South African Journal of Philosophy
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsph20
Africa, the global order and the politics of aid
Chika C. Mba
To cite this article: Chika C. Mba (2022) Africa, the global order and the politics of aid, South
African Journal of Philosophy, 41:1, 103-115, DOI: 10.1080/02580136.2022.2055264
To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2022.2055264
Published online: 06 Apr 2022.
Submit your article to this journal 
Article views: 18
View related articles 
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rsph20
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 Copyright © South African Journal of Philosophy
Printed in South Africa — All rights reserved SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL  
OF PHILOSOPHY
ISSN 0258-0136   EISSN 2073-4867
https://doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2022.2055264
Africa, the global order and the politics of aid
Chika C. Mba 
Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana
cmba@ug.edu.gh
A strong, but underexplored linkage exists between the current global order, world 
poverty and the politics of aid. Exploring this linkage, which is the key concern of 
this article, is crucial for a fuller understanding of the symbiotic injustice of the global 
order and the politics of aid. Using a conceptual thought experiment that portrays 
the framework of post-war global order as an intrinsically unjust “Global Games 
Arena”, I attempt a “vivisection” of the problematic relationship between the global 
order and the politics of aid. In the real world, I follow decolonial scholars like Adom 
Getachew and Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò to argue that the modern and current global order 
and its social, economic and political structures are founded on the unfair gains of 
trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism. The empirical and analytical consequence 
of this situation, the article shows, is that to make aid effective or altogether end 
its penurious impact in Africa in particular, would require, at first, a jettisoning or 
remaking of the current international order. In other words, I argue that aid would 
not be necessary in the absence of a world order that in fact requires aid to maintain a 
system of global injustice and inequality.
Introduction
There is a strong but underexplored linkage between the current global order, world poverty and 
the politics of aid. The main focus of this article is in exploring this linkage, crucial for a better 
understanding of the symbiotic injustice of the global order and the politics of aid. However, it 
should be noted at the outset that it has become almost commonplace among experts, especially in 
the last two decades, to increasingly admit, correctly, that international aid has become, in many 
ways, a mechanism for exploitation and political control, contributing significantly to destabilising 
local economies in certain regions of the world, blocking off opportunities and incentives for 
growth in those regions and ultimately worsening world poverty (Ferguson 1994; Easterly 2001; 
2006; Griffiths 2003; Perkins 2004; 2016; Chakravarti 2005; Calderisi 2006; Riddell 2007; Bolton 
2008; Collier 2007; Shirley 2008; Moyo 2009; Deaton 2013; Kalu 2018).1 A phenomenon some 
left-leaning intellectuals more recently refer to as Karma colonialism (Alyson 2020), insofar as 
these instabilities occur in previously colonised societies, with African countries being the worst hit 
in this regard. 
Conversely, critics arrive at very different conclusions as to what should become of aid in the last 
analysis. Jeffrey Sachs (2005; 2006) argues that aid has not worked because either not enough of it is 
given or aid is politicised and that the solution is that aid be substantially increased and depoliticised. 
While not completely disavowing Sachs’ substantial increment argument, William Easterly (2006) 
argues for a substantially revised strategy for aid, while Calderisi, Dambisa Moyo and Angus Deaton 
would rather have a world without aid, in the light of the debilities aid or its politics have brought 
to developing countries’ economies, especially in Africa. I imagine that the trio would welcome aid 
1 My summation, broken into separate components, is not true of each of the scholars cited; but each of them is persuaded that aid has failed 
as an integral aspect of post-war development policy for various reasons. My argument, however, is that none of them has come to the 
realisation that the global order birthed the regime of aid and requires aid to remain in place.
South African Journal of Philosophy is co-published by NISC (Pty) Ltd and Informa UK Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group)
104 Mba 
without its politics, but as this article shows, international aid is inseparable from the world system 
and its politics.2 Kenneth Kalu, Paul Collier and Giles Bolton generally share Sachs’ misgivings 
about the misdirection, paucity and politics of aid, while suggesting alternative approaches to 
revising the current aid strategy. Kalu (2018) blames the failure of aid in Africa on the structure of 
the postcolonial African state, which he variously describes as oligarchic, non-developmental and 
predatory. African states, Kalu claims, are replete with corrupt, extractive institutions that routinely 
block ideas and policies that could translate into the well-being of the people, while serving the 
selfish interest of the elite. Curiously, Kalu held that restructuring African states requires “external 
assistance”, and foreign aid should more appropriately focus on restructuring and transforming 
African states into agents of development (Kalu 2018, viii). Similarly, Bolton witnessed first-hand 
why and how aid fails in Africa, but in his book, Aid and Other Dirty Business (2008), he proposed 
that foreign aid itself be restructured and depoliticised to target the poorest persons. 
