LONDON: Surely they can’t all be wrong. More than 450 organizations in the Make Poverty History coalition, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Coldplay, Bono, economist-to-the-stars Jeffrey Sachs — everyone, it seems, apart from the US administration is calling for a doubling of aid and 100 per cent debt relief for Africa. Yet we have been here before. In 1981 the OAU and the World Bank called for a doubling of development assistance to Africa. In the following years, aid to the region duly increased by 130 per cent, but incomes fell and poverty increased during a ‘lost decade’.

This is not the standard Afro-pessimist argument that more help for the continent is a wasted effort. There is a robust body of evidence that aid has brought some economic growth, even in Africa. But the record of the 1980s and since serves as a reminder that aid alone does not work well enough to bring about the economic transformation desperately needed for a rapid end to African poverty.

Campaigners would immediately point to the role of trade. If the scandal of $300 billion worth of agricultural subsidies in the rich world were ended, the argument goes, then Africa would prosper. But sadly, the evidence is that liberalising agriculture in OECD countries will be of only marginal benefit to African countries — of the order of only 2 per cent of national income on average. While welcome, this is not the step change required.

What Africa needs is to shake off its dependence on primary commodity exports, a problem underlying not only its marginalization from world trade but also its chronic debt problems. Many countries rely today on as narrow a range of agricultural and mineral products as they did 30 years ago, and suffer the consequences of inexorably declining export earnings. Again, the campaigners’ remedy — to improve market access for African exports to Europe and America — is wide off the mark. While imperfect, various preferential schemes already give the poorest African countries excellent market access.

To understand how Africa might diversify we must look elsewhere, to the experience of east and south-east Asia. Not only have these countries revolutionized their trade performance in the last four decades to become world leaders in everything from clothing to computers, they have also achieved the holy grail of broad-based growth. The ‘Asian miracle’ has seen countries poorer than their African counterparts in the 1960s virtually eradicate $1-a-day poverty today. If you really want to know how to make poverty history, it is this transformation that you must grasp. A large number of studies have shown that strong states with a long-term economic growth strategy were at the centre of the Asian miracle. Counter to donor orthodoxy, these so-called ‘developmental states’ were intervening widely in their economies. They committed practically every sin in the neoliberal book, including state-owned industries and trade protection. This success story of competent government stands in stark contrast to Africa’s governance problems.

‘Governance’ has, of course, been identified by the Commission for Africa as the fundamental issue. However, the record of World Bank-inspired governance reforms in Africa is one of abject failure. Only in those rare cases with political buy-in at senior levels have anti-corruption efforts or civil service reform programmes even been attempted. This points to the importance of Africa expert Alex de Waal’s aphorism that governance is government minus politics. The answer to why African states have not been as effective as those of east Asia lies in political history.

A colonial inheritance of indirect rule and the scramble for power at independence meant that political leaders relied on dispensing patronage to local chiefs to hold together national alliances. The resulting system of patronage politics has produced leaders more interested in maintaining a flow of resources for elite consumption than in broader development, with oil and mining multinationals happy to facilitate a ‘spoils politics’ in the worst cases. It has also eroded the ability of African states to manage economic challenges. Such politics has survived multi-party reforms of the 1990s, and is entrenched even in ‘good performers’ such as Ghana and Tanzania. In the rare cases where African governments have led successful development and poverty reduction, such as Botswana, or Uganda in the 1990s, leaders have suppressed patronage politics.

If the nature of politics is decisive for Africa, what should the thousands on the streets of Edinburgh be telling G8 leaders? In reality, donors can play only a minor role in a transformation where African politicians will have the central part.— Dawn/The Guardian News Service