Blog report by Maurizio Blondet
Of Ilaria Bifarini
Where did the billions of dollars of aid to Africa go??
Huge loans from international financial organizations, significant relief from state debt, funds raised by private initiatives, who mobilized everyone, from individual Western citizens through organized forms of charity to show business stars, who worked for the rights of the weakest through concerts and performances.
Rivers of billions of dollars that do not seem to have made any dent in the problem of underdevelopment and endemic poverty in the Third World. On the contrary. It was found that, since the mid-1990s, circa 60 developing countries have become poorer in terms of per capita income than 15 years before. By 2030 two-thirds of the world's poor will come from Africa.
Africa is therefore increasingly poor, but of a new poverty compared to that of the colonial past. In fact, the African continent includes the countries with the highest levels of inequality in the world, in which the gap between a small elite dedicated to luxury and the rest of the population living in a state of poverty is abysmal.
So, what didn't work? Where have the rivers of billions of dollars gone?
The answer is actually quite intuitive: they have followed the same current that drags collective wealth on a global scale. They ended up in offshore accounts, they have enriched disproportionately consenting local elites and accomplices of the large international speculators and above all they enriched them, the Lords of Debt. After ending up in the deadly spiral of loans for the payment of debt and the interest accrued on it following the debt crisis of 1982 which involved Third World countries, Post-colonial Africa has definitively lost any possibility of development. It is estimated that for every dollar borrowed from banks and international financial organizations it has paid back 13! A Marshall Plan in reverse, which diverted money earmarked for the Third World to financiers of First World debt. The same depredation by finance through the weapon of debt that is asphyxiating our country today (in 20 years we have paid well 1700 billions of euros in interest alone!).
Il transition from imperialist colonialism to debt post-colonialism it was brutal for the Dark Continent and suffocated those timid attempts at national economic development initiated through the import substitution policy. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank intervened through the so-called "structural adjustment programs” (NOT): in exchange for loans and assistance they imposed economic control, monetary and political of Africa. Contrary to every logic and every example of a national economic development path, they imposed unconditional openness to liberalization and free trade on countries that had not yet started the creation of a locally based industrial and productive fabric. The coercively introduced model involved the use of loans to incentivize exports, without any investment in technological and human capital development, in order to meet the debt obligations. All forms of protectionism necessary to protect the local economy and exploit the potential for national industrial development have been abolished. So in Ghana in 2002 tariffs on the import of food products have been abolished, with a consequent surge in imports of food products from the European Union, like the famous frozen chicken scraps that cost a third of those produced locally. In Zambia, the abolition of duties on clothing imports has suffocated a small network of local companies in favor of importing used clothing from the West.
The IMF programs also imposed cuts in health spending and education, whose levels were already very lacking, and the privatization of essential public services – such as water supply- in most countries.
Although the two Bretton Woods institutions (FMI and BM) have often attributed the cause of the evident failure of their "structural adjustment plans" to the deep-rooted phenomenon of corruption of African rulers, their involvement is unavoidable. As, despite the fact that his kleptomaniac nature was well known Mobutu in Zaire, who stole over half of the economic aid received by the country, they continued to lend him. It is no coincidence that the IMF's privatization programs are also known as "kickback programs"..

The president of the former Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) Mobutu