In line with the above flow of thought, Calderisi takes a naïve cultural-essentialist approach, 
blaming African values and divisive sociopolitical system for the failure of aid. He also reaches, in 
a tongue-in-cheek manner, the Africa-infantilising conclusion “that Africa is now responsible for 
most of its own problems and that outsiders can help only if they are more direct and demanding in 
their relations with the continent” (Calderisi 2006, 7). To be sure, the general view held by Calderisi, 
Bolton and Kalu that Africans are generally to blame for their current woes because of the structure 
and culture of their societies is at present held by many, though with different conclusions about 
the consequences. Some of these Afropessimistic views go so far as to claim that some African 
states ought to be recolonised (Gilley 2017), or that weak African institutions in the current era of 
digital technology and big data will eventually roll back history, culminating in the recolonisation 
of Africa (Benyera 2021). These views exemplify why Niall Ferguson (2009, 9) disavows what he 
calls the “problematic, and…embarrassing [reality] that so much of the public debate about Africa’s 
economic problems…[are] conducted by non-African white men” and, I should add, equally heavily 
influenced by knowledge institutions and categories rooted in the cultural West.
In all events, even though aid experts are dubious about the success of aid, especially in Africa, 
they have continued to regard aid, or at least a restructured international aid system, as the received 
wisdom of post-war development policy (Stiglitz 2002; Easterly 2006; Bolton 2008; Kalu 2018). 
It is precisely this mainstream view that aid can be depoliticised, restructured, or redirected to 
achieve poverty eradication within the current global order that this article challenges. My argument 
is that aid and the global order are intermeshed in such a way that to restructure foreign aid and/
or its politics would require a restructuring or transformation of the global order itself, a system 
that Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò correctly refers to as “the Global Racial Empire” (Táíwò 2022). Indeed, I 
concur with Táíwò’s history and analysis of the extant world system in his new book, Reconsidering 
Reparations. He argues that the (current) global racial empire is built on the structure of injustice 
installed by centuries of the Atlantic slavery economy and colonial plunder, both of which have 
found routes to continue, strengthen and multiply their impact on global social positions, politics 
and the economy to the present day.
In another field of relevant scholarship on aid, philosophers concerned with global justice are 
apparently persuaded of the mainstream development economics standpoint. Cosmopolitans, in 
particular, do not necessarily raise questions about whether development aid and humanitarian 
assistance should be given. Rather, they argue variously about whether aid in general should have 
a cut-off point or not, and whether aid should be given as charity with conditions or simply as a 
right, as a duty of global distributive justice (Singer 2004; 2016; Pogge 2008; Ord 2013). One key 
argument marshalled by these philosophers in favour of aid is a suggestion that not only is aid 
capable of helping to lift people out of poverty in the interim, but that development aid, if properly 
conducted, can help in redistributing global resources and eventually bring about an egalitarian 
world order. 
2 I am unable to think of aid outside of its politics. By this I mean that it is impossible to think of foreign aid outside of the web of 
relationships and interests that go into determining who gets a particular pot of aid, at what time, and under what conditionalities. In other 
words, mine is a disavowal of Sach’s false hope for an aid regime without politics.
