Africa: Should we be supporting corrupt governments in the hope of making them less so, asks Joe Humphreys.
A venomous debate has been raging for some time now between Irish Aid, the development arm of the Department of Foreign Affairs, and John O'Shea, director of aid agency Goal, about how to deal with corruption in Africa.
While the former advocates engagement with corrupt governments, in most cases right up to and including "budget support" - the practice of directly funding foreign treasuries, the latter opposes collaboration of all forms.
"I am opposed to the whole notion of government-to-government support," O'Shea says. "My ambition is to stop all money being channelled through governments which are guilty of human rights abuses and corruption."
O'Shea's argument has an intuitive appeal. His claim, moreover, that "the rank and file people of Ireland do not trust Third World governments" probably holds.
Yet there is a case to be made for giving aid to the governments of developing countries - governments which are almost inevitably corrupt, and, yes, also guilty of human rights abuses of varying degrees of seriousness.
For a start, almost everything else has been tried without success. In particular, the traditional aid-giving strategy of establishing once-off infrastructural projects, or promoting "area-based programmes" to use the development-sector jargon, has produced little if anything of lasting value. Donors admit that such schemes tend to be unsustainable, while recipient governments complain of unnecessary duplications, bureaucracy, and competition between donors.
The consensus now among the big donors is that they must better co-ordinate their efforts, and also support an unprecedented level of engagement with Third World governments, over which they hope to use their individual and collective influence to effect change for the good. Hence the in-vogue strategy of budget support, whereby money from different donor agencies is pooled under one local treasury fund purportedly aimed at reducing poverty or promoting development.
An OECD report last month suggested that giving aid in this manner was more effective than funding specific projects, and no more prone to corruption. The study of seven developing countries including Uganda, Rwanda, and Mozambique, found budget support had helped to strengthen planning and budget systems, making them more transparent and therefore accountable.
Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Conor Lenihan, who joins President Mary McAleese on a three-country tour of Africa this week, will draw comfort from such findings. O'Shea, however, describes the OECD report as "nonsense". He notes Irish Aid, along with other international donors, has already placed a ban on budget support to Ethiopia because of that country's human rights record. If Ethiopia deserves to be blacklisted, he argues, then other countries do too, among them Uganda - which he says has a government "infinitely more corrupt".
O'Shea is not alone in believing there is some muddled thinking at the heart of Irish Aid. One experienced aid worker in Tanzania, who did not wish to be named, remarked: "If I was giving budget support I'd give it to Ethiopia over Tanzania any day. At least in Ethiopia, the government has proper financial checks and balances." Another veteran of the development field, Brendan O'Driscoll, who has been 15 years in Tanzania and heads up a local government reform programme, says of budget support: "I really don't think donors have thought it through."
Such funding consumes €10.4 million of the €26 million spent by Irish Aid in Tanzania. A further shift towards budget support, he says, will mean fewer resources for other - highly valuable - programmes in health, HIV/Aids and governance currently getting Irish Aid support.
But if O'Shea is right to raise concerns about current policy, does he err by over-generalising? "Every single African country has been run by corrupt regimes," he says. But does this overlook critical differences between states - not to mention small but important signs of progress? In Tanzania, for example, there has been an encouraging proliferation of independent media outlets and campaigning organisations. Irish Aid is trying to improve media standards in Tanzania by promoting an award scheme for local journalists. It also funds civil society groups working on what it calls the "demand side" of governance.
However, all of this, along with "supply side" investments, would come to an end if O'Shea's policy prevailed - for he believes Ireland has no role to play promoting "good governance".
"Why are we talking about this big picture? We are little Ireland. Why don't we take one country and do one thing in that country - build schools, clinics, well and develop an expertise in that area? That is the way we would do away with corruption," he says.
His argument has drummed up popular support for diverting more money to Irish non-governmental organisations (NGOs), such as Goal. Yet O'Shea admits that the project-based approach of NGOs has produced disappointing results in the past.
Is O'Shea guilty of some muddled thinking of his own? He is convinced about what won't work but he is not so sure what will. "If this job was handed over to the entrepreneurs rather than the diplomats it could be done," he claims. But how would you go about handing over Ireland's aid budget to "entrepreneurs", who would presumably work for NGOs? The fact is these organisations also run the risk of encountering crooks - perhaps not the "big man" in government but his equivalent in the towns and villages where they work.
Perhaps what is missing from the corruption debate is a degree of honesty - both from the Government and NGOs. Development work is a risky business. There is a chance of your money going missing. You may on occasion have to appease some undesirable characters to get things done.
That is the truth of it but neither Irish Aid nor Irish NGOs - most of which have stayed shamelessly silent during the corruption debate - will say it. Their fear is that the public will be less willing to support their work.
But surely the greater risk lies in misleading the public, for if and when some Irish money goes missing, as it almost inevitably will, either at governmental or NGO level, the damage to trust will be hard to repair. And watch then how donor fatigue sets in.
This is the second and final part of a series on corruption in Africa.