Dear Third World Charities...where the heck are the governments?

In My Humble Opinion
21

[QUOTE=Maastricht]
Then the power of the charities would lay in boycotting help to the tribe that the dictator does care about.

“if you don’t allow us to police our own distribution of aid the next disaster, we will withdraw help from the regions with your power base”.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t see how that puts much pressure on the ruling regime.

Suppose the Hutus are killing the Tutsis, with the government’s connivance. So the charities say, “Let us help the Tutsis, or we won’t help the Hutus”. What’s to stop the local regime from saying, “Fine, the Hutus don’t need any help right now. Maybe next year, after they kill all the Tutsis, then you can help them.”

Of course, you could keep score and say “no regime that stops us from helping their repressed peoples get any aid from us at all”, but then the list of countries in sub-Saharan Africa in particular who you can help is going to be a short one.

Third World dictators are glad to have aid coming into their countries, not least because they can steal as much of it as they can get their hands on. But confronted with the choice of getting kicked out of power, or not getting any aid, they are generally going to chose not getting any aid.

Regards,
Shodan

22

Of course. But that would not be the choice. The real choice the dictaor faces is: Do I let the charity set up a chain of hospitals, ( instead of fragmented individual ones), for which I can take the credit with my people, hospitals that look good to foreign investors and care givers? The hospitals that pay me a fee, and in return I protect them from the most blatant corruption, others that want to profit too much, and I facilitate them in, for instance their supply routes. In short, I treat the hospitals like I treat my army.
As a dictator, I would be interested.

23

Why would “credit” be a motivating factor? He doesn’t have to worry about reelection. When the primary source of revenue for a country is natural resources, “foreign investors” aren’t high on the list to impress unless they’re willing to pay you to extract those resources. Corruption allows the government to be under constant top-down control, so why would “eliminating corruption” be a goal?

24

Credit with his powerbase. They get hospitals, too.

For many African countries, foreign aid is the number one revenue.

Not eliminating, but chanelling. A dictator seems more powerful if he can eliminate or, better put, regulate corruption in certain areas. Most dictators, for instance, allow no corruption in their armies.

25

His “powerbase” is typically tribally aligned, paid, or intimidated into cooperating. Again, there is no credit to be gained for being a super good guy. Foreign aid and foreign investment are not the same thing, and as Shodan pointed out, foreign aid is normally scuttled by the government in question anyway. The people who suffer by eliminating foreign aid are the ones already suffering under the regime so I’m still uncertain where you feel the leverage comes from. If foreign aid doesn’t exist, the country is usually making money off natural resources anyway.

Where do you get the idea that dictators are strengthened by eliminating or controlling corruption? This has basically not been the case in any example in history, given that one of the major factors to expanding democratic institutions in a country is eliminating systemic corruption.

26

Certainly, it’s conceivable that if that plan was proposed to, say, Robert Mugabe, he might agree to it. But how is this a major change from how charities operate now? The scale might be larger, but the charities will be operating under the same restrictions on political activity and areas of operation. In short, what concessions do you think a dictator would make to acquire this hospital network? I’ll tell you the answer: little or nothing.

Right, for the dictator to be in power in the first place, he has to have a core group of supporters. Their livelihoods depend on loyalty to the regime; he doesn’t need to impress them with hospitals or anything else.

I think where the charities could go more good would be to focus their efforts on nations that are undergoing reform and democratization. For example, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and even more so Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, are crafting safer, more prosperious nations, and finally abandoning Marxist-Leninism policies that have held Africa back for decades. Perhaps the most aid and charity possible could be sent their way, as an incentive to others. But, such agencies generally try to accomplish the most good for the most people, and ignore politics as much as possible. It’s hard to argue with that strategy.

27

He already has the support of his power base, otherwise there would be another coup and somebody else takes power. But the support from his power base doesn’t come from providing hospitals to them and to the rest of his country - it comes from the fact that they are mostly from the dictator’s tribe, and therefore he allows them government jobs that allow them to get rich along with him.

Why should the dictator or his tribe care that their enemies are dying? They already get whatever the dictator gives them.

You seem to be assuming that dictators in the Third World care what the rest of the world thinks. I don’t think they do, at least not as much as they care about hanging onto power so they can get rich.

ISTM that if a massacring dictator cares about world opinion, they wouldn’t be massacring people in the first place.

But take Human Action’s example. Cutting off aid was tried in Mugabe’s case (albeit from governments rather than NGOs), His response was to withdraw from the Commonwealth, not to reform.

Can you describe, for instance, what NGOs should have done to prevent Mugabe from breaking the terms of his power-sharing agreementand installing his own people as head of all the ministries of the government?

Regards,
Shodan

28

You’ve asked a million dollar question supplies work for countless teams of analysts, entire cohorts of graduate students, and shelves of library space. The answer comes in the form of a lot of complex, interlocking systems. The one thing we do know is that no nation is congenitally corrupt. Corruption will occur basically anywhere there is an opportunity for it, and less corrupt countries are no showing superior willpower or morality, but rather have developed structures that don’t create benefits for corruption.