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 105
Ord (2013) on his part pursues the interesting argument that in the ongoing controversy about 
whether foreign aid helps poor countries, critics have not factored in what he calls the “big wins” 
of health aid. He attempts to show that critics have reached the conclusion that aid does not work 
only “because they have failed to count the biggest successes of aid, such as the eradication of 
smallpox, which have been in the sphere of global health rather than economic growth”. But this 
is a curious argument and looks suspiciously like a part to whole fallacy. For Ord moves from a 
presumed success of aid in the particular area of global health to imply the overall success of the 
many-sided programme of international aid, that is if we can all agree on what success entails in 
every aid project. Even were aid projects to be successful in their various economic and political 
components that involve richer countries funding anything from agricultural to military projects in 
poorer countries, it should still be conceivable that the entire international aid programme might 
be harmful to the recipients overall. This could be the case if the conditionalities attached to aid 
offers are such that they place recipients of aid in a position of eternal gratitude, indebtedness and 
dependency on powerful donors. More than this, as a seasoned researcher and critic of international 
aid points out, despite the successes with vaccination and other aid-driven global health successes 
“…all is not well in the garden of health”; it has not been a case of “untarnished success”, not 
even in the area of health aid (Deaton 2013, 289–293). What with all the difficult questions about 
whether wealthy and powerful nations like the United States of America and the United Kingdom 
pay attention only when a particular disease affects or threatens them directly, as indeed the 
COVID-19 pandemic has made even more palpable, the ongoing politics of recrimination and 
medical nationalism surrounding the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 more than cast serious doubt 
on the goodwill of Western governments toward the rest of the world, especially Africa, even in the 
area of global health. Nonetheless, in practical terms, to demonstrate their unflinching confidence 
in the redemptive merits of aid, moral philosophers like Peter Singer and Toby Ord have gone so far 
as to respectively establish thelifeyoucansave.org and givingwhatwecan.org, which are platforms 
inviting people to donate toward ending world poverty. The question is: are these philosophers 
right? Are morally minded philosophers right in defending international aid in the face of what we 
now know about the not-so-behind-the-scenes politics of aid? Why continue to give foreign aid or 
support the giving of foreign aid to try and ameliorate poverty if it has been proven to generate the 
opposite effect, especially in Africa?
Scholars have adduced several insights to try and explain the allure of aid, including putting 
forward the counter-intuitive but interesting argument that donors continue to give because it is in 
their own best interest to continue to do so. Moyo (2009, 34, 61–62) explains the rationale behind 
this line of reasoning as follows:
By the end of the 1980s, emerging-market countries’ debt was at least US$1 trillion, and 
the cost of servicing these obligations colossal. Indeed, the cost became so substantial 
that it eventually dwarfed foreign aid going into poor countries – leading to a net reverse 
flow from poor countries to rich to the tune of US$15 billion every year between 1987 
and 1989…Were it not for the tragic consequences, it would be farcical…In the donor’s 
desperate quest to lend, and maintain the lender-borrower see-saw, the aid relationship 
tips in favour of the corrupt government. Almost to the absurd point where the donor has a 
greater need for giving the aid than the recipient has for taking it (see also Ferguson 1994).
This work seeks a deeper understanding of the global order with a view to unravelling why the aid 
industry produces or is reproduced in a matrix within which aid donors have a greater need for 
giving than the recipients have for receiving. This analysis attempts to proffer a consistent logic of 
aid and its relationship with the global order, and how this linkage reproduces poverty in certain 
regions of the world. Using a heuristic conceptual thought experiment,3 this article depicts how it 
3 In this article, I deploy a thought experiment following a tradition in the history of philosophy from Plato to Thomas Nagel to use 
metaphoric assumptions, imaginative scenarios, depictions and/or hypothetical situations to adduce important answers to complex 
philosophical problems. As devices of the imagination, thought experiments are especially useful when they can be supported by empirical 
evidence, an effort I make in this case in the sub-section entitled “The politics of aid in the real world”. Also note that I use thought 
experiment and allegory interchangeably throughout the article.
106 Mba 
all hangs together and how and why the current global economic order must necessarily rest on the 
politics of aid. While focusing on aid and the global order, the thought experiment simultaneously 
deepens the sense in which aid might be intermeshed with and implicated in the plethora of social 
conflicts currently engulfing the people and institutions of poorer regions of the world, especially 
sub-Saharan Africa, a fair understanding of which is already present in the extant literature on aid. 
Apart from introducing a mechanism within which a consistent logical connection between the 
global order, poverty and the politics of aid can be established, the thought experiment I develop 
below is capable of providing new perspectives to aid criticism and goes beyond challenging 
the fundamental assumption upon which aid is a thing in the first place, which is that aid aims 
at engendering development and ending poverty, especially in Africa. This does not amount to 
regurgitating the extant arguments against international aid, but to explain why anti-aid arguments, 
in general, trump and will continue to succeed against the arguments in aid’s favour, in short to show 
that at present, an argument in defence of aid is an argument in favour of the unjust global order. 
