The Chronicle Newspaper (Lilongwe)
Danga Mughogho
16 February 2004
column
Lilongwe — This week a joint communiqué from the donor community (The Commission for the European Union, France, Germany, Norway, The United Kingdom, The United Nations Development Programme and The United States) commented positively on the recently-concluded voter registration process for the general elections.
The donor whitewash of the circus put paid to the chances for a free and fair election or at the very least one free of violence and contested results come May. The Electoral Commission, which has had five years since the last sham election to get its house in order, confirmed not only that it is incompetent, but shamelessly partisan.
The process was marred by widely publicised logistical hiccups and irregularities. The UNDP contributed mightily to the whole mess by failing to fund the NGOs accredited for civic education and the monitoring of polling stations.
Unfortunately, Malawi cannot do without donors: estimates are that as much as 45% of recurrent budget expenditure is donor-funded. The horse and cart routine is now well established: the Malawi government blatantly violates donor conditionalities, put in place to ensure the money reaches those most in need. The donors then make a few noises, withhold aid for a few months, and then turn the other cheek: good governance, multilateral-style.
The problem is that all multilateral efforts to enforce accountability whether through UN agencies, the European Union, or the Malawi-specific Common Approach to Budgetary Support (CAPS) have a significant moral hazard: they allow individual donor countries to hide their reservations behind a collective smokescreen.
The multilateral agencies are staffed by people on mercenary packages, which pay for the education of dependents, offer diplomatic immunity, and duty and tax-free status, with no incentive for success. After all, the job of any aid agency representative should be to develop the country they are posted to, and so make themselves redundant.
Instead, UN employees live from Peter Justesen Duty Free catalogue to catalogue, ordering toilet paper because you can't get four-ply in developing countries, and making sure they don't mess up their career progression by rocking the boat.
Bilateral relations between countries are a different matter altogether.
Country representatives are beholden to their governments and the voters who put them in office; they are the trustees of their nation's strategic and economic interests. They are civil servants, not highly-paid staff on 'hardship' allowances.
The triumph over despotism in Iraq has confirmed the failure of multi-lateral decision-making. While it is no secret that the United Nations General Assembly has always been an Israel-bashing, conspiracy theory type of place, it took the Iraq crisis last spring to reveal the fundamental flaws in Security Council decision-making.
In the absence of any collective resolve from the UN, NATO and the EU, the British and the Americans got on with a job that needed to be done, Tony Blair and George W. Bush lived up to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) tradition of not shrinking from the use of force to achieve the common good.
In the current US administration, and the British Labour government, the people of Malawi have the ideal bilateral partners for development. This is not to say there is no role for Germany, Japan and France, and the Scandinavian countries, whose assistance is considerable. It is just that history squarely places Malawi in the sphere of influence of Britain, as the former colonial power, and America, the heir apparent to the [British] English-speaking empire.
Our government is an amalgam of a Westminster parliamentary democracy and an executive presidency. All our institutions are modelled on British ones.
New Labour's reforms, spearheaded by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have created a 'morally socialist' Britain that is also friendly to private enterprise. The state provides a safety net in exchange for responsible behaviour by its citizens (similar to the welfare to work initiative of the Clinton administration) Coupled with progressive policies at home, the Blair government signalled its intentions abroad by appointing Peter Hain, who cut his political teeth in the anti-apartheid movement, as junior minister responsible for Africa.
Chancellor Gordon Brown has been a strong, credible advocate for debt relief at G8 summits. Clare Short, former Development Secretary, and veritable old Labour stalwart, actually pushed for the privatisation of state-owned companies when she was in office.
The Bush Administration's Africa policy has been a pleasant surprise. An African-American secretary of state (who'd have thunk it?) has started what America's European immigrants have always done looking out for the mother country. It is likely that without Colin Powell's determination to put Africa on the agenda, the Millennium Challenge Account, a US fund to give assistance to countries meeting strict criteria for good governance, would not have come into being. The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act is already delivering economic rewards to those countries willing to take up the challenge of competing on the world stage.
Without two African-Americans in senior cabinet posts (something that every Democratic administration has failed to do) it is unlikely that even a Democratic US administration would have committed peacekeeping troops to Liberia.
Coming from an administration whose political legacy is littered with accusations of hostility to non-white interests (remember President Reagan's policy of constructive engagement with South Africa) this is no mean feat.
What Malawi's people need is to be challenged to develop in a way that is transparent, accountable, democratic, and fosters private enterprise. We can free ourselves of the total donor dependence created by a government intent on fleecing the poor. We do not need any more hand-holding condescension.
By excusing the faults of African governments the UN is actually patronising us: the 'we never expected you to achieve much, so it is unfair to hold you to our standards mantra' is simply tongue-in-cheek affirmative action.
While the World Food Programme keeps the Mugabe regime in power by feeding its people, the US and Britain speak up for justice in the face of a denier's gallery of African kleptocrats and neo-colonial excuse-mongers.
Bush and Blair, WASPs both, are good for Africa. Cecil John Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling can rest in peace.
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