It is the second-largest aid recipient in sub-Saharan Africa, after Ethiopia, and received about USD26.85 billion in assistance between 1990 and 2010.
The recent decision by the board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation to suspend the partnership between Tanzania and MCC has prompted discussions about the nature of foreign aid, the relationship between donors and recipients, political accountability and self-sufficiency.
This brings to the foreground some important questions: What has foreign aid done for the country?
Has it really been effective and helpful? How has it influenced political reform, institutions and transparency?
Would Tanzania actually be better off without aid? How can it achieve this goal?
1. Has foreign aid been effective in alleviating poverty? Or has it rather led to a vicious cycle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion and further poverty?
2. How should foreign aid be given? Should it be General Budget Support (GBS), project/programme aid, technical assistance or sector-wide Approaches (SWAPs)? Is the usual top-down approach of aid agencies and government really the right way of tackling poverty?
3. Are the conditionalities attached to foreign aid fair and effective? Is it just another form of Western imperialism, supremacy and hypocrisy or an effective tool to help the promotion of democracy?
4. How has foreign aid influenced political reform and accountability? Does it strengthen civil society, parties, the media, the legislature and judiciary? Or does it rather lead to unintended consequences in undermining accountability through the provision of general budget support and increasing rent-seeking behaviour?
5. If the current form of foreign aid is not the right answer, what should governments and the international community do instead? Should there be a shift from aid to trade and investment promotion? Is more economic cooperation and a fairer global trade system a better solution? Should the ‘West” adopt a similar approach to the Chinese?
6. Can Tanzania really do without aid? Even at a time where domestic tax revenue remains very low? What would the impact be on education, healthcare, infrastructure and civil society?
7. What political and economic measures need to be taken for Tanzania to embark on the road to self-sufficiency? Implement effective pro-market measures, like micro-finance, foreign direct investment, trade, and floating bonds? Encourage private sector development and entrepreneurship? Focus on large scale industrialisation?
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts
Dear Young leaders, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, before I put forward my argument, I must give you a few ancient words of warning.
Words that were written thousands of years ago by a Greek poet;
He said : “Beware of Greeks bearing Gifts.”
The writer was talking about how after 10 years of war between the city states of Athens and Troy, 10 years of all-out siege, the Greeks decided enough was enough, and they gathered up their army and left in their ships to sail back to Athens.
When their enemy, The Trojans, woke up, they looked over the stout city walls and, to their shock, they saw no Greek soldiers, no ships, nothing;
Just a gigantic wooden horse, it was standing by itself outside the city gates.
They took this as a gift from a defeated enemy.
They wheeled in the wooden horse and went off to tell the King. But as soon as they were gone, Greek soldiers emerged from the insides of the wooden creature and opened the city gates and let in the Greek army which had been hiding outside.
The city was taken. The Greek soldiers slaughtered the Trojans.
The war was over.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
It is not just a line from a famous story.
For Greeks today we could substitute, The British or the Chinese or the Americans, or the Germans. Any nation, in fact, who comes to our shores bearing gifts, sumptuous gifts that we poor fools cannot resist.
These days’ gifts do not come in the form of wooden horses, but I say they are just as treacherous.
These gifts are called Aid.
Aid to help us develop our infrastructure, aid in the form of roads, or educational training, or equipment for our army or police force.
We have been receiving aid for most of my lifetime. And I can tell you that we are paying the price for this so called generosity today.
If you don’t believe me, then look at the state of this country.
Surely with all the billions of dollars, all the gifts, that have been pumped into our economy, we should be leading comfortable, if not lives of luxury?
We should be waking up in the morning with running clean water coming out of the taps; we should be able to wash our clothes in our machines, we should be able to turn on the light switch and expect there to be electricity, we should be able to send our kids to school and with a satchel full of text books. Our children should have their own desks and a teacher who turns up to teach them every day.
When we go to work, we should have a decent transport system. We should not expect to be stopped by the police and asked for a little something to keep their stomachs from rumbling. We should not be bothered by beggars at every street intersection.
