By Jonathan Glennie
The Guardian
January 20, 2011
South Africa's new aid agency confirms that we are entering an era where it is normal to give aid as well as receive it - but what are its motivations?
A fully fledged member of the G20, invited to join another exclusive club, the "Brics" (Brazil, Russia, India, China and now South Africa), and Africa's most promising candidate for a permanent seat on the UN security council (or has that idea been kicked into touch?), it was a matter of time before South Africa announced its own official aid agency. No hopeful new power can be without one.
According to a recent study of Brazilian aid by my ODI colleague, Lidia Cabral, between $9.5 and $12bn, close to 10% of total aid, is now spent in what is known as "south-south" aid. Brazil gives $1bn in aid every year, more than Finland, Ireland or Portugal, despite being home to between 10-15 million of the world's poor. South Africa is home to about the same number, so what is it doing setting up its own foreign aid programme?
This is further confirmation - if any were needed- that we have entered an era where it is becoming normal to give aid as well as receive it. The traditional model of aid, where donors and recipients are clearly defined, is appropriate when very poor countries need to fill a large gap in their finances. In such cases, aid is a significant addition to a country's spending resources. This is still the case for 50 or 60 countries in today's world.
But for most big countries (including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and South Africa itself) aid has always been a very small percentage of GDP, playing the role of catalyst rather than bulk investment. South Africa has received an average of 0.3% of its GDP in aid since 2000, and 0.35% in the previous decade. In such a context it is just as sensible for countries to give and receive help as it is for people. The very rich will be able to give much more, and the poor much less, but there is no neat division between donors and recipients.
So while South Africa continues to receive small amounts of financial help to deal with its own problems, it will increase its financial support for other countries in Africa. This will inevitably focus on conflict and post-conflict situations - South Africa is already one of the most generous contributors to the worldwide UN peacekeeping force. The aid efforts of traditional donors in Africa have seen as many failures as successes, and the new perspectives offered by a dedicated South African development agency will be a valuable addition to the international community's presence on the continent.
While one reason the South Africans are setting up an aid agency is to improve their contribution to peace and development on the continent, it would be foolish to see the effort as purely altruistic. The rise of southern aid agencies holds a very useful mirror up to the motives of those who give aid. Somehow the strategic interests of other countries are always more obvious than those of your own.
Foreign interests
If anyone is still suffering from the delusion that aid is all about charity, devoid of foreign policy interests, they should wake up now. The British have the best excuse for such simplicity as, since 1997, the British government has made serious efforts to focus its aid exclusively on poverty reduction, but most other countries in the world are quite frank about their mixed motives.
The largest recipients of US aid, to take the world's biggest donor, are not the poorest countries but those the US sees as strategically important. In 1962 US President John F Kennedy remarked that: "Aid is a method by which the United States maintains a position of influence and control around the world... Really, I put it right at the top of the essential programs in protecting the security of the free world."
To give one recent example, in February 2003, when the US and the UK were desperately seeking the security council votes they needed to go to war in Iraq, representatives of Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, who were serving on the council, would have remembered what happened to Yemen when it voted against authorising the first Gulf War in 1991. The secretary of state at the time, James Baker, warned that it could be "the most expensive vote in history" before cutting US aid to one of the world's poorest countries by 82%.
It is widely accepted that throughout the cold war aid was given to countries by both east and west in order to buy their support, often without regard for the possibly harmful impacts of such aid. South Africa was at the heart of this international power game - it would be surprising if it had not learned a few lessons.
There is no way around these mixed motives of foreign policy. All countries seek to balance aid with furthering their strategic interests, and altruistically supporting poverty reduction. South Africa will be no different. Dr Ayanda Ntsaluba, director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, appears open on the subject, saying that the agency is "not only a reflection of altruistic motives, but of how to advance South Africa's own interests".
It is up to civil society in donor and recipient countries to be aware of this and to keep their governments honest. With concerns about government corruption reaching fever pitch in South Africa, it would not be surprising if particular attention was paid to a new body planning to transfer cash to other not exactly crystal-clean regimes.
Ntsaluba has acknowledged that South African aid has been hard to track in the past, blaming a complex bureaucracy. The best gift he could give his country and his continent would be a new aid agency that leads the world in transparency, still the best tool in a technocrat's box to ensure aid achieves its stated goals.
