World Affairs
Michela Wrong agrees with Wolfowitz
Published 23 January 2006
People like me are actually urging the World Bank to get even tougher on Chad. We're not sadists, so how come?
For anyone who believes, as the insufferable Gina character in Richard Curtis's television film The Girl in the Cafe would have had us do, that combating poverty in Africa boils down to tackling western stinginess, a current case highlights just how tricky the whole business of turning fine principle into concrete practice can be.
The World Bank, under the leadership of that neo-con, Paul Wolfowitz, recently suspended $124m in aid to the vast, landlocked dust bowl that is the Sahelian African nation of Chad. Votes of no confidence don't get more high-profile or more public than this, and the international bank holding proceeds from Chad's oilfields in escrow has not tarried in blocking the transfer of funds to N'Djamena.
Yet rather than denouncing the ruthlessness of a lending organisation ready to cut off aid to the poorest of the poor - few Africans have it harder than your average Chadian peasant - people like me are actually urging the World Bank to get even tougher. How come?
We're not out-and-out sadists. Our stance is prompted by exasperation at the sabotaging of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project, a deal between the Chadian government, three oil companies and the World Bank that was intended to serve as an inspirational model for western governments wary of engaging with fragile African states, proving that domestic instability and dodgy governance records were no excuse for hanging on the sidelines.
Signed in 2000, the project signalled a new realism on the part of the World Bank, often accused of culpable naivety in its dealings with African leaders. Having seen the likes of Nigeria and Angola fall foul of the "resource curse", which dictates that the more resources an African country boasts, the worse the lives of its ordinary citizens, the World Bank was determined to break the mould. It wanted Chad, a country plagued by rebel insurgency and drought, to benefit from its untapped oil reserves. But it wanted to be certain that once a required 650-mile pipeline to the Atlantic Ocean was built, proceeds would go to the poor, rather than being siphoned off on military spending and luxury villas.
The answer was an elaborate agreement obliging the government to spend 80 per cent of proceeds on education, health and agriculture, with another 10 per cent to be placed in an offshore Future Generations Fund, dedicated to long-term development. Government spending would be overseen by a "watchdog" committee of Chadian religious leaders, human-rights groups and parliamentarians, while an international advisory group would visit every six months to check progress. For once the World Bank, which signed up for 13 per cent of the project cost, seemed to be engaging with the continent as it is, rather than as the west would like it to be.
Sad to say, none of these careful clauses stopped Chad's parliament voting last month to scrap the Future Generations Fund and divert more oil money to military spending - a blatant breach of contract. Maybe President Idriss Deby, rattled by rebel movements in the east and at odds with neighbouring Sudan, feels he would rather break with the west than risk his own extinction. Maybe he never really believed in what he was signing. "The scale of the recklessness is what surprises me," says Robert Calderisi, who as World Bank country director helped tailor the deal. "I'd have expected some slippage over time, but not this."
One of the most depressing aspects of this unfolding story has been the way in which the increasingly bitter exchanges have been confined to the World Bank and N'Djamena. For years now, we've been told that Africa stands ready to police itself. The new-look African Union (AU) has made much of the notion of peer review, in which member states hold each other to account. An arrangement that should have served as an example for investors and donors suffering from Africa-allergy is in the process of being discredited. Yet we hear nary a peep from the AU.
Calderisi has not given up on the model. He thinks that in future, the World Bank must simply become even more hard-nosed, show an even more forensic attention to detail, when drawing up similar contracts. But one could also reach another, more depressing conclusion regarding the west's future relationships with the continent.
Premised on the belief that, providing you draw up terms and conditions carefully enough, you can both lead a horse to water and make it drink, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project represented an intelligent and imaginative response to past donor blunders. It placed Chadian civic society centre stage, took human greed for granted, and anticipated a regime's instinct for self-preservation. Yet even that recipe looks like failing.
The sad lesson may be that when an African administration itself fundamentally doesn't believe in the poverty-alleviation agenda that was embraced by non-governmental organisations and G8 officials in Gleneagles last spring, even the canniest of foreign financiers, the most determined of diplomats, would be well advised to steer clear. I suspect no road exists which can bypass a rotten domestic government and lead directly to the poor. Gina, I hope you're taking note.
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