Here are some scattered thoughts on a few of those:

  1. Money: This gets to be a little chicken-and-the-egg, but without skilled labor, reliable infrastructure and machinery, countries really do just have a lack of funds. Raw materials and farming, especially on marginal land, doesn’t make much money. The GDP of Central African Republic (CAR) is around $3.29 billion for a population of 4.4 million. For comparison, NASA gets about $18 billion. The GDP of the city of Phoenix is $200 billion.

CAR’s 2011 government expenditures was just $273 million, or about what The Avengers brought in on its opening weekend. To compare, that is the cost to build 4.2 miles of freeway in Portland. With this, they need to maintain a military to control their borders (or, much more economically, pay off local warlords to do it for you) because that’s the basic minimum requirement for actually being a country. Then they need to provide basic infrastructure, including at least some roads, electric lines, telephone facilities, etc. They need to pay their civil servants, which again is a basic definition of what it means to govern a country. This leaves precious, precious little for fostering business and economic growth, much less things like health and education systems.
The gaps this lack of money causes creates cascading effects and distorts everything, often in non-intuitive ways. It’s easy to complain about countries spending on military, but the alternative is paying off local warlords to keep bandits, greedy neighbors and rebels in control, and that’s even worse. It’s easy to complain about paying civil servants, but a strong civil service is the absolute foundation of government. Corruption actually happens most often when the civil servants aren’t being paid regularly and need to look towards outside funds.

  1. Macroeconomic realities

Poor countries face problems with hard currency. If you live in CAR and get paid in Central African Francs, you are being paid in a currency nobody anywhere wants, and it is worthless paper outside of the area. So what happens when the machines in your factory break and you need replacement parts from Germany? To develop, countries need medicine, machinery, and other things that are only available as imports.

Poor countries have a sharp need for hard currency (which they can really only get through exports, and export revenue is hard to get if you are poor and your neighbors are poor), and so they try to discourage citizens from spending any hard currency they run into on Cadbury bars, Nikes, and other non-essential items. This requires complex systems of currency controls, which creates even more market distortions and opportunities for corruption.

  1. Misguided macroeconomic policies

Three major policies have hurt poor countries. The first is the concept of “dependency theory”, which was a well regarded theory based on the idea that poor countries were dependent on their former colonizers, and to develop they needed to develop independent economies. A centerpiece of this was import substitution industrialization (ISI), where countries tried to give a “shot in the arm” to industries designed to replace imports- things like machinery, automobiles, and the like, in order to reduce dependency and conserve hard currency. ISI restricted imports in these industries to reduce competition, and provided economic favors to the new industries. In the end, this turned out to not really work, and this lead to debt crises.

Debt crises are another issue. In the 1980s, there was a huge crush of petrodollar lending, followed by a slowing and a crash that left developing countries suddenly unable to borrow the money the needed to keep their countries running.

And this is where the NGO proliferation comes in. In the 1990s, IMF was able to lend to these countries, but in exchange they required strict adherence to ideologically driven “poverty reduction” policies that required countries to liberalize their trade policies, privatize as much as possible, and basically gut their social sectors, including basic services like health and education. This is really what drove the para-governmental role that many NGOs play today. With governments restricted from providing these basic services, donors encouraged NGOs to fill in the gaps. This quickly became an ideological stance, with the concept that working through NGOs was better than working through corrupt governments. The US, for example, has pledged to funnel much of their money through local organizations.

This creates problems as well, as a government cannot build capacity when the best and the brightest are working for NGOs, and when the investment isn’t being made in making governments stronger and more effective. There is an entire branch of development focused on improving governance, but it’s new and everyone is still learning what works and what doesn’t. And it works differently in different countries. India, which has a strong public sector, has always had a strong stance towards development being best implemented by the government. Other countries are happy to save money by letting NGOs take over some of the costly but necessary services.

  1. Political realities

When African countries became independent, the rest of the world did a collective freak out and eliminated (through assassination, bribery and other means) an entire generation of the most capable and charismatic leaders in order to install less capable but more easily manipulated leaders. Then the US, Europe and the USSR proceeded to play proxy-warfare games all over the continent, propping up whoever seemed like the best guy to piss of the other team, without much regard for how they would actually manage the country.

Much of this generation was able to hold on to power well into the modern era, and Africa is just now seeing the last of the “dinosaurs” go. There is also some element of sticking with the devil we know. While we don’t like these leaders, we know they won’t do anything too unpredictable and we would rather work with them than whatever comes next. While we have now recognized that good governance is better for us in the end, we still sometimes are tempted to get our hands dirty. It will be interesting to see how our increasing focus on Africa and the war against terror affects our political interventions in the area for years to come.