Development first means giving into dictators

Helen Epstein has a great takedown on the development first crowd (i.e., economic development should come before democracy) in the current edition of the New York Review of Books. The subject of her article is Ethiopia, specifically focusing on President Meles Zelawi:

Meles’s Ethiopia is now the subject of an informal experiment to see whether “the big push” approach to African development will work. Its foreign aid receipts, which have tripled since 2000, amounted to some $3 billion in 2008, more than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa…

Unfortunately, this aid is also subsidizing a regime that is rapidly becoming one of the most repressive and dictatorial on the continent.

That’s right folks. While the development firsters have been showering aid on Zelawi, he has been busy keeping the aid away from supporters of the opposition:

Scholars and human rights groups had for years been alerting the international community to the fact that [the ruling party] frequently deny the benefits of foreign aid programs to known opposition supporters.

And, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, because it’s hard to get people to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it, donors go out of their way to ignore the obvious:

One day, I heard an aid official give a lecture about a small nutrition project in one of the poorest regions of the country. She showed pictures of the area and that’s when I noticed how green it looked. “It’s called ‘Green Famine,’” she said, but when I asked her what caused it, her answer rambled from rainfall patterns to soil erosion to local preferences for nutrient-poor root vegetables and made little sense.

…a few days later I visited the region myself…As one farmer, who keeps his support for the opposition party a secret, told Human Rights Watch in 2009, “I am a member of EPRDF because I need relief assistance…” While aid officials may lecture about how hunger in Ethiopia is due solely to climate change, soil erosion, and the preference of poor people for root vegetables, this crisis…is…primarily caused by politically motivated human rights violations.

Got it development firsters? Zelawi’s way of managing the opposition is to starve them to death.

It gets even worse. Not only are donors ignoring the obvious, they are even assisting in the oppression:

For years, Ethiopia’s foreign donors supported a fledgling human rights community…In response to increasing criticism from some of these groups, the government recently enacted a Charities and Societies (CSO) law, forbidding them from receiving all but minimal funding from non-Ethiopian sources. Since few Ethiopians can afford to donate to charity, numerous human rights programs have shut down. The donor agency officials…public pronouncements have been conciliatory. On the day the EU announced a new €250 million aid package for Ethiopia, it expressed the hope that the CSO law would be “implemented in an open-minded and constructive spirit.”

This reminds me of Obama and Bolivia: we need to temper our D&G programs to keep the other vital ones going – yet these are the same programs that Zelawi is using to punish the opposition! Surely this makes no sense.

I can see two responses to this. The first is Dembisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid” argument. This holds that if we cut off Ethiopia from aid, the government would act more benignly because it would have to collect taxes from its own citizens. Do we have any reason to believe this is how Zelawi would behave? I suspect, given his track record, that he would simply become more coercive.

The second response, and the one I prefer, is for donors to have some guts and stand up to Zelawi. Aid is not neutral; it always benefits some more than others. Zelawi wants to make sure he and his party get all the benefits. Donors ought to reply the aid is for the poor, not for you and stand behind those who are suffering from the politically courageous act of standing up to a dictator. Instead, donors are just giving into to the murderous thug.

Development Firsters: The argument that you can’t eat democracy doesn’t go very far when the real problem is that you can’t eat without it.