The explanatory merit of my thought experiment as it unfolds, I believe, lies in highlighting the 
obtuseness and unjust nature of the global order and the politics of aid by viewing their relationship 
analogously with another cluster of human activities where fair play is the norm: sports. Sporting 
activities are very frequently thought of as inherently just or should always be just and fair in their 
framework, and that anyone, every participant, must have at least, a theoretical chance to emerge 
successful or winners. More than this, my thought experiment’s objective is to expose the global 
order as inherently unjust, highlighting exactly why aid fails, particularly in the context of aid to 
Africa, and especially in the era of global interdependence occasioned by an aggressive post-war 
pursuit of globalisation. In the last analysis, my contention is that one can only arrive at a successful 
argument in favour of aid, or drive a successful aid programme, first by launching a successful 
argument or campaign against the current global order. The converse, that is defending aid or 
looking to realise the lofty aims of international aid while the current global order subsists, in my 
considered opinion, is an exercise in futility. Let me attempt to explain why.
The global order as a “global games arena” – a thought experiment
Imagine a world where people from every region depend for their survival and flourishing on their 
participation in a “global games arena”. In sporting events, participants are drawn from all over 
the world and athletes placed under three broad categories depending on the teams they represent 
and where those teams place in a region-based algorithm. Athletes are placed in Group One if they 
are representing teams placed under the Alpha region or Block A; Group Two, corresponding to 
teams classified under the Beta region, that is Block B; other athletes are placed in Group Three 
if they represent teams profiled under the Kappa region or Block K. The background yardstick 
for the placements is arrived at based on privileges and entitlements derived from unjust initial 
acquisitions and positions achieved through conquests, enslavement and colonialism, as well as 
other unjustly established and entrenched historical inequalities. What is more, the placements are 
done by officials who mostly hail from the Alpha region who are the chief beneficiaries of these 
historical injustices and fundamental inequalities, with a few of them drawn from Block B. 
During tournaments, every event is typically won in between twelve to fifteen seconds. Meanwhile 
athletes in Group One are usually allowed to begin the race nine seconds ahead of athletes in Group 
Three and three seconds ahead of athletes in Group Two, while athletes in Group Two are given 
a six-second head start against athletes in Group Three. This means that the races are actually 
between athletes in Group One and Two. At the end of every tournament, as expected, only athletes 
in Groups One and Two win all the laurels, with most of the wins going to Group One athletes. And 
just as routinely, the athletes in Group Three are blamed for their “poor performances” and tasked 
to improve their skills for the next tournament. To encourage Group Three athletes to continue to 
participate, they are offered one form of consolatory gift or the other, and “expert” coaches and 
trainers that would help them improve their skills are recommended. These “kind gestures” come 
from officials of the games who happen to hail from the Alpha and a few from the Beta regions. 
Of course, kind gestures do nothing in the way of improving Group Three “performances”. After 
years of persuasion, Group Three athletes try to improve their fortunes by employing some of the 
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 107
expert trainers recommended – “experts” that routinely hail from the Alpha and Beta countries – 
thereby further depleting their already meagre revenue base to pay salaries to the already prosperous 
regions. Better training, of course, does nothing to improve the fortunes of athletes from the Kappa 
region.
As already hinted, the rule makers, officials and referees of the games are exclusively drawn from 
the Alpha region and a few others from B Block in every event and at all tournaments. Though, 
occasionally, an official from the Kappa region “retrained” in the Alpha region might be considered 
for inclusion as a referee in only a particular aspect of the games and for a temporary duration. 
Nonetheless, with the passage of time and different tournaments, some athletes in Group Three 
miraculously win some of the races. But when this happens, such athletes are immediately and 
unceremoniously disqualified or found guilty of flouting one rule of the games or the other, and 
the prizes and monetary benefits immediately returned to the grateful hands of athletes in Group 
One. In cases where no foul play could be pinned on a winning Group Three athlete, the category 
of the games they won is simply removed from the tournament. In some other cases, Block A and B 
teams will harangue or lobby the talented or miraculous athletes from Block K to switch sides and 
represent Groups One and Two teams in the next games without the knowledge of Block K teams 
and other athletes. In general, Block K athletes are frequently encouraged to enter secret agreements 
with A teams in particular, allowing the former to keep some of the proceeds of their wins, if ever, 
while diverting the rest to the latter’s athletes.
