I’m really curious about Dambisa Moyo.
Here she is in a CBC News piece:
I’m barely a quarter of the way through Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa and she has this way about her that makes me want to believe everything she says. Her writing is clear, refreshing and easy to follow. It’s the kind of writing that makes me turn off the critical part of my brain. And that’s dangerous.
I’m not saying I’m on the Moyo bandwagon yet. My development courses have made me borderline idealist (and definitely opposed to the prescriptions of the neoliberal doctrine) and that makes it hard to jump at her ideas. Let me get through the remaining three quarters of this tome before I make up my mind about what she has to say.
Here’s what Niall Ferguson calls her crucial insight: “That the receipt of concessional (non-emergency) loans and grants has much the same effect in Africa as the posession of a valuable natural resource: it’s a kind of curse because it encourages corruption and conflict, while at the same time discouraging free enterprise.”
Okay, I understand. And then there comes four recommendations:
1. Africa should follow Asian emerging markets by getting bonds and “taking advantage of the falling yields paid by sovereign borrowers over the past decade.”
2. These countries should promote large-scale direct investment in infrastructure.
3. They should also promote free trade in agriculture.
4. They should encourage financial intermediation modeled after the successful microcredit initiatives that have blossomed in Asia and Latin America.
And then she suggests benevolent dictators “push through the reforms required to get the economy moving” and asks what would happen if African countries each got a phone call telling them aid taps would be turned off in five years.
Bottom line: Moyo wants business, not wasted aid.
Africa – 60 years after the independence movements began – is still in a sorry state. I get that African leadership should take a larger responsibility for their economies instead of lining their coffers with aid dollars. I get that celebrity culture has done some bad, bad things for aid (Moyo is not pro-Bono). I also get that shock tactics are often called for. But add in recommendations for renewed capitalist energy and foreign investment and my head starts to get a little fuzzy. It’s like her ideas get my train leaving the station but something in the fuel she’s supplying refuses to let these wheels go full speed.
I’ll keep reading for now, but I have a feeling once I get past Moyo’s history lesson and into the finer points of her recommendations for African economies I’ll be writing a completely different blog entry.
