African Aid  

The Live8 concerts this weekend have gained a lot of attention, but a lot of commentators have noted that "debt-relief" proposals tend to come with quite a few strings attached that may make any acts of apparent generosity to the third world perhaps a bit less useful than the casual observer may think.

Naomi Klein has come up with the novel idea of letting Africans keep their oil revenues instead - which would probably help them pay off their onerous debts a lot more rapidly than the current proposals for aid and "debt relief" will.

A recent report from Action Aid International revealed the extent to which official aid figures exaggerate rich countries' ‘generosity'. The report itemised what it termed “phantom aid'‘, including aid that was not focused on poverty reduction, aid that double-counted as debt relief, and aid that could only be used for the purchase of goods and services from the donor country.

An astonishing two-thirds of all official aid is estimated to be of this ‘phantom' variety. Perhaps in acknowledgement that western governments are not, in practice, stumping up the necessary resources, the British chancellor, Gordon Brown, has suggested that the oil-rich states of the Middle East could help “make poverty history'‘ in Africa.

Journalist Naomi Klein has responded by asking whether it might not be a better idea to use African oil (and other resources) to make poverty history in Africa. She points to the $30 billion in oil wealth extracted by Shell from the Niger Delta, while local people were left, not only in poverty, but mired in pollution.

Exxon Mobil has negotiated a deal with Equatorial Guinea that leaves only 12 per cent of the country's oil revenues in local hands. “Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich,” she said. The fact that African elites collude in this oppression and exploitation does not diminish the responsibility of Western governments and companies.