Maravi

Donor aid is weakening our democracy

Donor aid is weakening our democracy
By Editor
Thursday April 03, 2008 [04:00]

A country beginning to develop itself must, in the first period, work, above all at organisation, and one should approach the practical problems by using one’s head. This may seem to be an abstract and vague opinion but it’s something very important. While the increase in donor aid can be said to be a positive aspect because it can bring much more rapid development than even a few years ago, we shouldn’t forget that aid is provided under certain conditions. And on this point we must be very vigilant.

Donor aid, as the All Africa Party Parliamentary Group visiting our country has correctly observed, has weakened a lot of things in our country, including our parliamentary system. As they observed, Zambia is unable to effectively implement its own budgets due to influence from donor countries and agencies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Department for International Development.

And truly, foreign aid has weakened our democracy by making our government less accountable to us and our representatives in Parliament.

This is because donors have tended to work over and around our members of parliament rather than with them. In this way, it has been almost impossible for our members of parliament to provide a safeguard for ensuring that aid is used in an efficient, effective and orderly manner to relieve poverty and promote economic development.

As we observed over the privatisation of Zambia National Commercial Bank, all our people – the entire civil society – and the great majority of our members of parliament were opposed to the privatisation of Zambia National Commercial Bank. Parliament had even resolved that this bank shouldn’t be privatised.

But the government went ahead and privatised it because it was under extreme pressure to do so from the donors who had tied substantial aid or financing to the privatisation of this bank. So, effectively, our government is more accountable to the donors than to us and our representatives in Parliament.

Aid has tended to focus on meeting what the donors want and not what the people of this country want; aid focuses on meeting donor objectives and not necessarily poverty reduction. And this has led to aid being poorly targeted and ineffective.

The ways in which donors behave in this country overemphasise our government’s accountability to donors without them being accountable to us or our government. Donors are not held accountable by our government, our members of parliament or indeed ourselves. But they take a driving seat in everything that is happening in our country.

This in turn is working to undermine accountability in our country. It is continually weakening our government’s ability to decide its own policies and in turn our people’s ability to hold their government to account is also continually reducing.

Our government’s view continues to refocus on donors rather than the citizens of this country and their representatives in Parliament. And because of this, aid has been increasing expectations without delivering results.

It is time we are allowed to spend the funding given to us by donors on our priorities – priorities truly decided by us and not by them.
The quality of aid must improve if poverty reduction objectives are to be met.

There’s need to change donor practices if we are to increase aid effectiveness. And donors should realise that their aid will only be successful if it is truly owned by us.

In today’s scheme of things, we are highly accountable to donors, but donors are rarely accountable to us. Making donors more accountable to us will go a long way in helping to improve their aid practices, and more leadership by us in this aid relationship itself could promote our ownership better.

There is need to address the power imbalance between donors and us if we are to harbour any hope of promoting real partnerships between us and them. We cannot deny that donors have legitimate claims in what is done with their aid. But we also have a legitimate claim on what we should do with the aid given to us.

Therefore, what we need to have is shared development goals, in which each has legitimate claims the other is responsible for fulfilling and where each may be required to explain how they have discharged their responsibilities, and be sanctioned if they fail to deliver.

There is a clear asymmetry of power in our aid relationships. Donors determine the quantity and quality of their development assistance, monitoring closely the performance of our government. Our government, for its part, has little influence over donor policies, and few mechanisms for monitoring donor performance. Donor agencies are accountable to their home countries and constituencies, but the consequences of their actions are felt by our government and our people.

There is currently no direct feedback loop that allows us to influence policy-making in donor countries. There is no doubt this aid is not working well and is distorting our accountability framework. Mutual accountability and reciprocal commitments imply shared responsibility for the outcomes and impact of development interventions.

Attempts to promote mutual accountability will need to generate a greater voice for us and our government, power and capacity to challenge donors, to enhance enforceability.

At the moment, donors only face weak incentives to improve the quality of aid, based on reputation and peer pressure – being seen as a bad donor – but little or no regulation or competition – bad donors are not penalised.

Clearly, donors need to radically reduce the number and scope of conditions they attach to our budget support. And they should cease tying their budget support to IMF targets or conditionalities. They also need to drastically improve their transparency.

Donors have come to assist us and they shouldn’t be entrusted with the responsibility of making all the key decisions about how we conduct or manage the affairs of our country. They should be here to assist us, not to run our very lives.

This is not aid, it is something else. We don’t want to call it imperialism, it can be called anything else. There is no way we can develop under such conditions or arrangements. We need better relationships that address the power imbalance between us and our government on the one part and the donors on the other. This is necessary for us to promote real partnership with the donors.

Labels: DONORS

posted by MrK @ 6:37 AM