In the next week, Calgary will be flooded with critics who castigate Canada and other developed countries for failing the people of Africa.
We certainly have failed in the past, but Canada is now doing much better, thanks in part to valid criticisms from the activists themselves.
For starters, Canada is pledging $34.2 million to eight drought- and famine-stricken countries in southern Africa.
All the money will go to non-government organizations, not to the African regimes or to private companies.
This is exactly what activists have demanded for years. To hear some of them, including David Suzuki, only non-government organizations are pure and virtuous.
In Africa, at least, they make a good point.
Leaders tend to use western cash to buy Mercedes saloons and apartments in Paris. After the family shopping is done, some money might trickle down to the starving citizens.
And too much foreign aid has been window dressing designed to make the donor country look good while subsidizing companies with good political connections.
I have some experience of this, after spending time in East Africa in the 1970s looking into aid and development projects on a tour with the World Bank.
Our host was an amiable Nigerian who quickly turned bitter when the subject turned to western aid. "Look around," he said, "see what's happening."
I did. After the tour ended, I hooked up with a typical project funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.
A small Canadian aviation company was using CIDA money to "survey" the animal population of the Masai Mara game reserve in Kenya.
Some Africans were hired, plunked down beside each other in the back seats of one-engine planes, and told to count the animals they saw out the window.
Back and forth the planes flew as the Africans counted lions, rhinos, Cape Buffalo, elephants and other beasts.
There was, however, a small problem with the methodology.
The animals moved. Sometimes, they even stampeded at the approach of planes. Rhinos charged around madly, trying to locate the strange engine noise.
An animal would be counted on one side of the plane, race to the other side, and be counted again. On the next sweep, it might be counted twice more.
It took me about six minutes to figure this out, but the project flew blithely on.
The pilots truly cared about the Africans, and complained constantly about administrative foul-ups in Ottawa and among Kenyan bureaucrats. Africans weren't being trained, and an order of special airplane seats -- ones that actually allowed the counters to see -- never seemed to arrive.
This project, like many others, did nothing to help Africans.
Meanwhile, the slums of Nairobi were growing every day amid the most heartbreaking squalor and poverty, as Kenyans who couldn't survive on farms flocked to the city.
Our African aid in those days was contemptible and venal posturing.
Now that has finally changed, thanks in large part to activists who kept exposing these abuses.
Call 235-7236 or e-mail to dbraid@nucleus.com
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