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Stop giving us aid, say Africans – Telegraph Blogs
I've just been talking to a very clever man. He's called Thompson Ayodele,burberry borse, he's from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer. The statistics he produces are jaw-dropping. They suggest a direct correlation between the receipt of development assistance and low growth. This is true whether you compare neighbouring countries,hogan rebel, or whether you look at different periods within the same country. Foreign aid, he suggests,Goat jumps ship – Telegraph Blogs,borse chanel, isn't useless; it's actively harmful. It discourages enterprise,Mulberry uk, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes. A similar correlation exists between debt remission and insolvency: countries which have their bills periodically written off become re-indebted more quickly than countries which don't.
James Elles MEP,hogan outlet, Thompson Ayodele and me
It's quite a dilemma for Western governments – especially those of the Centre-Right. Socialists have a tendency to emphasise motive over outcome. Never mind that aid shields recipient governments from the consequences of their policy failures: the key thing, for Lefties,Mulberry handbags, is to show that you're a caring person.
Fair enough. But if we genuinely wanted to help Africa,ray ban 3025, says Thompson, we wouldn't give one more penny in direct grants. Instead,burberry, we would scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, open our markets and build infrastructure directly in situ: in other words,Margaret Thatcher remains the real Iron Lady – Telegraph Blogs, we'd fund (say) a new highway across Sudan and hold competitive tenders for local companies to build it.
The trouble is that if conservatives announced that they were going to cut overseas aid budgets, not everyone would believe that they were doing so as a result of Thompson's cogent philosophy. They would be accused,chanel outlet, rather, of doing it because they were selfish or because they didn't care about people whose skins were darker than theirs. Hence, perhaps, my party's determination, at a time of general economic retrenchment, explicitly to guarantee the international development budget against future cuts.
As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away,outlet chanel. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result". Yup: but at least we'll have shown everyone how nice we are,If Nick Clegg wants to target pensioner entitlements, he cant limit the pain to. |
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