The Last Condom Factory in Alabama

An important New York Times article today describes a little-known aspect of foreign aid: it is often legally required that the money flow to US (or European, in the case of European aid) companies. Thus USAID buys condoms from a US manufacturer in Alabama for more than twice the cost of the condoms they could be buying from a factory in Asia. Not the most effective means of providing aid, but the government contract is the only thing keeping that company in business. Towards the end, there is a quote from a poor single mother who works in the factory for around $7 per hour:

But even facing her own impending job loss, Ms. Appling took a moment to empathize with the women making condoms on the other side of the world. “We need a job — I guess they do, too,” she said, during a brief pause from feeding condoms into an intricate, rotating, whooshing machine that tested them for holes. “It’s sad. At the same time, the United States can’t just keep helping overseas. They’ve got to help us, too.”

This is a heart-rending story. It’s terrible to think that we have to choose between helping a poor Alabaman woman, an anonymous Asian condom factory worker, and Africans threatened by HIV. Can’t we help them all?

The short answer is no, you can not protect everybody. You can’t save everybody’s job from being shipped overseas, and you can’t save everybody’s employer from bankruptcy. If you want to see what happens when you try, the best example is American and European farm subsidies. Decades ago, before poor countries were competing with the U.S. and the E.U. for manufacturing and IT jobs, they were competing on the global food market. In response to this rising scourge of globalisation, the U.S. and the E.U. implemented massively expensive and counter-intuitive farm subsidies. This hasn’t kept a lot of independent American farmers in business, although it has fuelled agro-industry, the over-sized factory farms with dubious ethical practices. It has also killed thousands and thousands of Africans and other farmers. Agriculture accounts for 80% of Uganda’s exports; no amount of foreign grants, of “free money,” could make up for the lost benefits that the great increase in earned money would have for the Ugandan economy.

So what do you say to that poor Alabaman single mother who will lose her job if USAID starts buying condoms from Asia? You can’t save her job, but you can provide her with a decent education. You can give her the tools she need to fend for herself. She’ll do a better job of that than a government bureaucracy would.

Artificially supporting uncompetitive domestic industry is both futile and globally irresponsible—not to say cruel. And when packaged with foreign aid, it undermines any attempt to do good abroad. For example, when, in an attempt to stem a famine, the US ships American-grown food to African countries, the bottom drops out of the local food market and African farmers find that they can't raise enough money by selling their crops to afford both basic necessities and seeds for the next year. The agricultural economy is undermined, and the stage is set for future famines. Using the same money to purchase African-grown food could avoid this calamity.

In fact, using aid money to buy American goods and ship them to Africa is probably not as helpful as using aid money to buy African goods an ship them to America. “Trade, not Aid” has become a slogan of many modern African development promoters, and with good reason. It’s the “teach a man to fish” philosophy: don’t give a man a second-hand t-shirt, give him a job. Let him spend his earned cash in his country, spreading the benefits to others. Make the government dependent upon local tax money rather than foreign grants, which could not fail to stem some of the rampant corruption and lack of accountability.

So, returning to my earlier question, maybe you can help everyone. There may not be a simple solution to these problems, but here’s a start: drop all protective subsidies, starting with farm subsidies, and re-direct the money into a modern-day GI bill, providing the so-called “victims of globalization” with the training they need to stay competitive. Their lives will improve when they move from dead-end factory jobs to higher-paid skilled positions, anyway. Then, reverse the policy of supporting U.S. firms with our aid money. Instead, stipulate that all aid supplies must be manufactured by corporations owned from within the target country, where possible. Without spending an extra cent, everyone—U.S. laborers, foreign recipients of aid, and consumers worldwide—will win.

Kale, Ssebo...

In case you're wondering what Kale (pronounced ka-lei) Ssebo means, it's Luganda for "Now, sir." Used to mean, more or less, "Sure," or "I understand," or for a million other uses. You hear it all the time in Kampala.

A Time to Follow

Today in the NY Times, there is an article about a new prize being established to reward African presidents who uphold basic democratic principles (such as stepping down after their constitutionally-allotted number of terms, which already rules out Museveni). There is an interesting quote in it by Mo Ibrahim, the Somali-born founder of Celtel who is now a billionaire:

“We must face the reality,” Mr. Ibrahim said, referring to Africa’s leadership record. “Everything starts by admitting the truth: we failed. I’m not proud at all. I’m ashamed. We really need to resolve the problem and the problem, in our view, is bad leadership and bad governance.”

This quote makes a very important point: Africa's problems are in no small way Africa's own creation, and Africa alone can and will fix them.

In a class I took once on democracy, development, and the rule of law, we were talking about Africa's famous problems: why has it suffered so much, and fallen so much behind the rest of the world? Fifty years ago (OK, I admit that I'm fudging this statistic, but you should read this as "sometime in the early-to-mid 20th century") it had the same per capita GDP as India. What happened?

The answer of every student: it must be colonialism's fault. That, and a lack of resources.

In this incredible rush to be seen as politically correct, to be non-western-centric pro-indigenous peoples, every single person in the class had just shat all over Africa. According to their argument, Africans have never had any control over their destiny. Africa is seen as a helpless virgin, powerless before the indomitable dragon of the West.

