Why We Lie About Aid

There was outrage in September 2019 when it emerged that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution spent 2% of its annual income overseas. The money, totalling just over three million pounds, went towards overseas partners working to reduce deaths from drowning across the world. Tapping into the popular sentiment that the UK spends too much money on charitable causes overseas, Tory MP Andrew Brigden said, ‘It’s not the Royal International Lifeboat Institution.’ In fact, the UK government’s foreign aid budget comprises only 0.7% of the national budget. In Why We Lie About Aid, Pablo Yanguas points out that this percentage remains relatively unchanged, irrespective of the political party in power. Up until the millennium at least, the difference between the approaches taken by progressive and conservative governments has been the difference of a few tenths of a percentage of the gross national product that goes toward foreign aid. His two types of government may disagree about precisely how and where this money is used, but both view development as ‘the pursuit of fair markets, efficient states, and personal freedom.’ Since the mid-2000s, achieving this specific view of development has been threatened by the funding practices of governmental development agencies such as the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK. In 2010, DFID began requiring stringent cost-effectiveness analyses before they would fund development projects. The ability to demonstrate impact in financial terms leads to the funding of projects that lend themselves to being audited, rather than projects, such as those relating to anti-corruption and democratic freedoms, that have less easily quantifiable effects.

Having worked at DFID for nearly two decades, Yanguas is perfectly placed to provide insight on the contradiction between intentions of funders and the wider development community. However, Yanguas never explicitly questions how the true goals of the development agencies of imperialist capitalist powers might differ from – or even contradict – their stated goals. It is not contentious to suggest that foreign aid is often used as a political tool to achieve policy objectives on behalf of the donor country. The very content of aid can be shaped to produce the political outcome desired by the donor nation. When Venezuela’s economic crisis deepened as a result of further US sanctions, the Bank of England decided to freeze the $1.2 billion in funds held there on behalf of the Maduro government. The UK government then announced £30 million in humanitarian aid would be delivered to Venezuela in the form of clean water and medicines.

The key to this strategy is to steal the money that could be invested in production to help the country become self-sufficient and to only provide aid as consumables to make the UK appear as a helpful donor rather than as part of the international effort to bring the Maduro government to its knees and make Venezuela reliant on foreign aid. This critique of the form of foreign aid is echoed in the thinking of the revolutionary Marxist and president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. He called for aid in the form of ‘ploughs, tractors, fertilizer, insecticide, watering cans, drills, dams’, i.e. the means of production, rather than food, which is consumed and then you are again left needing the help of imperialist nations. The former demonstrates how a communist approach to foreign aid differs to that of imperialist nations. For example, the Cuban government has paid out of its own pocket to house, train, and feed thousands of doctors from the poorest countries in the world, provided that they return to their country to help communities where medical provision is scarce.

Yanguas states several times that he is aware that aid might have more ‘mundane’ goals than genuine charity, but there are many passages that are crying out for any analysis of the ulterior motives that might lie behind foreign aid. To give one such example: ‘It would not be until the 1990s that politics was finally allowed into the development agenda, and that was only after the debacle of external debt and structural adjustment that left many countries worse off.’ Politics, then, is when development agencies became concerned with co-operating with recipient governments to help them develop into western-style capitalism, and apparently not when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund spent the majority of the 1980s making aid conditional on countries adopting laissez-faire economic policies – at the expense of their actual economic development.

Only in the last chapter is it revealed why the book treads such a careful line between acknowledging anti-capitalist critiques of aid while at the same time never substantially participating in them. Yanguas lays out his new vision of a ‘contentious development politics,’ which he feels is needed to ‘step away from the straw men that all too often grab the spotlight in development debates.’ Yanguas is then willing to co-operate with neoliberal donors and autocratic regimes for the benefit of people who suffer the most in some of the poorest countries, but he longs to perform this task in a funding arena that acknowledges that the path to creating western capitalist democracies will be slow and non-linear. One group of straw men to be avoided are ‘anthropologists and self-styled critical scholars, who use foreign aid as a punching bag for decrying the evils of colonialism and capital.’ But this is to fundamentally misrepresent the point of anti-capitalist critiques of foreign aid. Such critiques don’t focus on aid merely to ‘get at’ capitalism, regardless of how much the struggle to prevent millions of people each year dying from starvation and easily preventable diseases might suggest. Anti-capitalist critiques reveal the rift between the hidden and stated goals of foreign aid, as well as bringing into question the methods used to get there.

In donor nations, foreign aid is sold to the public as a moral requirement where imperialist countries show their humanity by preventing suffering in uncivilised and underdeveloped countries – whose circumstances are never tied to the wider context of imperialism and colonialism. The economic restructuring prior to the 1990s was not implemented with the understanding that it would ultimately make things worse off for working class people in the countries undergoing restructuring. Through anti-capitalist critiques of this policy we can begin to understand how poor countries opening their markets benefitted the western capitalist class at the expense of the poorest people on the planet, ultimately coming to understand how this may well provide a reason why the policy was pursued so extensively. It is unclear how useful an application of ‘contentious development politics’ would have been during this economic restructuring, given its reluctance to question the intentions with which the aid is given. Even so, now that ‘politics has been allowed into development’, with a new focus on anti-corruption measures and under the pretence of building stable democracies rather than pro-actively harmful economic liberalisation, is there no longer a need for anti-capitalist critiques?

