Be the solution, not the victim – resetting Africa and aid after Covid-19

Covid-19 has changed the world. 

It has altered Africa’s development opportunities. Significant setbacks loom in the fight against poverty as countries in the developed world pivot inwards, away from Africa, to focus on patching up their own economies. 

Yet this reset does not have to be a bad thing for Africa if it learns to own its problems and be their solution. 

The harsh treatment of African nationals in China, where the Covid-19 pandemic began, illustrates the extent to which Africa’s future prosperity lies in its own hands. Our continent should not be dependent on the generosity of others, making it vulnerable to a change of circumstance or whim. 

Even as African leaders now scour the capitals of the world looking for funding to arrest the continental effects of Covid-19, we should be reminded of the limits of outside aid as a tool of development. 

Africa receives more than $60-billion every year in aid. Some of this is not spent on Africans themselves, of course, but on services from the donors themselves. Around one-fifth of total bilateral aid in 2012, for example, was spent on donor countries or put towards debt relief.

Much aid, too, is simply wasted given that it is specifically given to regimes and leaders that lack the governance and policies to deliver development to their people. This is exactly why they are destinations for aid in the first place. Rather than using this money well, in these situations aid is wasted, being used to shore up political power or to build . 

Increasingly, more and more aid is spent not on institutional hardware but on soft power, a term coined by the Harvard academic Joseph Nye more than 30 years ago. This refers to the ability to co-opt rather than coerce partners through culture and values rather than military strength or financial transfers.

The importance of shaping such perceptions has not been lost on China and others. Where Britain uses the British Council to promote its own values, Germany the Goethe Institute and France the Alliance Francaise, the number of Chinese government-sponsored Confucius Institutes, which promote Chinese language and culture, rose from zero across Africa in 2004 to 48 in 2018 in 20 countries. The Russian equivalent, Russkiy Mir (Russian World) Foundation, is active in nine African countries. 

This also explains why Africa has been the site of so many leadership visits and summits in recent years. Where China regularly stages its Forum for China-Africa cooperation, Russia launched its version in Sochi last year, while the UK, France and US have their own, similar summits. 

There are now various indices assessing the relative soft-power rankings of states. These are fraught with contradiction, however, since those professing to support values regularly fund our oppressors, variously claiming (as China does) non-interference in sovereign matters or, like the United States with support for Uganda’s military, overarching strategic interests.

Covid-19 has laid bare the cost of this donor strategy to Africans. Where large-scale funding has historically worked for development, such as with the Marshall Plan, it was employed in an environment defined by governance and local ownership.  

 

The failure of aid can most starkly be observed in terms of Africa’s infrastructure deficit where Covid-19 has woefully exposed African governments and their international sponsors.