Understandably, teams in Block A and some in Block B have become prosperous and wealthy 
through the lopsided wins their representative athletes have amassed over a long time. Also note 
that all participants to the global games usually pay participation levies, and as teams in Block 
K are never allowed to win, it means that their participation levies are always lost to the eventual 
winners. This further implies that Block A teams and some teams in the Beta region have also 
directly impoverished and weakened teams from the Kappa region. At some point, athletes in Block 
K become demoralised as the prospects of ever winning are non-existent and their capacity to 
continue to participate in the games systematically degraded. However, desirous to win at all costs 
after centuries of deprivation, some athletes and teams from the Kappa region invent ingenious 
approaches to the games that allow them to occasionally win and retain their laurels. They are again 
fined and banned for their troubles. As greater desperation sets in, teams from the Kappa region try 
to develop their own versions of the global games. They find insurmountable obstacles placed in 
their way by powerful organisers and patrons of the dominant global games. Apart from that, new 
games do not get much patronage because of lack of popularity and meagre funding. Eventually, the 
entire global games arena becomes conflict-ridden and dangerous for all participants as a never-to-
recede battle line is drawn between the “winners” and the inconsolable “losers”.
As conflicts and complaints by Kappa athletes and teams reach a certain crescendo, athletes 
and teams from the Alpha and Beta regions feel pressed to be “magnanimous” in victory, and so 
occasionally offer some of the proceeds of their wins as humanitarian assistance or inter-team aid 
to their losing counterparts from the Kappa region. Much of the pressure that A and B athletes feel 
comes from some of their supporters back at home who feel somewhat ashamed by the inglorious 
victories their athletes and teams win at the global games. On the other hand, athletes and teams 
from the Kappa region try their best to be obsequious toward their privileged competitors from A 
and B blocks. This further puts pressure on institutional processes and selection criteria on the home 
soil of Kappa teams. Conflicts and turmoil arise about representation in the Kappa region, as they 
fight it out to be given a chance at possible representation, only to appear at the global games to be 
given aid or humanitarian assistance, if not some recognition.
With the further passage of time, new rules are made allowing Alpha and Beta teams to be able 
to recruit athletes from Kappa teams to directly and legally represent them at the games, since there 
is clear evidence that many athletes from the Kappa region are actually better endowed and more 
capable than their privileged counterparts from other regions. This further exacerbates the state of 
internecine conflict in local selection and representation processes in the Kappa region, since there 
is now a chance that apart from aid, one could actually be given a chance to win individual honours 
at the games. Alpha and Beta teams notice this and try their best to milk the unfolding scenario. 
108 Mba 
They try their utmost best to cause maximum instability in teams from the Kappa region, since this 
increases the chances of neediness, co-option and exploitation. This allows A and B teams not only 
to harvest the best athletes from Kappa region, but to take back a hundredfold – in the form of bribes 
and lobbying funds – what they have given as team development aid or humanitarian assistance to 
athletes and teams from the Kappa region. 
Over a long period of time, it becomes harder and harder for any aspiring athlete or team from 
the Kappa region to hope to be successful in the games without the endorsement of, or outright 
migration to Alpha or Beta countries. Athletes and/or teams that try to resist this system of things 
by avoiding the global games are profiled as rogue athletes/teams by the more powerful teams in 
Block A and the officials that almost always hail from the Alpha region. Opportunities are then 
sought by the Alpha region to further destabilise “rogue” teams from K Block and, occasionally, 
from B Block. No effort is spared in this destabilising mission, including using athletes and teams 
from around and within rogue teams to reverse any internal gains that might have been achieved 
after delinking from the global games. The result is that fewer and fewer teams or athletes have any 
incentive to attain a “rogue” status, even though this looks like a good way to overcome the tyranny 
of the global games and a route to prosperity. In the end, subjugation and fear help maintain a veneer 
of acceptance, universality and order in the global games.
