Aid: bigger problems than we know how to handle

By Pete North - June 8, 2021

I’ve written a lot about foreign aid and development, but looking back at some of it, I’m just as guilty of the naivety of which I accuse the NGOcracy. To my mind, Nigeria has always seemed like the natural partner candidate in the region to stabilise and help grow. Not least because there’s some low hanging fruit in terms of development aims.

Some of the problems are quite obvious. First of all the state of the roads. You can’t get goods to global markets if you don’t have functioning roads and bridges. They can be repaired but the state of them is a reflection of the political culture. We could send in engineers to do the job for them but they’d be back to a state of dilapidation in no time.

The other problem is the ports and the lack of refrigeration facilities. Some of that is being addressed by way of private investment, but then you have a problem with congestion in and amount the ports, which is only going to be solved by fixing the roads and fixing the traffic system. That’s not as easy as it might seem. You could install the road traffic management systems but educating the public to obey the rules and appreciate it’s in their interests to do so is another matter.

Earlier this year I was talking about a lorry permit system not entirely dissimilar to the one we looked at in the event of a no-deal Brexit. They tried it, but after much hoopla, the electronic call-up system set up by the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to manage the movement of trucks operating in Apapa collapsed, while gridlock on the port access roads has fully returned. It’s unclear why the system failed but some suspect sabotage because there are too many vested interests who profit from the dysfunction. We can also reasonably assume the system itself didn’t work very well.

But then there are much more fundamental problems for trade in Nigeria and the whole region. Modern trade is no longer just about being able to produce goods and get them to market. Compliance and traceability is every bit as important and if you don’t have that, you don’t really have a product to sell. For ports to work efficiently they need single window systems where all the documentation is filed in advance electronically. That’s fine for us in the west but not so easy for a country lacking in internet infrastructure. Which brings us neatly to the next major problem.

Putting it bluntly, the Nigerians will steal or destroy absolutely anything that isn’t nailed down. The telecoms industry records 33,000 cases of attacks in 13 months. While the attacks cut across the six geo-political zones of the country, such incidences are more frequent in the South East region. Globacom is the worst hit among operators, resulting in over 40 percent downtime on telecoms services, which is responsible for the poor network services nationwide.

The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), said some common components including generating sets, batteries, automatic voltage regulators, radios, among others are stolen on almost on a daily basis, while fibres are cut arbitrarily. Furthermore, some of the batteries stolen from telecoms sites are sold to some inverter operators in the country. Elsewhere MTN South Africa shut down 53 base stations permanently after vandalism attacks.

This is not confined to telecoms either. Much the same can be said of rail and transport infrastructure and without resolution the kind of high-tech traffic management systems I envisaged are simply not going to happen. Major infrastructure destroyed by such criminal elements in recent times include police stations. The Imo State Police Command headquarters was not even spared, as “hoodlums” set ablaze no fewer than 50 vehicles parked in the premises in the early hours of 5 April 2021.

Aside from the aforementioned facilities, many bus terminals built by the present administration of Governor Hope Uzodimma have been vandalised. That is also the case with manholes, streetlights, aluminium glass windows of some public schools. They just cannot win. You can’t build a civic system around people who will sabotage your every effort.

Before you can even begin installing infrastructure, you have to think about security which piles on the overheads which either have to be subsidised or passed on to producers thereby harming their capacity to compete. Since that is neither practical or sustainable, essentially requiring security technology on every item of pivotal infrastructure, you’re then faced with the much lager task of changing the culture for which there are no easy or quick fixes and without it the only way you’re going to bring order is by way of a brutal dictatorship. Something Britain was at one time quite good at but has since fallen out of fashion.

In that respect you can almost see why Britain’s foreign aid and development projects have been so abstract and beyond the understanding of the average grunter on Twitter. At this point we’re all clutching at straws as to how to change the culture and indeed the political culture. Without massive investment, the kind we cannot afford, we are pissing into the wind. Moreover, since this kind of work does not produce tangible results, as we have seen lately, it is default to bring the taxpayer along with you.

Of course none of this is news. Academics have written at length as to why many of these initiatives fail, and though Professor Paul Collier points to an array of solutions in his books, they deal with tackling the political corruption and the root causes which is then a matter for multilateralism and international law looking at the dodgy contracts of mineral and oil companies. Put simply, it is beyond our capacity acting alone and we’re up against powerful multinational forces who have a vested interest in not fixing the problems. We are therefore left scratting around with humanitarian aid because it feels like it’s the only thing we can usefully do that is of value to the people at the bottom. Notwithstanding the unintended consequences.

There is also the matter of ongoing security issues in the north of the country where Nigeria, on the face of it, is mounting quite effective counterinsurgency operations against the likes of Boko Haram, but it looks to be a war without end so we then have to interrogate the root causes of those regional conflicts. This is often linked to access to water and disputes over grazing. This is perhaps where we need to look at nuclear desalination and irrigation systems but the latter is just as likely to fall victim to sabotage because there’s always someone who has a vested interest in continued conflict.

Presently the UK parliament is calling for submissions on how the UK can direct its efforts. It’s encouraging that they are thinking about Nigeria along these lines, and thinking in terms of strategic objectives – but the more I learn, the more pessimistic I become – especially in a wider regional context where EU, Chinese and North American trade policies are just as responsible for the dysfunction. We can encourage investment in SMEs but while the EU is railroading African states into trade liberalisation and dumping its surpluses there’s not a lot of point. We weren’t going to change that in the EU and we’re not going to change it from the outside. Ultimately it’s for Africa to get its trade act together. The UK needs to look at how it can support them in the WTO now we are not bound by the common EU position.

Though it is unlikely we can establish functioning transport and internet infrastructure, we can at least work on demonstrators and proof of concepts. For example, roads made from plastic waste. Ultimately, though, we have to capture imaginations as to what things could be like with just a bit of vision and leadership. That is not something we can provide for them. They themselves have to tire of endemic corruption and poverty. Until then, we might as well save our money and stop throwing good money after bad.