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Jonathan Clayton, Africa correspondent for The Times of London, observes that, one year after Live 8, Africa has just as many poor people, and just as many rich. The latter seem disproportionately represented among Africa's parliamentarians and development-agency bureaucrats.
This lot, helped by their friends in the NGO world, will be bemoaning the West's lack of commitment to its G-8 pledges this week and asking for much, much more aid. Then, they can follow the example of Kenya's MPs - some of the best paid on the continent - and vote themselves increases in salary and travel allowances.
A year ago, Mr Clayton was hopeful that Live 8 and Make Poverty History could effect real improvement in the living conditions of ordinary Africans. Now, however, he is more skeptical than ever.
As ever the voices of real people living on this continent were largely absent and therefore the two huge falsehoods on which the G-8 were premised went largely unchallenged. These were: more aid leads to more development and therefore less poverty and, two, there is a new breed of African leader around more interested in his people's welfare, than his own. The first is a myth, propagated by the whole aid business, the second is a simple untruth, spread because the alternative is diplomatically too unpalatable …
Andrew Mwenda, Ugandan journalist, is also very skeptical. Indeed, he has been in London arguing against foreign aid. Far from helping Africans, he maintains, it makes their situation worse. Aid is not the solution; to the contrary, by creating perverse incentives, encouraging corruption, and impeding development, it is in truth the problem.
Mr Mwenda is widely known in Africa; less so in the West — and for a reason. He accuses charities and aid agencies of self-interest, of seeking to feather their nests and expand their market share, and he talks about the big issue that is never mentioned: race.
“White society is being blackmailed. The white world looks at Africa from a position of guilt,” he told a seminar at IPN, the London think tank. The beneficiaries of aid are governments, politicians, the staff of aid agencies and charities, he says. Head in hands in mock despair, he reels off a list of “charities” that sprang into being when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria began to disburse its millions. “There was Children of Hope, there was Hope for Children, there was Help the Children.”
Vast sums vanished into the pockets of politicians and corrupt government officials. Money from Western taxpayers, corporations and individual donations raised with rock star endorsement was siphoned into private bank accounts. The scandal eventually forced the Global Fund to suspend its $200 million (£110 million) grant to Uganda.
“The sick and dying in hospitals never saw the money,” he says.
What Africans need, says Mr Mwenda, is not handouts from white foreigners, but changes at home: better governmental institutions and tools to develop their economies themselves.
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