Aid and Development in Africa
Africa Cannot Develop Through Aid
Africa’s quest for development has been entangled by mixed views. Africa is richly and vastly endowed, yet Africa remains generally under-developed. The inability of African leaders to look inwards, think deeply, and pay the price to harness their resource endowments is a major reason for Africa’s poor state of socio-economic development.
It’s quite ironic that leaders in Africa have come to convince themselves that the development of their countries must be tied to aid from donor organizations and countries. This is must absurd.
How can you ever expect someone to help you or aid you to the extent that you can be like him? Why is that African leaders are too aid-dependent yet they live in luxury and style with the very resources of their nations that ought to have been deployed to develop their people?
What is wrong with the leadership class in Africa. The future of Africa is only dependent on the emergence of a crop of thinking leaders, who are weaned of ego, whose value for life over-rides anything else.
Aid does not develop a nation. It only makes a nation lazy and promotes official corruption. Aid opens the for espionage missions and renders a nation vulnerable in all fronts.
Africa must be wary of those that pose as donors. Donors must be treated with caution. They might come openly helpful, but they insidiously work against your countries self-reliance and development.
African leaders should accept aid minimally and do so with caution. The quest that leaders in Africa should ask themselves is this: those give you aid, who gave them aid to develop themselves? In order words, those nations that offer you aid, who offered them aid to enable them to develop?
The aid-dependent mentality is a very sad situation among African leaders and public officials. The leaders cannot afford to produce vaccines to deal with diseases that debilitate their population, but they have resources to purchase exotic cars, yacht, and private jets to cruise around. This is inconceivable and annoying.
No Nation becomes developed through aid. This must sink in the minds of leaders and public officials in Africa.
© Future World Editorial
12/02/2025
