The weight of the world Britain’s ambitious overseas development policy needs to be savvier if it is to survive (#rwanda)
IN MANY years as a foreign correspondent, quite often in scrapes, Bagehot only once troubled Her Majesty's representatives overseas for help. This was in Kigali, six years ago, after Rwandan agents looted his hotel room.
Ignoring two passports and several hundred dollars in cash, they stole the fruits of a three-week research trip through neighbouring Congo—notebooks filled with accounts of the massacres and rapine carried out by Rwandan soldiers there during the previous decade. Using software that is not commercially available, they also evaded the security settings on a laptop computer belonging to The Economist and erased its contents.It was annoying, not least because as a British taxpayer your columnist was helping pay the thieves' salaries. Rwanda, a fly-speck central African country, with 10m people and of no strategic interest for Britain, has in recent years received over half a billion pounds of British aid: far more than it has had from any other country. Hence Bagehot's hopeful request to Britain's envoy to help retrieve his stolen belongings. Fat chance of that. The ambassador appeared not to believe that President Paul Kagame's government would stoop to such a trick.
Yet it was clear then, and has become clearer since, that it is one of Africa's most ruthless, repressive and belligerent regimes. It is also tactless; last year British sleuths uncovered a Rwandan plot to kill two dissidents in London, one of them a Liberal Democrat activist. But Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) still backs Mr Kagame. After he was shown to have armed his umpteenth uprising in Congo earlier this year, Rwanda's other main donors, including the EU and Sweden, froze all or part of their largesse. So did Britain; but then DFID's departing boss, Andrew Mitchell, used his last day in the job in September to slip Rwanda £16m ($26m). Mr Mitchell does not much like Lib Dems either. Still, what was he thinking of?
His successor, Justine Greening, now has this and bigger questions to worry about. A decision to protect DFID's budget against cuts was one of the coalition government's boldest policies—a matter of both conviction and strategy. It chimed with David Cameron's benign paternalism and with the prime minister's bid to make the Conservative Party appear more compassionate. Yet the longer Britain's economic doldrums endure, the more controversial this exemption seems.
Right-wingers are seething. "Monster behind genocide and rape squads" ran a headline in the influential Daily Mail newspaper, above a photo of Mr Kagame campaigning for a recent presidential election—which he won with 93% of the vote. Other parts of DFID's spending are also under attack, including £280m a year given to India, a country with an aid programme (and space programme) of its own. Lord Ashcroft, a Tory tycoon, senses a "growing fury over giving away ever-increasing sums to foreigners". Polls suggest he may be right: almost half of Britons, according to the latest by YouGov, support the notion that "Britain should look after itself, and leave poorer countries to sort themselves out."
That there are not more of these curmudgeons is testament to one of Britain's more laudable features: a philanthropic concern for the world that has survived its shrinking global influence. As a share of gross national product, Britain gives three times more aid than America and 50% more than Germany. Its charity also comes with few strings. France channels much of its aid to its African clients; DFID is forbidden by law to take British national interest into account. For this and other reasons, development wonks (which Britain has in abundance) praise DFID richly. Far from incompetent—as its critics say it is—it frequently comes up in Whitehall audits as the government's best performer. Seeking to trumpet these achievements, Mr Mitchell went so far as to call Britain a "development superpower".
Paved with good intentions
That was an ill-chosen phrase, because power suggests influence, which DFID has little of. Poverty reduction, not influence, is its forte, which is why it has kept faith with Mr Kagame. His regime may be repressive but it uses aid well; between 2006 and 2011 Rwanda cut its poverty rate by almost 12 percentage points. Yet this progress has come at some cost to DFID's reputation, and, in a violent region, will be reversible so long as Mr Kagame continues to stamp on dissent. Britain's donations to India, not dissimilarly, are also easy to justify in the narrowest development terms. Despite its growing wealth, India has more poor than Africa and a state that is largely incapable of serving them. Yet the country's new wealth makes DFID's support to India anomalous. It appears illogical to many Britons and humiliates India. The country's president, Pranab Mukherjee, has rudely derided Britain's alms as "a peanut".
Contrary to what many wonks wish to believe, politics and development are inseparable, for the donor as well as the recipient. Ms Greening appears to recognise this. In a spirit of self-preservation, she has tightened her control of DFID's spending, launched an inquiry into Britain's support for Rwanda and is expected to announce a large reduction in British aid to India on November 9th. She is right to do so: if the department's mostly well-spent budget cannot be justified both at home and abroad it is liable to be slashed.
That would not only be a loss to the poor people who might benefit from it. Britain also gains from its prowess in dispensing aid, albeit in a vaguer way than Mr Mitchell's talk of his department as a superpower suggested. To continue punching above its weight in the world, as its economic and military advantages shrink, the country will need other areas of expertise such as this. One admiring foreign diplomat even suggests DFID's strengths semi-justify Britain's permanent seat in the UN Security Council. All the more reason for Britain to give more carefully.
http://rwandaspeaks.com/2012/11/13/the-weight-of-the-world-britains-ambitious-overseas-development-policy-needs-to-be-savvier-if-it-is-to-survive-rwanda/
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