On the surface, corruption in recipient governments channels money away from the people whose lives it is being donated to improve. Less corruption is therefore good. A campaign against corruption also happens to be the next step in ensuring that foreign investment capital flows smoothly within, and eventually away from, newly independent countries. Colonial powers, having encouraged and developed corrupt nepotistic puppet governments as the most effective means of extracting value at the time, returned to their former colonies to find that the corruption and ethnic tension they left behind no longer provides the required political stability and trustworthiness in market transactions necessary for continuous surplus value extraction. Anti-corruption efforts pursued using capital from western donors happen to correspond precisely with how Marx understood capital expansion into new frontiers tending to displace ethnic conflict and petty chauvinisms, replacing them with the single relationship of the class relationship under capitalism. There is an entire chapter of Why We Lie About Aid dedicated to the case study of anti-corruption efforts in Sierra Leone, where the UK government appears only as a donor ready to dig deep into its wallet with a genuine concern for Sierra Leone’s people. The fact that the UK colonised and ruthlessly exploited the country until 1960 is seen as irrelevant. But three things can simultaneously be true: anti-corruption efforts are worthwhile; the presence of corruption in ex-colonies is due to their previous colonisation; and current anti-corruption efforts are linked to the aim of safely extracting surplus value from ex-colonies as part of imperialism. Claiming the first point without acknowledging the other two ignores historical complexity, focusing instead on the procedural complexity of how to reduce corruption.

Yanguas portrays contemporary aid as a fundamentally positive institution that has unfortunately been hijacked by anti-capitalist theorists who don’t care for the hard work that aid practitioners undertake, merely seeing aid as a convenient avenue for easy anti-capitalist theory. As I’ve tried to show above, a Marxist analysis of anti-corruption efforts is more than a convenient avenue of attack and rather a crucial acknowledgement of the dual nature of contemporary foreign aid. Aid programmes have stated, measurable goals — numbers of vaccines delivered, levels of school attendance among young girls, or mosquito nets handed out — but they are at all times in lockstep with the implicit advancement of political and economic goals essential to imperialist nations. The generosity of the former is used to prevent discussion of the latter. This dual nature is present even in what appear to be the most straightforwardly selfless form of aid: emergency responses to infectious disease outbreaks. The 2018 Ebola virus outbreak in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is, at the time of writing, the second largest Ebola outbreak to date with nearly 3,000 cases and 2,000 deaths. Since the much larger outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the US, China and Russia have all developed different Ebola vaccines that could now potentially be tested in the field alongside the currently used Merck vaccine.

Complaining about the lack of enthusiasm shown by the US in guaranteeing that their vaccine was the one to be chosen for field trials, the Director of the University of Minnessota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy, Michael Osterholm, states the underlying motivation: ‘[T]hose that provide the vaccines and those that provide the care and treatment are often those who also have access at the table of the highest levels of government for every other thing, including trade, resources and all aspects of regional security.’ (China May Compete for Limited Opportunities to Test Ebola Vaccine, Scientific American) The vaccine developed by US manufacturers Johnson and Johnson requires two doses to be administered 56 days apart to achieve protection, compared to the existing Merck vaccine which requires only one dose. The previous health minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Oly Ilunga, who oversaw the outbreak response effort, refused to sanction trails of the new vaccine. He claimed that it would be hard to administer two doses of a vaccine in a chaotic environment where many people were fleeing their homes, as well as pointing out the potential confusion deriving from delivering one and two dose vaccines in the same area. He was later removed as the head of the Ebola response and subsequently resigned as a minister, leaving behind a letter criticising ‘interference in the management of the response’, as well as heavy pressure to approve the vaccine trials that he disagreed with. Just over two months later, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine trial was approved, albeit in areas where there is no active Ebola transmission.

Aid informed by ‘contentious development politics’ ultimately ignores the motives hidden just below the surface, even when they are obviously articulated by proponents like Michael Osterholm above, and focuses only on the task of implementing the practical agenda of capitalist donors. In doing so, it settles for building nations with all the contradictions essential to capitalism, this is especially true given the increasing influence of philanthro-capitalist foundations such as the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Even in imperialist nations such as the UK, a third of children live in poverty and people with full time jobs need to access food banks to ensure that they can eat. I see no reason why the conditions of the majority of people in countries subject to imperialist development will ever reach even this unsatisfactory level. I can sympathise with an entrenched form of capitalist realism among aid practitioners, who have to operate in complex political circumstances and try to effect meaningful change using the financial breadcrumbs that drop from the table of the capitalist class. Such efforts are still worthwhile; for the greatest victims of global capitalism, some aid is better than no aid. But with that said, this is not a book that purports to be a practical and pessimistic guide to getting development done within a capitalist system. Yanguas means it to be aspirational, revealing the lies that ‘we’ tell ourselves about aid and staking out bold new ways of thinking. I can’t help but feel that his book fails to reach this goal, settling instead for attacking the value-for-money method of capitalist development at the expense of questioning its overall goals.

Why We Lie About Aid
Pablo Yanguas
Zed Books, 2018
9781783609338