Its good news that Jacques Chirac has finally seen light and withdrawn his invitation to Robert Mugabe and his illegal government to attend a Franco-Africa summit in Cannes, France which opened yesterday. Chirac defied calls for Mugabe's ban at the first Franco-Africa summit but now its election year in France and he could not ignore the pressure especially from the French based trade unions. As MDC in UK we demonstrated at French Embassy in London and handed a petition calling on the French government to withdraw Mugabe's invitation. Mugabe deserves no platform on any forum or summit its a joke really that Chirac embroiled in his personal agenda that clearly defines French foreign policy whose main objective to usurp British foreign policy wanted to invite a ruthless despot. Citizens of Zimbabwe are denied human rights and live in an oppressive regime, the invitation however withdrawn meant that France condones what is happening in Zimbabwe today. Which brings a nagging question which has been burning at the back of mind, why do almost every year there are legions of aid bureaucrats that travel the world in a whirl of per diems and poverty-eradication conferences which accomplish nothing. The Franco-Afro summit in Cannes is an example of one, the Chinese also hosted another Afro-China conference that meant nothing except dubious development projects that still prop up the same dictators that are now attending the Cannes summit.
Why do rich nations such as US, Britain..... amongst many keep pouring large amounts in AID to Africa when they know that the money is used by the dictators to extend their political life while further oppressing the masses. Unfortunately, AID can make things worse, by entrenching the incompetent or corrupt governments and institutions that keep people poor. The world community has tried to tie aid to good governance commitments, but these rarely pan out in practice. To enforce the condition of good governance would met with fierce resistance from the dictatorial governments as it would mean audit of money given in as AID to account for its expenditure. The aid community has the same problem as the financial community: it is in the business of giving out money. When there are no good opportunities available, the temptation is to start piling into the bad ones, rather than give the money back and look for another job. Africa as a whole has received a cumulative of over US$500 billion during the past several decades from rich countries and international organizations like the World Bank, Africa has had the slowest growth in per capita income of any continent. Slow growth is not the inevitable result of being poor since the per capita incomes of poor nations grew since 1960 about as fast, and perhaps a little faster, that the per capita incomes of rich countries. Obviously, the abundant aid to Africa in the past did not guarantee rapid growth, This aid may even have made growth harder by encouraging greater corruption, by reducing the need to consider drastic economic reforms toward freer economies, and by making it easier to waste resources on grandiose and unproductive projects, such as the The Heroes Acre in Zimbabwe, The National Sports Stadium also in Zimbabwe which has been leased back to The Chinese (who built it) that almost nobody uses or does any local football team use as a home ground in order to fund its maintenance. Overally, there is no correlation between aid and growth, but in Africa aid has harmed development by supporting governments whose policies have actually impoverished people. They fail to see that one of the primary causes of African poverty and likewise the most ignored cause is farm subsidies in the first world. It's an uncomfortable truth, but subsidized food in the US & Europe has been murdering poor people the world over for nearly a hundred years now. Can't these countries see the consequences of their own preferred policies.
If AID to Africa in the past decade has been dominated by Western nations then brace yourself for China. China began its charm offensive towards Africa last year when it hosted the China-Africa summit a remarkable diplomatic event in which leaders of 48 of the 53 African countries were feted and courted. The reasons are very clear, China is the new Imperialist going after Africa's natural resources. China's trade with Africa is growing faster than with any other region except the Middle East, increasing tenfold in the past decade, to just shy of $40 billion last year. China buys timber from the Congo Republic, iron ore from South Africa and cobalt and copper from Zambia. An estimated 80,000 Chinese expatriates live in Africa, selling shoes, televisions and everything else the world’s factory produces. More vitally, Africa has helped quench China’s growing thirst for oil. Angola, which China cultivated assiduously in recent years, has edged out Saudi Arabia as China’s largest foreign source of oil. Sudan, shunned by the West for its genocidal civil war in Darfur, was a net oil importer before China arrived there in 1995. China has since invested heavily in oil extraction, helping Sudan export about $2 billion worth of crude annually, half of that to China. Beijing’s aggressive pursuit of commodities has often been accompanied by generous aid programs, low-interest loans and other gifts that some Western interests say undermine efforts to foster good governing in Africa. The AID community has expressed its concerns that China’s unrestricted lending, including a $2 billion credit line for corruption-plagued Angola, has undermined years of painstaking efforts to arrange conditional debt relief. What bothers me the most is that China wants to extract raw materials for industry and then sell manufactured goods back to Africa, a mercantilist pattern that failed to bring sustained growth in the past. But what is supposed to irk every activist out there and every human rights campaigner is the threat by China to use its veto in the United Nations Security Council to stop an sanctions against Zimbabwe and Sudan. There is also a link between China's quest for oil and its arm sales to dictators such as Mugabe. Selling arms to African countries helps China cement relationships with African leaders and helps offset the costs of buying oil from them. China doesn't have the same human rights concerns as the United States and European countries, so it will sell military hardware and weapons to nearly anyone. Indeed, Beijing sees Africa as a growth market for its military hardware. China's active exploration of oil sources in Africa also leads to a need to ensure security around them, which has led Beijing to send Chinese military trainers to help their African counterparts. In return, China gains important African allies in the United Nations—including Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria—for its political goals, including preventing Taiwanese independence and diverting attention from its own human rights record. The autocratic government of Robert Mugabe ordered twelve FC-1 fighter jets and 100 military vehicles from China in late 2004 in a deal worth $200 million. In May 2000, China reportedly swapped a shipment of small arms for eight tons of Zimbabwean elephant ivory. In addition China has also provided a radio jamming device to Zimbabwe that allows Mugabe's regime to block broadcasts of independent news sources like SW Radio Africa from a military base outside Harare. China also donated the blue tiles that decorate the roof of Mugabe's house.
