Aid cuts will not change African rulers; try proving they can kill

And if you expected some form of political upheavals, you can dream on, for no such thing is likely to happen. You may recall when in the 1990s the external donors cut aid as pressure to force political pluralism.

In many places the rulers managed to convince their citizens that those foreigners were just malicious meddlers. In Kenya, it took the enormous sacrifice by members of the enlightened civil society to force the ruling single party to cave in.

At some stage some people had expected the Arab Spring to spread to Black Africa. It didn’t, despite the proximity. Earlier in 1970s Uganda, the ruining of the economy to near stone age (some of us learnt to use papaya sap as soap to wash clothes when factories and foreign trade collapsed) did not cause regime change. It was wanton killings by the state that made people pick arms to kick the rulers out.

Academics that guide international agencies’ predictions get it wrong applying their formulae to Africans. You have heard projections of so many people at risk of starvation in Africa from some calamity if relief doesn’t arrive in so many days, how lack of treated water is endangering fellows who have never turned a tap in their life, and death expected to result from food intake falling below some number of calories.

This is not to say Africans deserve a raw deal, but their resilience is often underrated. When Covid-19 started killing people in the developed world who have modern health facilities, predictions indicated that Africans would die in their millions. They didn’t. With due respect to modern science, reaction to infections and external phenomena is not uniform in all humans.

If we had space, we would talk of IQ tests that portrayed African kids silly for failing questions about things they never heard about.

There is also the tendency to think that Africans value western systems that were imposed as colonialists were retreating at independence.

If they had introduced the electoral democracy to the “natives” earlier during the occupation, it would now probably be in our DNA.

But when they retreated, our people fell back to regarding elected leaders like monarchs. Africans don’t get angry enough if rulers steal public funds. It will explain why aid cuts won’t affect kleptocracy in Africa.

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What will happen is that salary earners are going to pay higher Black Tax to cushion their affected relatives. So if there is no medicine in the public health centre, cash income earners will dig into their pockets to buy drugs for sick relatives.

If the pockets run empty they will borrow, rather than let a cousin or distant nephew die. Black Tax will replace aid. Of course, that will curtail local savings and investment, but so what? Our people will fall back to nature for survival.

The way we reverted to herbs and beat Covid-19, more of us shall scratch the earth and grow our food and raw materials. Hopefully, we shall recognise our potential that aid had made us ignore.

Africans are different, and scenes at the recent Munich Security Conference were just amusing to us — the few Africans who even notice.

For senior (male) European diplomats to burst into tears because US Vice President JD Vance talked to them harshly, saying that internal European threats posed a greater danger to European democracy than external threats from Russia and China, was entertainment to African viewers.

Aid cuts won’t change African leaders. When Arab traders first came to sell guns to our kings, they were first made to test them by shooting at a nearby servant, then another standing farther away to determine the firearm’s effective killing range, before the sale transaction could be concluded. Even today, to make African rulers change, you would have to prove that aid cuts can kill. But they will not kill.