Africa, development, corruption, email scams

Interesting article about development in Africa (hat tip: ALDaily)--a book review of a new book: Matthew Lockwood, The State They're In in Prospect (No. 113, Aug 2005). On the author:

Matthew Lockwood worked in the development aid business for 20 years and wants to know why it is not working in Africa. For decades, aid donors have tried carrots, sticks and a host of measures in between to try to get development moving in Africa. They failed. Have aid donors done something wrong? Is there something that works in every other developing country but not-apparently-in Africa?

His main thesis:

Lockwood has come up with the missing piece of the jigsaw. It is African politics. The reason that-South Africa apart-sub-Saharan Africa has not developed is that it has not been in the interests of the controlling elites to develop it. In contrast to the "developmental states" of Asia-such as South Korea and Taiwan-which grew rich in the 1970s and 1980s by educating their populations and investing in export industries, Lockwood calls Africa's states anti-developmental, arguing that they actively discourage business, trade and innovation. In Asia, the rulers, often military men or one-party-state dictators just as in Africa, had a sense of national purpose, and the state broadly functioned for the public good. In Africa, the rulers captured the state, its institutions and sources of wealth, and kept it for themselves. They used it not to generate national wealth, but as sources of patronage to reward followers. Where reforms urged by western donors have threatened their interests, they "have resisted them until they have found ways to secure those interests in other ways," says Lockwood.

The whole article is interesting (i.e., you are encouraged to read the whole thing for yourselves) and dovetails with a few other articles I mentioned not too long ago. This particular bit, however, caught my eye:

The problem is not an inefficient civil service or lack of local government. Nor is it just about corruption. The governing class in Asia was often corrupt too. But they ploughed back their money into their own countries. In Africa, an estimated 40 per cent of privately owned wealth-about half the value of Africa's debt stock-is held outside the continent. How can Africa ask for more foreign investment when its own wealthy do not invest in their own countries? African rulers strain every muscle to prevent anyone else developing a wealth or power base, even at the price of famine, war and national economic ruin. As they say in Kenya, it doesn't matter how thin the cow gets if you are the only one on the teat.

This is just my layperson's observation, but the above seems highly consistent with many of the email scams one often gets in the inbox--you know, the ones involving some large sum of money locked up in a foreign (usually European, American or Canadian) that belonged to some now deceased minister of some African country, whose widow/children/etc. is trying to recover with your help, with a nice cut of the action promised... Now how is it that the minister had been able to accumulate his twenty million USD in his time in office, I wonder.

In some of them, corruption is practically admitted, as for example in the case of this one I received not too long ago (my emphasis):

First I must solicit your confidence in this transaction. I am a highly placed official working with the ministry of state for finance and economic planning here in Banjul, Gambia, west Africa. My department, the treasury, does transactions that run into several hundresds of millions of dollars quaterly. Myself and two other colleagues in this department are currently in need of a silent foreign partner, whose influence and bank account we can use, to transfer the sum of twelve Million Five Hundred Thousand US Dollars (US$12,500,000.00). This funds accrued legitimately but discretely to us as commission from foreign contracts through our private connections...

Legitimately but discretely? Good one.

What can I say? Life imitates fiction, fiction imitates life.