Mfonobong Inyang: Wake Up Africa, Foreign Aid Is Not A Development Strategy

I sincerely believe that until we are willing to have uncomfortable conversations with ourselves and come up with positions that are not politically correct but are ultimately helpful in the pursuit of our individual and collective interests – we will wander in the wilderness for a very long time. On the small matter of foreign aid, I believe that it is inherently a good thing for countries with greater economic power to support countries that are more vulnerable economically. It must be said that foreign aid has been used as a buffer and an important reprieve for underserved communities and countries that would not have otherwise found a path to a functional existence. However, I also have an idea of how the real world works–something that is originally meant for social good can be weaponised. Those two truths can comfortably co-exist at the same time.
My position on how foreign aid has increasingly become a tool of social engineering and neo-colonialism in Africa is well-documented; I am not trying to be a Monday-morning quarterback. Last October, I wrote about the independence we love to celebrate where I shared some important submissions. This excerpt pretty much underpinned my point: “We have become comfortable with our leaders being invited to conferences about never-materialising development plans and hustling for photo ops with global leaders. Our leaders junket the world not to secure foreign direct investments or negotiate favourable trade terms but to beg for aid. In the world we live in, there is no free lunch, if any organisation is giving us aid on one hand, it is using the other hand to advance socio-cultural, economic and political agendas.”
Do you really think that anyone will send us money to conduct elections and not have a political preference? Let us use our tongues to count our teeth. When we say that Nigeria is a ‘sovereign’ country, why then are we fighting another country for how they chose to spend their own money? Why celebrate independence but refuse to sever the dependency on other people’s resources? The Holy Book literally says that the borrower is always subject to the lender. So if I were a foreign agent who wanted to destabilise a country or continent and wanted them to be perpetually subject to my homeland’s national interests, what do you think I would do? It’s no longer fashionable to invade countries and take over their territories, so I would ensure that I weaponise aid and loans to significantly influence outcomes in the recipients’ regions.
I am tired of all these pearl-clutching and virtue-signalling. If we want something to be outraged over, let every citizen in African countries interrogate the line items in their respective countries’ budgets. Suppose the massive sleaze, budget-padding and allocation of resources to overpriced white elephant projects doesn’t make us angry. In that case, nothing else will – certainly not which country decides to withhold foreign aid towards us. This is why I don’t like identity politics because the first thing it does is put people in a box and even when presented with irrefutable evidence that contradicts their previous position, they find it hard to change their minds because they don’t want to distance themselves from the collegiate ideology. Show me one country that was developed with foreign aid, I will wait. Foreign aid is meant to be a temporary relief and intervention, not an official policy of any country that seeks to assert its sovereignty. Foreign aid is a leverage, a subsidy and an assistance–it was never designed to be the core of national receivables. There is a reason why developed countries hardly receive aid from others even when they actually need it; there’s something they know that we don’t.
No country’s state department in the world loses sleep or wakes up in the morning thinking about how to make your country or continent better. Every country plots the advancement of its national and strategic interests, why shouldn’t we pursue ours? I am a person of faith and I believe in being favoured but e get how person go give me money I go ask am say, “You wan sleep with me ni?” Funny as that may sound, it’s a valid question because there’s no free lunch even in Freetown. Anyone giving you hard-earned money has an endgame whether for good or otherwise. All that megaphone diplomacy is BS, envoys will say what they have to say publicly but behind closed doors, they will do what they have to do to prioritise their national interests. I rather deal with someone who tells me what he thinks, even though it’s not what I want to hear than someone who claims to be for me but stabs me in the back. This shock should force us to recalibrate not retaliate (not that we had any significant leverage anyways).
Pay attention to what is happening in the Sahel corridor, do you think the citizens there are necessarily fans of military rule? No, they are not, they want democracy too but they are willing to take any leadership that moves them further from the shackles of neo-colonialism. You saw how they were willing to die fighting rather than surrender their homeland to external interests. By the way, I called out Nigeria’s foreign affairs ministry for such stark incompetence – how does it make any sense to engage in a proxy war with one of our neighbours to push the interests of neocons across the Atlantic? Thankfully personnel changes have been made since then. I wrote about a rebel culture amongst this generation of young Africans and how they are increasingly questioning a status quo that has not benefited their parents and doesn’t appear as though it would benefit them either. We need to move from being activists to strategists by seeing this as an opportunity to look inward and hold the feet of our leaders to the fire.
This is not to normalise bad behaviour but sometimes people who bring desired change are not always saints, nice or even couth. Many people wouldn’t have married the love of their lives if they weren’t served hot breakfast by an ex, many successful entrepreneurs wouldn’t have been leading mega organisations today if they weren’t fired from paid employment, many people wouldn’t have been homeowners if they didn’t have constant landlord issues and certain health policies and facilities today wouldn’t have been instituted if the pandemic didn’t happen. My point is that we have to fix our perspectives and learn to see the silver lining beyond the dark clouds. I am not being tone-deaf, I know that many innocent people and projects would be caught in the crosshairs of a freeze on foreign aid. It would be disingenuous to suggest that humanitarian crises in certain regions won’t be exacerbated in the interim but ultimately it’s a net positive. We all have personal and corporate finances we steward, audits are necessary and regular occurrences. If as a CEO of a large organisation, you did an audit and found out that a large part of your company’s resources had been diverted, embezzled or operated as a slush fund–how would you react?
It’s easy to call out people around us for being entitled but we should recognise when we do exhibit the same behaviour as a collective. We all have challenges, recently I leveraged some of my social capital to pull resources for certain things I considered critical. I am grateful for that, however, I shouldn’t feel entitled to having access to anyone’s resources because they didn’t come to this life to carry my load. As an intelligent person, what that tells me is that I should do my best to plug the holes such that I don’t find myself in such vulnerable situations next time which may be inadvertently weaponised by others. I remember some years ago when I used to depend totally on the national grid and my neighbour’s generator to power my laptop as a writer. It dawned on me that it wasn’t a sustainable arrangement, so the first chance I got – I paid through my nose to install a solar setup that guaranteed me a 24/7 power supply. My personal anecdotes can be extrapolated to the country and the continent. We are in a season of disruption, are we going to keep whining or ensure that we don’t find ourselves in a position where the actions or inactions of another country will fundamentally alter our way of life?
You see this faux outrage? This is not the time for it. We should save it for when next there is a budget presentation, extravagant amounts of money allocated for dozens of people travelling for a foreign trip or a report of grand larceny by public officials – that is the time to be an activist. We should be demanding that our governments have increased funding for critical sectors such as education, healthcare, electricity and other public infrastructure. When next we see waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers’ monies, that’s our cue for some righteous anger – not at how others choose to spend their own resources.
Are we willing to sell out our country for a gig? Does it mean we defend a position that hurts the continent even though the status quo benefits us personally? Do you think that when we were projected to be the third-fastest economy in the world ten years ago, all the power blocs in the world were cheering us on? Or do you think certain people would just fold their hands and watch us morph into a world power? Dey play my fans! These are questions patriots must answer. When we say we love Nigeria, what does that even mean? The same love a mother has for her newborn baby enough to feed it is the same love that recognises that the child must be weaned from the breasts if it is to grow into full potential. There is a new world order, let’s get with the programme. For those that don’t know, my favourite word is metanoia. The ability to make sophisticated decisions based on new information is why human beings are advanced beings. To my credit, I try to give a heads-up and I shared last month how 2025 will be anything but a normal year. Let’s brace ourselves for impact because winter is coming.
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