The politics of aid in the real world
In the real world, our “global games arena” is the same as the global order. Replace “teams” with 
countries, “athletes” with governments, supporters with citizens and substitute the so-called First 
World with the Alpha region and the Second World and Third World with the Beta and Kappa 
regions respectively, and you are likely to get a truly unsettling picture of the current global order 
and its relationship with aid, poverty and social conflicts in certain regions of the world.4 My 
depiction suggests that Third World countries in Africa, in particular, may never get justice unless 
a rupture occurs in the global order. Extant literature on the politics of aid shows that my “global 
games” thought experiment is analogously accurate in representing the injustice that the global 
order engenders and helps perpetuate. In the following analysis I rely on the global games thought 
experiment to offer new and revealing answers to the knottiest questions about aid. The unavoidable 
revelation is that the logic of foreign aid is, more than likely, accurately represented by Alyson’s 
Karma colonialism. Karma colonialism views colonialism as integral to the current global order 
and explains how Europeans and their descendants attempt to perpetuate their centuries-old effort to 
control the lives of previously enslaved and colonised peoples, especially Africans.
The hope is that the global games thought experiment helps, among other things, to show that aid 
is but a symptom of an unjust global order put in place by those who have wielded the historical 
precedents of conquest (enslavement and colonialism) to give themselves more than a head start in 
every global event and arrangement. These historical precedents have given the same people the 
leverage in an interdependent world to make the ground rules governing vital human interactions 
and activities in the areas of trade, technology and law, as well as establish in their own terms 
institutions and bodies like the World Health Organization, the Bretton Woods institutions and the 
United Nations. Aid, I argue, is simultaneously a symptom of and an invisibilising mask for the 
unfair gains that certain regions of the world have made and continue to make because of these 
unfair advantages, and consequently undercutting the opportunities for poor countries and regions 
to become rich countries and regions.
To rely on the global games allegory to deepen a real-world analysis of the politics of aid in the 
current global order, with the stated objectives in mind, there is a need to spell out the following 
caveats. The first caveat is that the aid or foreign aid being discussed here is not to be confused with 
domestic aid or welfare benefits to the poor. Domestic aid is not the subject of discussion when 
we point to the ruinous effects of aid, even though, it should be noted, opposers of domestic aid 
frequently argue that aid to the poor creates the incentives for poor behaviour that in turn help to 
4 This classification is more euphemistically called high-income, middle-income and low-income countries.
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 109
perpetuate poverty.5 The concern with foreign aid is not about what it does to citizens or inhabitants 
of poor countries (or in the context of the global games depiction, supporters of athletes around the 
world), it is about what it does to governments and countries in poorer regions. 
Second, foreign aid comes in different ways and from different quarters for different purposes and 
takes different forms. This article is not necessarily concerned with analysing the different forms 
aid takes, for example bilateral or multilateral aid, since this does not necessarily have a serious 
poverty-reduction implication for the outcome of any aid package to poorer countries. This work is 
concerned with why aid is necessarily intermeshed with the global order and, for that reason, does 
not and may never reduce poverty in certain regions of the world. I am also not concerned with 
explaining in great detail what impact aid might have, depending on its types or targets (military 
aid and medical aid for example) for the sufficient reason that aid is fungible. Which is to say that 
it does not matter whether a particular aid package targets medical, military, or educational support, 
since in the end, once that pot of money arrives in its destination country, it can be used for the 
purpose it was meant for, reappropriated for another purpose entirely, or simply pilfered. At the 
same time, if aid meant for educational support, for example, is used strictly for that purpose by the 
recipient country, nothing says that the funds so freed up from the local educational budget may not 
now be redirected to funding an unjust military campaign, or again simply stolen. Thus, regardless 
of the form aid takes, it does not change its apparent outcome for the poor inhabitants of countries 
on the wrong side of the existing global order. And so those distinctions are not helpful for an 
Africa-centred analysis of aid of the kind being carried out here.
The distinction between official development assistance (ODA) or aid transferred directly from 
rich countries to impoverished countries and humanitarian aid funnelled through international 
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is important for this work, since like Dambisa Moyo 
(2009), I focus mainly on ODA that comes in the form of concessional loans and grants. But even 
when aid is passed through NGOs independent of governments, it
…is at best an imperfect remedy…Schools and clinics operated by NGOs may free up funds 
for the government – and governments find ways of taxing (or simply diverting) the NGOs’ 
resources. They can (and do) levy taxes on goods and equipment imported by the NGOs, or 
require expensive operating licenses. The same thing happens in humanitarian emergencies, 
especially in time of war, when warlords have to be bought off in order to allow humanitarian 
access to their own people. In extreme cases, this has led to international NGOs flying in 
weapons along with food, to pictures of starving children being used to raise funds that were 
used in part to prolong war, or to NGO-funded camps being used as bases to train militias 
bent on genocide (Deaton 2013, 264; emphasis added).
