01:36 GMT 31st January 2012
By Chika Ezeanya
It is regrettable that African leaders have failed to overhaul the precedents set by their corrupt colonial predecessors who for more than 60 years stole Africa's resources. However, the cliche of blaming African leaders has become a smokescreen for the severe policy failures of the World Bank and the attendant difficulties it has heaped on already longsuffering Africans.
Several texts have been penned critiquing the harsh effects of the World Bank's free market policies and irresponsible lending to corrupt African leaders. Very I ittle, however, has been written on the draining effects of the duplication and fragmentation of projects and programmes packaged for Africa by the World Bank.
The World Bank is an institution that runs like a closed system. Within it, different departments also run as closed systems. In a vast country like Nigeria with a multitude of its own agencies, the situation becomes even more complex. The closed system of the World Bank by itself generates projects, hires consultants and executes projects without consulting other parties who are actively involved that particular sector.
What this means is that even if the ministry of agriculture has already spent $4m conducting a study on the effects of the current Land Use Act on smallholders in Nigeria, the World Bank goes ahead to commission the same study without asking the ministry of agriculture. It then might bill the Nigerian government $8m for carrying out the study. The implication is that Nigeria ends up "borrowing" another $8m from the World Bank to fund the study, when its own report is gathering dust.
In a striking example of this ineptitude, a 2008 World Bank-funded study on sustainable land management was discovered to have been conducted a year earlier by the New Partnership for Africa's Development. This discovery came about only after Nigeria had paid millions of dollars to several World Bank consultants to conduct the fresh study and submit reports to the ministry of agriculture.
To forestall such waste, India has banned several socalled donors from operating in the country. In Africa, Rwanda is about the only country that insists on coordinating donor funds to avoid duplication. It has also asked certain donors to leave its shores for failing to cooperate with the government in harmonising development efforts.
The high transaction costs due to the lack of coordination of the World Bank and other agencies' operations in Africa has resulted in several international resolutions. The Paris Declaration on Aid was endorsed in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. Both agreements adjoin lenders and recipients to be mutually accountable for the giving and receiving of aid. As the agreement is non-binding, it has been established that its terms are being flouted, at least in sub-Saharan Africa. African governments have also failed to put the necessary structures in place to ensure the implementation of these agreements.
Moreover, in lending to African countries, the World Bank hardly consults governments to determine a country's requirements. World Bank officials decide the projects that the country needs and lends money for that particular project. At the end of the day, a huge percentage of these borrowed funds go back to the consultants from the lending countries who are paid exorbitant fees and accommodated in the most expensive hotels for months, with no plans for the project's sustainability once they leave.
In a pretentious attempt to present a project as a joint government World Bank effort, document wordings are crafted to convey ownership. Sentences like 'Government of Nigeria has requested the World Bank to ... ' are liberally applied throughout a project document. In reality, there has been no request from the government of Nigeria and it is only the World Bank covering its back, knowing that it is wrong to craft policies in Washington DC and impose them on a sovereign country.
A progressive country like Rwanda now insists on telling the donors what to fund and what not to fund. At the Ninth National Dialogue held in December, President Kagame clearly rejected the pressure from the World Bank and other agencies to dictate to his country when he said, 'Some people think they have the capacity and knowledge to define what is good for us. I say nonsense.'
Indeed, it makes no sense the way the World Bank and other lending agencies tell African countries when to borrow, what to borrow and how to borrow. It is incomprehensible that such funds are to be used for projects that are often irrelevant to the immediate development needs of the masses. It is unintelligible that capital-intensive projects are conducted without due diligence, leading to money being borrowed to produce duplicates.
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