The Pessimist

Foreign aid given from economically advanced countries of the world to the struggling countries of the world has always been recognized as a responsibility by the givers and an entitlement by the receivers.  Those that had the good fortune to have and to share felt a warm glow of brotherhood and saintliness for extending themselves to help the less fortune aspire through those handouts to a better life.

There have always been questions about how well that handover of funding has worked to the benefit of the receiving nations.  Just as in Afghanistan, that war-torn, utterly dysfunctional chaos of semi-civilization, which has received billions of dollars of aid funding never tracked or accounted for, it represents a perpetuation of largely wasted funding.

Countries all over Africa and elsewhere in the world which have received their share of financing from first-world countries determined to do their share of helping third-world emerging economies achieve some measure of enlightened social progress to feed and to house and to medicate and to educate their suffering populations, seem unable to account for missing progress.  The funding is absorbed, the results absent.

Absent?  Not quite.  Much of it simply doesn't move further than those who have received it to fairly and judiciously administer it for the greater good of their vast public waiting to be rescued from hunger and disease and privation.  Overseas private accounts are stuffed, and those charged with the grievously difficult task of wielding power on behalf of nations learn to live very well as befits their station in life.

Mali looked for awhile as though it was making Democratic and social-welfare progress on behalf of its people, and events simply struck the uphill ladder out from under expectations.  The newest country in the world, South Sudan, now has quite a few elite bureaucrats living in luxury villas and driving platinum-edged cars.  Robert Mugabe is not wanting for comfort, but his people certainly are.

But the legions of international humanitarian and welfare agencies have found their niche, and it is one of lofty idealism.  Their industry keeps them busily engaged and publicly funded and proud of themselves.  The countries that traditionally proffered the funding to ensure the foreign-aid budgets were kept in good shape suddenly find themselves with less leeway and have begun to cut back.

Causing great lamentation from among the NGOs who depend hugely on the collective sense of responsibility from the haves to the have-nots, to countries across Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa.  The struggles of Western countries to balance their economies in the wake of a severe downturn has caused them also to re-evaluate their outlay.

And there are so many competing concerns; the environment, climate change, international health, food security, weapons proliferation, the fragility of states teetering on collapse with a new brand of opportunists waiting eagerly offstage to begin pillaging, marauding, ransoming, ransacking and imposing the shackles of fanaticism on the helpless.

The burden of foreign aid that cannot be adequately directed to where it can actually make a favourable impact is a wasted effort. A statement that is certain to cause the ranks of the humanitarians to quiver and quake with despair.  Whether it is at the prospect of those they serve being failed, or that their own aid-giving function is imperilled due to lack of funding is just another in a long litany of questions.