Many critics of aid have findings that buttress aspects of the above claims. James Ferguson’s work 
in Lesotho and Edwin Nsah’s more recent work in north-western and eastern regions of Cameroon 
provide empirical backing to the argument that the NGOs do not perform better in the field of trying 
to quell poverty through international aid projects. Ferguson (1994) reveals in lucid terms how 
the politics and language of development aid effectively cancelled out and made nonsense of the 
presence of a multitude of international NGOs in Lesotho between 1975 and 1984. Both Ferguson 
and Nsah through their empirical findings show that international NGOs did not help improve 
people’s lives, if anything, poverty worsened in both case studies and countries. An interesting 
finding by both researchers was that aid work failed mainly because the recipients were never 
consulted to ascertain what their real problems were. The NGOs are answerable to the donors not 
the recipient community. In a particularly interesting report on a poor rural community in Cameroon, 
Nsah noted a fundamental disagreement between the inhabitants of that community and the NGOs 
about how best to tackle their poverty. Whereas the NGOs believed that the best way to begin to 
tackle extreme poverty among the people of the Baka community was to enrol their children in 
schools, the locals felt that it was unfair to send children to school on empty stomachs with most of 
them having to walk long distances via non-motorable tracks to school. Nsah (2021, 90–96) found 
5 I take no sides in the domestic aid debate here, since there is no room in this article to do justice to that interesting debate.
110 Mba 
that the locals agree that “education is a [long-term] solution to poverty”, but they maintain that 
“education cannot be effective unless the issue of chronic poverty in this community is first solved” 
through supporting agriculture, which happened to be the mainstay of the Baka community. The 
locals were ignored, leading to the eventual failure of that aid project. So, it does not seem to matter 
too much how aid is transferred; the recurring negative outcomes of aid uptake suggest that it tends 
to do more harm than good.
The key question then becomes: why continue to give aid, especially to some (corrupt) 
governments of African countries, if it has been proven to be ineffective and counter-productive? 
As one analyst hints, it is surprising that after so many years and so many evaluation reports, books, 
commissions and so on, that those involved in aid have not either come up with some solution 
or decided to abandon it altogether (McNeill 2009). What is unclear in McNeill’s statement of 
concern above is: who are “those” involved in aid? The worry is that he, like many others, may have 
lumped together the machinery of foreign aid bureaucracy and machinations of the donor countries’ 
governments and the possible good intentions of their citizens. But like I have been arguing, the 
intentions of governments and citizens should be separated to expose the complicated nature of 
the aid industry and its rationale. My general view is that everyone in the aid web is not on the 
same page about what aid does and are not in a position to decide whether to continue, change the 
approach or simply stop. The lack of clarity about the relative positionalities of the actors in the aid 
web, even in the literature on aid, has not helped matters either. 
To better appreciate how the complex interaction between the government of donor countries, 
their citizens, aid workers and the recipients of aid may be keeping the aid machine in motion 
without a serious attempt at a proper evaluation of its impact on the recipients on the part of those 
who should know better, let us note that
[i]n earlier times, resources flowed in the opposite direction, from poor countries to rich 
countries – the spoils of military conquest and colonial exploitation. In later periods, 
rich-country investors sent funds to poor countries to seek profits, not to seek better lives for 
the locals. Trade brought raw materials to the rich countries in exchange for manufactured 
goods, but few poor countries have succeeded in becoming rich by exporting raw materials. 
Many have been left with a legacy of foreign ownership and internal inequality (Deaton 
2013, 253).
The above insights are again a confirmation of the historical trajectory within which a global 
order emerged and that allows some people to start the race toward development and economic 
prosperity a lot earlier than others. Aid, if taken as a mechanism aimed at reversing the damages and 
unevenness of the global economic order, seems to be having the opposite effect. More than this, my 
suggestion is that it seems unlikely that aid was ever designed by governments of rich countries to 
benefit poor countries, even though donor citizens might see things differently, hence the constant 
push that their governments should donate even more. 
