DIG deeper into your empty purse, the letter said. A chief of one big charity urged us, in a letter to this newspaper, to keep up all of our international aid programmes, despite the dark days.
"We must continue to help Africa", the writer remonstrated, in case you were thinking of cutting back. But let's just consider that for a minute. Another eloquent writer, African, internationally educated, with a CV to die for, has just shocked the
world with a claim, backed up with pages of facts, that international aid isn't working. She says that charity, and lots of it, is actually killing her country of birth, Zambia, and most of the whole continent of Africa.
Dambisa Moyo's book, Dead Aid, is provocative, shocking, brutally honest, and brandishes some very harsh facts indeed. It's not the first time these things have been said, but this time it's an African who is saying it. Perhaps it's time to sit up and listen.
"Aid has actually worsened poverty," says Dambisa. The most aid-dependent countries, she says, have exhibited an average annual growth rate of -0.2 per cent. She notes that when aid flows to Africa were at their peak, for the last 30 years of the 20th century, the poverty rate actually rose from 11 per cent to a staggering 66 per cent.
"Transferring large amounts of money from one government to another encourages corruption, creates aid dependency, kills off exports and disenfranchises Africans," says Dambisa. Underpinning all of this is a much more serious problem. "Many Africans," says Dambisa "are now addicted to aid."
Please stay calm. It's an emotive subject for sure. We appear to live on the wealthier side of the world. It's hard to bear that there are others starving and suffering in countries much poorer than our own. Many of us give, generously, sometimes in compassion, sometimes to address our guilt. But have we really thought this through? Just who is that helping?
Musician and trained counsellor Sylvain Ayite was born in Senegal. Now father of a son and a daughter, Sylvain lives in Edinburgh. He would like us to stop seeing the African continent and Africans as separate from ourselves, the problems as being "over there" rather than "over here".
"We need to focus on education, not aid," he says. That education should be as much of ourselves, as anyone outside our own borders, says Sylvain.
"We need to reflect on what we really mean by 'helping'. Who are you helping by being the 'helper'? What is your authority? If we are not reflective, one just becomes the person with power, a gratifying position for the giver. But there should not be two sides that remain the same, those who give and those who receive. This will never lead to change, to a transformation where there is health and empowerment on both sides."
Celebrity giving – it's a touchy subject too, but actually "irrelevant, adding only very negative PR" to the main debate, says Dambisa.
Bono and Sir Bob Geldof have brought a glamour to giving that rocks the emotions. When G8 came to Scotland, it was soul-searching for all of us. Waves of well-wishers poured off the trains with bicycles and backpacks. They cared, it was moving and it created a tide of euphoria that has carried us all along ever since. We can do this thing. We can slash the debt, we can even the inequalities, we can kick poverty's ass. We can make poverty history.
But that's not how it has happened. On the contrary, things are not getting better, but worse, and more people are questioning our rationale. Bono lectured one audience about Africa. He slow hand clapped. "Every time I clap" he said piously, "A child dies".
"So stop clapping!" quipped one audience member. He had heard enough.
These are hard things to hear. It's not very nice, but there can be sharp lessons to learn. "Gimme the money". It can get that crude. "What do you mean – how do I plan to use it?" It can get that arrogant.
For every negative tale of cynicism, there could well be ten of successful empowerment and mutual respect. More important though, as Sylvain Ayite adds, we need to think again.
"There is a better way than aid," says Dambisa. "Of course there is a moral imperative to respond to humanitarian need, but the non-aid models, the emerging market economies, like South Africa and Botswana, are working. Developing macro-finance projects, regulating free trade, actually setting a date for the day that aid to that economy – and dependency – will cease, this is the way for the future."
Eminent economist and historian Niall Ferguson, among other things a professor at Harvard business school, prefaces Dambisa's book, naming her "hard- headed and big-hearted", urging us to listen and asking us to review our own behaviour.
I think I go with his last remark. "This reader was left wanting" he says "A lot more Moyo, and a lot less Bono."
