The momentum is building ahead of next month’s G8 summit in Scotland where t

The momentum is building ahead of next month’s G8 summit in Scotland where the leaders of the world’s richest nations will debate what they can do to help some of the world’s poorest. Africa is the priority and the politicians will discuss reducing the debt burden, ending trade regulations which put the continent’s economy at a disadvantage, and giving more aid.
    All around the edge of Africa—along the coastline, near the continents’ ports—are monuments to exploitation. On the island of Goree, for example, just off the coast of Senegal, there’s the Slave House. This was the last place many Africans saw before being shipped off to a lifetime of slavery in the Americas or, just as often, to death on the high seas.
    There are many more places like this dating from the 350 years or so of the African slave trade. When people wonder why Africa is so poor, they need look no further for the start of an explanation.
    Some people argue that colonialism brought limited development—railways and schools and so on—the system was principally designed to turn Africa into a vast plantation and mining site for the profit of outsiders.
    Of course, some Africans gained from this period. Chiefs who sold their enemies to the European or Arab slavers, for example, and coastal people who creamed a little off the colonial trade which flowed through their land.
    But on the whole, for almost half a millennium, the general rule was systematic exploitation. This must, surely, be the basic reason why Africa is so poor. You could add that the climate is punishing, that tropical diseases are rife, and that today’s independent African rulers are far from perfect. All true. But these factors, powerful in recent decades, seem marginal when set against to the pattern that was set for centuries.
    The solution, or, at least, the project sold as the solution, has been "aid". Emergency aid, development aid, agricultural aid, economic advice. Billions of dollars worth of it. The problem with this solution is that, patently, it hasn’t worked.
    On the whole, Africa has got poorer. The failure hasn’t really been the idea of real aid but the misuse of that term. Clearly, if, in the famous phrase, you "teach a man to fish", you’re probably helping him.
    But most aid hasn’t been like that. Most of it has been "top-down" aid, money that’s given to African governments do the political bidding of the aid givers. A good proportion of it has been creamed off by the recipient government’s officials and another large chunk of it paid back to the so-called "donors" in consultancy fees, salaries, cars, houses-and-servants for aid officials, debt repayments and the purchasing of arms.
    During the Cold War, which only ended in the 1990s, most aid to Africa was never really even supposed to help poor people. It was designed to reward client states for supporting or opposing one of the dominant ideologies. This led to inappropriate and sometimes laughable results. There’s an apocryphal tale that does the rounds, for example, of the former Soviet Union, in the 1970s, supplying snow ploughs to tropical Guinea. To be honest, I don’t know if this story is true. But I do know of many cases where so-called food aid has destroyed markets for local farmers by driving down prices.