EN - FR - Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

Foreign Aid and Africa’s Development *P rof. Chachage Seithy L. ChachageThe economic channels of the young state sink back inevitably into neocolonialistlines. The national economy, formerly protected, is today literarycontrolled. The budget is balanced through loans and gifts, while every threeor four months the chief ministers themselves or else their governmental delegationscome to the erstwhile mother countries or elsewhere, fishing for capital.Fanon (2001: 134)IntroductionAfrican countries have had to tackle difficult problems of underdevelopmentin their various forms in the last 45 years or so. Most of the emphasis haslargely been geared towards overcoming economic problems, at times to thedetriment of social and political considerations. These problems have, moreoften than not, been viewed in terms of scarcity of capital and technology. Itis in this regard that African countries have sought assistance from developedcountries and the Bretton Wood institutions. Despite the flow of some financialresources over the years in many of these countries, it seems the socioeconomicsituation has tended to deteriorate even more. It was in this contextthat lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) andthe World Bank sponsored Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) as ameans to redress the poor economic conditions of these countries starting fromthe late 1970s. These institutions had come to the conclusion that orthodoxapproaches do not work, since these had resulted into the worsening of the situation,which has led to fall in the standards of living, poorer health and educationfacilities and higher foreign debts.These international aid flows have not been devoid of debates.Development aid—multilateral and bilateral, to African countries since 1960shad more and more become viewed by the recipient governments as an annualaddition to their economies. In fact, development assistance in manyrespects had become increasingly a budgetary assistance, to the extent that one