Global Policy Forum

By George Ndegwa

The recently-reported impasse between the European Union and the Kenya government in the negotiations to institute a new bilateral aid programme re-ignites the debate on what compromises a sovereign nation should make in return for aid. At the centre of the controversy is the current thinking that some of the conditions attached to these bilateral programmes are so numerous and intrusive that they undermine the very sovereignty of the nation.

When a cash-strapped country like Kenya begins to balk at conditions imposed by a donor, and going by the old adage that beggars can't be choosers, the conditions giving rise to the impasse must be substantially intrusive.

While it is not necessary to belabour the fact that some form of conditions will always exist in any borrower-lender relationship, it is necessary to examine the new areas conditions have taken and to debate the rationale for some of them.

In the past, conditions for aid revolved around economic liberalisation and sectoral reform that ostensibly were geared towards making the national economy more efficient, hence remedying the problems that gave rise to balance of payments difficulties in the first place. Today, conditions have moved to social-political parameters, the most important being governance and corruption.

The complexity and contentiousness of governance as a conditions begins to emerge when donors first label a country as one not having good governance. To appreciate the complexity, it is useful here to first define governance. This is presented as the manner in which a country's public business is managed. Or, more precisely, the exercise of authority, management, power of government exhibited by the ability to define and implement policies. When donors demand "good governance," it implies that a country's public business is not well managed. Then the story gets even more complicated when the idea of civil society is brought into the picture.

Good governance now implies the sum of interactions between civil society and government. These interactions involve a broad array of practices which maximise the common or public good. Such will include effectiveness, openness and the terms Kenyans have heard most frequently; transparency and accountability.

Including governance in conditions poses two bottlenecks. First, good or bad governance should ideally be a condition perceived and reported by the governed. It is most contentious and paternalistic for a foreigner to tell mwananchi that he is not well governed if he himself is not complaining. During the women's conference in Nairobi in 1985, western women sought to "sympathise" with their local sisters who were living in polygamous families. To them, polygamy was an unacceptable form of family "governance". The response was furious. The African participants told their western counterparts off and in turn sought to "sympathise" with them on concubinism, a situation that is perceived to be a western creation.

The second problem with governance is in performance. What are the parameters that will be used to assess the achievement of good governance? When is a country deemed to have "progressed" from not being transparent to being transparent or, for that matter, when does a government become accountable? As is the case in all high-sounding concepts, these terms are left to the negotiating officials to define. Once the definitions have been made, there is still the problem of front-loading, that is, determining before aid is disbursed, what future levels of good governance will be acceptable.

The notion of good governance surfaced in the World Bank's 1989 report on sub-Saharan Africa, which characterised the crisis in the region as a "crisis of governance." The main thrust of this line of thought is the continuing lack of effectiveness of aid and the weak commitment of recipient governments to economic reform. The pursuit of good governance will then involve questioning the effectiveness of the state and the legitimacy of the power structure, thus moving into the realm of internal politics. Yet, the charters that brought the IMF and World Bank in to existence expressly prohibit their involvement in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.

It is easy to bitterly criticise conditions on many grounds, but the real object of criticism in the whole saga is the recipient country's officials. Economic managers fail the country on two critical levels. The first was aptly expressed by former World Bank country in Kenya, Harold Wackman. He said in remarks reported in the local press that all meaningful economic programmes were originated by donors. It is also the case during negotiations for aid. Most of the responses to the conditions for aid by the government are reactive, not proactive. Proposals on the amount of money required are made and the donors respond that if the country is keen on getting the money, it should effect certain measures. As much as it may seem patronising to have a foreigner tell us to institute good governance in the country, it should be the country itself making concrete proposals on how this is to be achieved. It makes little sense to complain about conditions without a counter-proposal. But these are rarely forthcoming from government officials.

The other failure is the lack of a long-term vision on the concept of aid. For how long will Kenya seek donor assistance? Are our resource gaps permanent? How long will the country continue to stomach the humiliations of conditions?

The answers to these questions give an indication of the sort of economic planning and management in place. A plan that envisages a country not in need of donor funding, say in another 10 years, will have in-built measures to collect revenue, manage expenditure and seal the loopholes that allow corruption. Proper expenditure targeting entails good governance and the whole realm of aid conditions. It must be accepted that aid is a very soft option in the management of development problems. As long as there are soft options, the management of a country will always find it difficult to get serious.

A young person works hard in school if he plans to be independent of his parents when he grows up. Kenya is not planning to grow up because we are not working hard enough in the school of economic development.

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