbitrary powers to a minimum. Arbitrariness is the root of the abuse of power as the sad example of foreign aid shows. Instead of continuing to injure the long-suffering people of Africa with aid we grant to their dictators, our leaders should stop sending aid dollars to make themselves look good, and work out an imaginative plan of aid that does some good for its recipients.
Filip Palda is Professor at l'École Nationale d'Administration Publique in Montreal, and Senior Fellow of The Fraser Institute.
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