Many of Africa’s leaders will have been distressed to hear Obama’s message on aid conditions

Africa’s leaders have become accustomed to a protective stance of victimhood. They only need to say “neo-colonial” for world leaders to back off from criticism. And moats have made the problem worse: imagine the retort to a British politician complaining about African governance. Obama’s arrival in Africa was preceded by his spectacular apology to the Muslim world, so many African leaders must have been hoping for more of the absolving balm of western guilt. They did not get it. Instead, Obama delivered three unwelcome messages.

The most explosive was that Africa’s core problem is its own misgovernance: Africa’s persistent poverty has been largely self-inflicted. Obama is the first western leader to have the political space to deliver this tough but necessary message. He does not need a photo-op with smiling Africans to signal to voters back home that he is a compassionate sort of guy. Nor does he risk being denounced. His protection is in part that it is not possible to imagine Obama in a pith helmet; but beyond that, nobody can seriously question Obama’s sincere concern to help his father’s continent. His statement cannot be interpreted as being the preliminaries to neglect.

Second, the solution to misgovernance will come from within Africa: the key struggle is internal. By choosing to visit Ghana – which recently hosted an honest election, with the governing party narrowly losing – Obama flagged up that leadership depends critically on the integrity of the political process.

Obama has made a clarion call for change, but more importantly, he is the change. Africans see Obama as a fellow African, but unlike most of Africa’s own leaders he personifies the leadership values that he preaches. Poor leadership is not intrinsic to African leadership; it is intrinsic only to the people who have jostled their way into presidencies.

Why has the selection of African leadership been so disastrous? The problem lies not with Africans but with the structure of the polities in which they live. Around the world the chance of a stolen election soars if the society is poor, small, and resource-rich. Even then it is not inevitable: Botswana started with just these features yet it is a functioning democracy. But such countries need strong checks and balances such as a free press and what political scientists call “veto points” – independent bases of power that can block presidential decisions. The democratisation that swept across Africa after the fall of the Soviet Union in most cases amounted to little more than elections.

Which takes us to Obama’s final message: America will help, where it can, to tilt the balance towards brave people struggling for change. American money will be conditional upon decent governance. Where public money can be looted, the political class – no matter what its original composition – will end up peopled by crooks. In Africa aid is such a major component of public money that the scope for capture matters enormously.

To date America and Europe have chosen different mechanisms for aid: Europe has favoured budget support, in which the recipient government decides how the money is spent; America has preferred project aid, where the money is tied to a specific expenditure. In badly governed countries the effect has been the same: the money has been captured by politicians who are the core of the problem. Project aid only gives the illusion of integrity: governments get donors to finance the projects they would have done anyway, and this releases their own money for the presidential wish list. It is the wish list that project aid is really paying for.

The Obama principle provides the basis for a new, common approach. Where governance is satisfactory, as in Ghana, budget support is the only sensible basis for aid. Europe has it right: why should US politicians try to dictate to the Ghanaian government how to spend aid when Ghanaians are able to hold their government to account? At the other end of the governance spectrum neither budget support nor project aid can tackle the problem.

We can learn from Paddy Ashdown‘s experience in Bosnia. He concluded that what he had needed were not doctors without borders, but accountants without borders. Where governance is inadequate, aid should only come with an army of accountants able to ensure that it is not captured. The missing piece of international architecture is an independent assessment of the integrity of budget systems. Where a budget system was certified as satisfactory, Europe and America could safely converge on budget support. Where it was found unsatisfactory, aid would be conditional upon accountants. Governments would know that to get foreign accountants off their backs they need to build systems that withstand scrutiny. The rationale for cleaning up budgets is not that it would safeguard our money, but that it would clean up politics, and build on the distress that Obama’s speech will have caused Africa’s crooked politicians.

Many of Africa’s leaders will have been distressed to hear Obama’s message on aid conditions

Africa’s leaders have become accustomed to a protective stance of victimhood. They only need to say “neo-colonial” for world leaders to back off from criticism. And moats have made the problem worse: imagine the retort to a British politician complaining about African governance. Obama’s arrival in Africa was preceded by his spectacular apology to the Muslim world, so many African leaders must have been hoping for more of the absolving balm of western guilt. They did not get it. Instead, Obama delivered three unwelcome messages.

The most explosive was that Africa’s core problem is its own misgovernance: Africa’s persistent poverty has been largely self-inflicted. Obama is the first western leader to have the political space to deliver this tough but necessary message. He does not need a photo-op with smiling Africans to signal to voters back home that he is a compassionate sort of guy. Nor does he risk being denounced. His protection is in part that it is not possible to imagine Obama in a pith helmet; but beyond that, nobody can seriously question Obama’s sincere concern to help his father’s continent. His statement cannot be interpreted as being the preliminaries to neglect.

Second, the solution to misgovernance will come from within Africa: the key struggle is internal. By choosing to visit Ghana – which recently hosted an honest election, with the governing party narrowly losing – Obama flagged up that leadership depends critically on the integrity of the political process.

Obama has made a clarion call for change, but more importantly, he is the change. Africans see Obama as a fellow African, but unlike most of Africa’s own leaders he personifies the leadership values that he preaches. Poor leadership is not intrinsic to African leadership; it is intrinsic only to the people who have jostled their way into presidencies.

Why has the selection of African leadership been so disastrous? The problem lies not with Africans but with the structure of the polities in which they live. Around the world the chance of a stolen election soars if the society is poor, small, and resource-rich. Even then it is not inevitable: Botswana started with just these features yet it is a functioning democracy. But such countries need strong checks and balances such as a free press and what political scientists call “veto points” – independent bases of power that can block presidential decisions. The democratisation that swept across Africa after the fall of the Soviet Union in most cases amounted to little more than elections.

Which takes us to Obama’s final message: America will help, where it can, to tilt the balance towards brave people struggling for change. American money will be conditional upon decent governance. Where public money can be looted, the political class – no matter what its original composition – will end up peopled by crooks. In Africa aid is such a major component of public money that the scope for capture matters enormously.

To date America and Europe have chosen different mechanisms for aid: Europe has favoured budget support, in which the recipient government decides how the money is spent; America has preferred project aid, where the money is tied to a specific expenditure. In badly governed countries the effect has been the same: the money has been captured by politicians who are the core of the problem. Project aid only gives the illusion of integrity: governments get donors to finance the projects they would have done anyway, and this releases their own money for the presidential wish list. It is the wish list that project aid is really paying for.

The Obama principle provides the basis for a new, common approach. Where governance is satisfactory, as in Ghana, budget support is the only sensible basis for aid. Europe has it right: why should US politicians try to dictate to the Ghanaian government how to spend aid when Ghanaians are able to hold their government to account? At the other end of the governance spectrum neither budget support nor project aid can tackle the problem.

We can learn from Paddy Ashdown‘s experience in Bosnia. He concluded that what he had needed were not doctors without borders, but accountants without borders. Where governance is inadequate, aid should only come with an army of accountants able to ensure that it is not captured. The missing piece of international architecture is an independent assessment of the integrity of budget systems. Where a budget system was certified as satisfactory, Europe and America could safely converge on budget support. Where it was found unsatisfactory, aid would be conditional upon accountants. Governments would know that to get foreign accountants off their backs they need to build systems that withstand scrutiny. The rationale for cleaning up budgets is not that it would safeguard our money, but that it would clean up politics, and build on the distress that Obama’s speech will have caused Africa’s crooked politicians.