When it comes to African development, foreign aid is just the beginning.
President Trump’s controversial decision to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been greeted with widespread condemnation across the aid industry and foreign policy establishment. The condemnation is not unwarranted. While questions regarding the legality of the move remain unresolved (a federal judge has ruled that the president “overstepped his constitutional authority”), even those who take President Trump’s point about the need to bring the agency in line with the administration’s “America First” agenda are right to ask whether it could, and probably should, have adopted a more humane approach.
That being said, it is instructive that most of the reaction to the move has zeroed in on the question of foreign aid, particularly the severity of the pain and disruption that its abrupt withdrawal is expected to cause in the poorer countries.
This exclusive focus on aid is driven by two related factors. One is the passion of aid workers and their conviction in the human significance of what they do. A second factor is the same workers’ fervent belief in the aid system, a belief anchored in experience of the good that well-targeted aid can accomplish in underserved communities across the developing world. From this perspective, not only do concerns about waste or fraud miss the point entirely, it seems a negligible price to pay for the morally unimpeachable goal of bringing succor to the afflicted and smiles to strange faces in even stranger lands and places.
No matter one’s feelings or prejudices about this approach, there is something to be admired about a bloody-minded devotion to doing good. In a world riddled with doubt and cynicism, one yearns for more of it, and it is certainly preferrable to the kind of handwringing cynicism whereby nothing can be done because, you know, there is so much to be done. For sheer devotion and sticktoitiveness, exponents of foreign aid are worth their weight in gold.
But there is a fly in their ointment, which can be summarized as follows: first, while belief in the morality of aid is admirable, it is not enough to dismiss legitimate and well-founded concerns about its efficacy and, more worryingly, its proven capacity to stimulate the wrong socio-economic, political, and cultural incentives in aid-dependent countries. Indeed, not only do these concerns predate the Trump executive order, they are well known to development activists and scholars in both donor and recipient countries. And since Western-based development activists cannot feign ignorance of these nagging reservations, it is difficult to imagine how they can continue to ignore them while insisting that they take the agency of recipient countries seriously. The current conjuncture may be far from ideal, but it does give these activists a real chance to get ahead of the curve.
Part of doing this will be returning to first principles on the question of foreign aid by posing the question of how countries develop, and whether or to what extent foreign aid accelerates or frustrates the attainment of developmental goals. No amount of wishing this question away will make it go away. Furthermore, and since foreign aid is an integral part of a broader development paradigm which sees foreign assistance as a stopgap measure pending such a time in the foreseeable future when recipient countries would finally rise and walk under their own power, it may be worth asking why this has yet to happen and why, over time, aid has produced greater, not less, dependency.
In any event–and now we come to the second aspect of the fly in the ointment–it would seem that even when conducted with the necessary frankness, aid talk is by definition circumscribed, a tiny facet of the broader problem of development in Africa. If this is correct, the more attention we give to aid, the less to what is inarguably of greater moment–the future of human freedom in Africa.
The paradox of the situation is that one can scarcely conceive of a time when conversation about the future of freedom in Africa is more urgent than now. This is because of the nature and persistence of the emergent challenges to human freedom in Africa. The first challenge is the rise of a (my coinage) “governance without representation” discourse which insists that the problem in Africa is not democracy but food, security, and reliable infrastructure, all of which can be provided by a benevolent leader, popular representation be damned. While one can see the appeal of this discourse (how can anyone possibly be against food, security, and infrastructure?) what is particularly frightening is its willingness to incinerate freedom, not least the freedom of the people to choose and replace their representatives as is now standard in every modern society, on the pyre of a vaunted technocratic efficiency. In their hurry to procure decent digs and grub for immiserated Africans, promoters of this discourse miss the point that people are not sheep to be corralled by their rulers.
A second challenge to human freedom in Africa is the nascent cult of the strongman, symbolized by the growing popularity of military rulers like Burkina Faso’s interim leader (sic) Ibrahim Traore. That such adventurers are propelled to power by a mix of popular disenchantment with democratic rule and justifiable resentment against interloping external agents in no way diminishes the threat that the cult, and the mass prostration always needed to feed it, poses to human freedom on the continent.
Thus far, the reaction to President Trump’s move has been dominated by genuine solicitude for African communities likely to be adversely affected by the sudden withdrawal of foreign assistance. Yet, for the conversation to be truly generative, it has to rise above mere petitioning for a restoration of the status quo ante to address the broader question of what foreign aid is for. In other words, it is crucially important to use this moment to think deeply about development in Africa, its intellectual and moral foundations, and the means of securing it. In my book, this cannot be accomplished absent a foundational commitment to human freedom, simultaneously the prerequisite and purpose of development.
Nathan Schoonover and Giulio Bianco contributed to the research for this article.
