African Bootstraps

Fire of Liberty

As you know from my previous posts, I'm a great fan of Booker T. Washington's concept of one pulling themselves up by their "own bootstraps" with regard to escaping poverty or going about your life. The reason why I believe this is that if folks within this country let other folks take care of their ever waking needs(I make exceptions for the severely hadicapped and elderly) they begin to develop a dependency on that entity and will continue to retain the work habits and attitudes of life that got them there in the first place. Well it seems we should also apply the same to foreign aid to places like Africa. Now I'm not saying we should cut Africa off at the knees with regards to AIDS medicine or disaster relief but we've got to cut back on just shelling out money in hopes that this will pull them out of despair. Some folks like Jeffrey Sachs will argue all day long that if we just sent more funds to the region then we'd pull Africa up but he fails to realize that this money just creates a greater sense of dependency within these nations and their respected governments thus they never learn how to fix their problems or find a way to set their nation on an path of development that pulls you up. While others might note that such an attitude is typical of a conservative but I'm just noting what other folks within Africa are saying about the problems that seem to follow their country as tons of Western aid floods into their country. Just see here and here for the African perspective as well as these here, here, here, here, here from an American view and you'll see that direct aid from Western nations causes more harm than good for developing nations. What the folks in Africa really need to do is to develop a well working legal system, open up their country to foreign trade(The same goes for the west), create a more open government, learn how to grow crops to become more independent, allow more private charities to enter their borders (they help the people learn how to do things because the "Teach a man to fish".) and above all else they should avoid the massive shipments of cash. The main thing that needs to be said is that the only force that will bring about a change and push for greater development is the people within Africa and will on do so when they see that they're the only group they can fall back on for help. In fact you can read such an argument in greater if you head over to the UK's Prospect magazine web-site and look up Robert Cooper's essay "The mystery of development", which is featured in the February 2006 issue. Cooper pretty much validated my whole "bootstrap" argument when he noted the following:

Historically, development and modernisation have been inseparable from nationalism. The modernisation of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries took place amid the creation of new states and the growth of national consciousness in old ones. Germany, Finland, the Netherlands and Japan tell the same story in different ways. So does China today. Nationalism can be a positive as well as a negative force. The weakness of national feeling——not to mention the lack of a settled idea of the nation——may be one of the factors holding back both Africa and the Arab world.


Perhaps it is more difficult to be a nationalist today than it once was. Not only is nationalism out of fashion, but the temptations of individualism are much greater. Our postnational, postmodern societies are more welcoming to Ethiopian doctors or Japanese intellectuals than they were 100 years ago. We offer an easy option for dynamic individuals. In earlier times they might have felt driven by rejection abroad to return to their own countries to force them into modernisation. If globalisation is a barrier to development it may be less through the power of corporations than because more open societies offer a soft alternative to the people who might otherwise drive modernisation forward in their own countries.


The political nature of development partly explains why aid does not bring development. It is difficult for outsiders to intervene in the political life of other communities. Politics, like poetry, is the part that doesn't translate. Outside interference doesn't work not because it is badly designed——though this can also be the case——but because it comes from outside. The leadership that enables change in society cannot be provided by foreigners. The constitutional compromises necessary to create a functioning state cannot be achieved or sold by outsiders; nor can outsiders mobilise the collective national will to overcome the difficulties together. All these are political questions and the meaning of politics is precisely that the solutions must come from within.

Let's just say that if folks in Africa and the people in the West who keep yammering about "sending more money to Africa," would read the advice against doing so in the above pieces they'd pull themselves out of the gulch they're in currently. I'd also suggest that they also read P.T. Bauer's Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in the Economics of Development, George Ayittey's Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future, William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good and a basic economics book and they'll be safe are more aware of the dangers of foreign aid.