Yes, all these areas of our life, necessary areas too, have been financed by aid packages. Each one was designed to make our lives better. So teachers were trained, books were dispatched, roads were built, electricity plants were planned, water infrastructure was constructed. And who hasn’t been trained in this country.
By now after all the workshops they have attended, the police force should be free of corruption, journalists should be able to report stories without prejudice, university students should be able to pass their exams without buying the answers, and the doctors and pharmacists should be able to dispense drugs without having to be paid.
And so the list goes on.
Yes, this is what foreign aid which as I said has been pouring in throughout my life span should have constructed. A well-run, efficient, prosperous society backed by a vibrant economy which is geared up to the creation of wealth.
Of course, it hasn’t happened. We live instead in a city which, sadly and despite the billions of dollars, the gifts, bestowed on it, is not fit for purpose.
So where did the billions go?
Perhaps I should pause here and allow you time to have a laugh.
The answer, of course, is it went into the trouser pockets, the deep trouser pockets, of the politicians who have run this country into the ground over the years.
Will we ever be able to get any of it back, or more important, will the donors ever be able to see their gold again?
The answer to that is a big fat NO.
The truth is, you see, the donors are not at all unhappy about the way the money is spent.
Take the case of helping the PCCB. A few years ago there was a recommendation from a group of experts that the PCCB should be equipped with state of the art surveillance equipment. Besides this there would be a training programme that would run alongside it because there would be little point in providing sophisticated equipment if the PCB officers had no idea about how to work it.
Was this equipment ever handed over? Was this training ever given?
No to both questions: Why? My source who was part of the assessment team that drew up the recommendations to supply the equipment and training, tells me that the reason was simple.
Though there was a genuine desire on the part of the donors to train up a highly motivated and well equipped PCCB squad, it was considered that the consequences of creating a super efficient PCCB would outweigh the benefits. Think of the trouble the PCCB could make? Think of all the delicate situations the PCCB might come across.
I asked my source why the donors capitulated. The answer, I was told, lay in the set-up of the PCCB. Who controls it, asked my source? The President’s Office, I answered. My source shrugged. There was your answer.
So, here was a case of aid that could have been of huge benefit to the ordinary man in the street but it was denied to us because of the pressures of politics.
There are many other cases I could give you like the time of the last big El Nino when after the floods which had caused massive damage and taken many lives, the British government in a fit of generosity announced that it would take care of the road damage to the tune of millions of pounds sterling.
Si what did they do? They sent by ship bulldozers and earth movers and road graders. And they also sent engineers. The roads and culverts were repaired. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was the British who achieved this with British plant and British engineers.
Wouldn’t it have been more sensible and more economic for the British to have used Tanzanian plant and Tanzanian engineers? It is not as if there are no bulldozers and engineers in this country.
So, you see, aid can be self-serving.
But there are other problems with receiving aid.
To be constantly having things done for you, in my opinion, makes us lazy. And more than that, it makes us expectant. We lose our capacity for helping ourselves. Oh, why bother to fix the roads, the Chinese will do it. That sort of apathy has infiltrated our character and turned us from self reliance into supine.
And then, of course, there is the little mater of sovereignty. How can we be our own people if we have the Chinese or the British waving a big suitcase full of dollars at us?
We can never criticise them. We can only kowtow to them. This is not good for a nation, for its morale, for its people.
So I hear you ask the one big question: How can we survive without aid?
We are a rich nation. Yes, the streets of Dar es Salaam may not be paved with gold, but who knows what lies underneath those streets?
We are literally treading on ground that is rich in raw materials. We have gold, we have oil, we have gas, we have diamonds, and all manner of minerals that carry enormous value.
Yes, we may have them, but how do we get them out of there ground? And do we want to rely on a commodity-rich economy?
The answer to both questions is we can get them out of the ground and monetise them nit with aid. Aid never got anything out of the ground. We can use private enterprise to do this for us. And, as for the recession, remember the world economy is rather like a ride on a daladala. It goes in stops and starts. Soon you can be sure it will start up again.
So, I will end as I began. With the words:
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
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