This revisionist history is as divorced from reality as it is insulting to Africa. (And it shows that liberals are not inherently more in touch with reality than the Christian right. Sometimes I think George Bush and MoveOn.org are competing to see whose rhetoric can be more ideological and less pertinent to reality.) Leave aside the starved-for-resources argument, which is akin to complaining that Minnesota lacks an adequate fresh water supply. You can't pin Africa's problems solely on Westerners. I'm not excusing Europeans and Americans for the crimes against humanity they did commit. I'm just saying that Africans played a big role in their own misfortune.

The slave trade, for example, would never have gotten off the ground were it not for the eagerness of many Africans to barter one another for sundry European goods, cowry shells, and guns. And even though some analysts (such as John Reader, in his otherwise laudable tome, "Africa: A Biography of the Continent") imply that in supplying these goods, the Europeans were somehow tricking the naive Africans into demanding them, that is illogical crazy-talk. A supply does not generate its own demand. Africans demanded European guns because they wanted power over other Africans, just as man has always strove to have power over man.

While colonialism was staggeringly violent, coercive, and abusive (Adam Hochschild estimates that by the end of Belgium's rule over the Congo, the population was half what it should have been), many Africans also opportunistically cooperated with the European rule, too. The European technological advantage played a huge role in the colonialists' dominance, but as John Reader fairly well shows, the "thin white line" by which the colonialists kept themselves in power was far too fragile to have held were it not for the complicity of many local leaders.

The point of this tangent was not to point a finger of blame back at Africa, nor was it to excuse Europe and America of moral responsibility for the atrocities they committed and were complicit in. It is to say, however, that Africa is not, was not, and has never been helpless. Since independence, Africa's leaders (by and large) have been brutal despots; Africa's misgovernance is its number one hindrance to development—not the colonial legacy, not the slave trade, not the WTO, the IMF, the Washington Consensus, or EU agricultural subsidies. (Although those certainly are evil... seriously, they're more than just misguided. Western farm subsidies are a crime against humanity.)

And look: if Africa is no damsel in distress, if it is not floundering in the grasp of some Western Smaug, then it doesn't need a knight in shining armor to come save it. The great thing is that Africa does control its own destiny, and it can solve its own problems. I see all these hotshot young foreign do-gooders working for Western NGOs, riding around in a shiny Land Rover like a well-armored, trusty steed. They do nothing but boost their bleeding heart credentials. As evidence: I fairly trip over foreign NGOs here in Kampala. If most of them were even remotely worth the time and money that's thrown into them, if they were really a worthwhile investment, Ugandan poverty wouldn't possibly be on the rise, 80% of Ugandan children would not fail to finish primary school, lepers and beggars wouldn't line the streets.

I don't dispute that the NGOs and the volunteers who staff them mean well, and I know many of them do make a difference for a few people. But the place of Americans and Europeans who want to make a difference in Africa is not to lead, it is to follow. Yes, we do have a moral responsibility to help. But only Africa can find the solutions to Africa's problems, and the role of the U.S., the E.U., and the rest of the international community is to provide them with support, and (even more importantly) to stop holding them back.

Africans are aware of this. Hardly ever do I hear an African go on a diatribe against colonialism (although I wouldn't blame her or him if they did). Instead, I hear statements like this quote from Mo Ibrahim: "We really need to resolve the problem and the problem, in our view, is bad leadership and bad governance.” Africans are stepping up to tackle their own problems. The question is, will the Westerners step down from their high horse to walk with them arm-in-arm?

Today's Most Excellent Understatement

Did you know that nowhere on the website of the Parliament of Uganda does it mention who the current Speaker of Parliament is? Including on the page describing the role of Speaker... incredible. Actually, there is no official website that mentions who the speaker is except tangentally, as in "the Speaker of Parliament, the Hon. Edward Ssekandi, greeted the dignataries...". Again, incredible.

But what I really wanted to mention here is what may be the most ludicrous understatement I've come across in 2006. It's from the website of the Statehouse of Uganda, on a page called Your Government:

"Uganda has experienced a number of changes from the time when it was declared a British Protectorate in 1860. A number of developments have occurred in the areas of social, economic and political establishment."

A partial list:

the slave trade; a rinderpest epidemic that wiped out much of the cattle (and therefore many, many people) in the 1890s and has been described as the worst epidemic ever to strike humanity; a sleeping sickness epidemic that followed on its heels; several epic draughts; colonialism; independence; at least four coups and one foreign invasion; Idi Amin Dada; Obote (twice); Museveni's bush war and subsequent 20 (and counting) year rule; the rise of AIDS; 20 years of unheard of brutality in the North under Joseph Kony; electricity; running water; malaria medication; universal primary education; automobiles and roads; several new crops (staples like rice as well as coffee, sugarcane, and other cash crops)

Quiet, Please

I'm thinking. Outloud. Or rather, through writing. More or less the same thing.

My first post is called "Quiet Please" because I don't expect anybody to read this blog, except a few curious friends and family who wonder what I'm up to these days. And they may quickly cease to read it, since my blog won't have a lot to do with what I'm up to these days. So I expect this site to be rather quiet, a digital study where I can retreat and ruminate.

Quiet, please.