In the context of actual administration of aid, the key argument of this research contradicts the 
assumption that aid was designed to benefit the recipients or that aid is still in place today because it 
is thought to help fight poverty. As a matter of fact, what keeps the aid industry active is in the very 
logic of the current global order, a governing rationality that the global games allegory captures and 
which Ferguson describes with near-cynical accuracy in the context of aid and national development: 
“The World Bank…for its part, makes literally no mention of politics. Where ‘bureaucracy’ is seen 
as a problem, it is not a political matter, but the unfortunate result of poor organization or lack of 
training” (Ferguson 1994, 65). That explains why representatives or governments of poorer countries 
are required to get better training to better participate in negotiating their economic futures in the 
context of the global order. At other times, weaker economies are required to (re)-introduce policies 
and programmes, such as structural adjustment policies and other (neo)-liberal marketing reforms 
to fit into the global economic order. This has the capacity to sublimate or sublate any radical or 
“rogue” economic transformation that may have been introduced by progressive leadership in 
the affected countries to conform with the dominant global economic order. African countries are 
often at the receiving end of these economic hegemonising gimmicks, beginning in the 1980s. The 
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 111
prevailing regional and geopolitical factors are simply ignored, and if local politics gets blamed, it 
is only to the extent that the recipient African state government had put in place a corrupt and inept 
developmental bureaucracy, and once personnel are retrained and reorganised and/or encouraged to 
fit into a certain standard mould, development will begin to boom. But Dambisa Moyo has no such 
illusions and begs to strongly disagree.
Moyo in Dead Aid is unequivocal in stating that “[o]ne of the most depressing aspects of the whole 
aid fiasco is that donors, policymakers, governments, academicians, economists and development 
specialists know, in their heart of hearts, that aid doesn’t work, hasn’t worked and won’t work” 
(Moyo 2009, 54). There is an interesting reason why Moyo’s pessimism is likely justified:
…Far from being a prescription for eliminating poverty, the aid illusion is actually an 
obstacle to improving the lives of the poor…Politicians in both donor and recipient countries 
understand this process. Recipient governments can use their own poor people as “hostages 
to extract aid from the donors”. In one of the worst such cases, government officials in 
Sierra Leone held a party to celebrate the fact that UNDP had, once again, classed their 
country as the worst in the world and thus guaranteed another year’s worth of aid. [In many 
cases]…Africans suffer to burnish the tarnished reputations of Western politicians. The 
givers and receivers of aid, the governments in both countries, are allied against their own 
peoples. All that has changed from colonial times is the nature of what is being extracted 
(Deaton 2013, 234, 255; emphasis added).
This further underscore the fact that governments and their people are not the same and are not 
always on the same page when the former go into contracts with donors, even though they ostensibly 
pursue the goal of prosperity which citizens yearn for. All over the world, governments are notorious 
for keeping their citizens in the dark about the details of their dealings, especially in the international 
arena. It might also be that citizens of donor or richer countries do not want to hear the truth in some 
cases. Since part of hearing the truth would be to come to terms with their own privileges and their 
complicitly in an unfair global order that favours them to stay rich by suffocating poorer societies 
through aid bondage. 
Another reason why aid continues to be favoured above a restructuring or transformation of 
the global order is implicit in the above analysis. Aid is an instrument of political control and 
neo-colonial hegemony; it operates within the unevenness of historical injustice. In most cases, 
aid serves the interest of colonialist and imperialist countries as they move to exorcise themselves 
of the guilt of the past, to normalise and make invisible the gains of great crimes, while putting 
in place a strategy to legalise a continual “peace time” pillaging of their historical enemies and 
victims. This acute realisation prompted Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Case for Reparations” to assert 
in the context of anti-black racism in the American banking sector that “[p]lunder in the past made 
plunder in the present efficient” (Coates 2014). After exploiting the recipients of aid in the most 
fundamental manner through resource theft, aid serves the psycho-moral purpose of helping the 
donor feel righteous again, to move toward donor innocence. Poor countries are in effect denied 
justice or equitable distribution of global resources, much of which are taken from their home 
soil, in exchange for destabilising foreign aid, which in turn keeps them needy with a Stockholm 
Syndrome feeling of indebtedness toward their donors, read oppressors. 6 
Thus, it should no longer be considered heterodox economics to say that aid is harmful to the 
recipient and only helps keep an unjust global order in place. For example, ODA value reduced 
substantially at the end of the Cold War, compared to the 1960s to 1980s standards, and that must 
tell us something about the donor governments’ intent. It is hard to argue against the fact that aid 
was increasing during the heydays of the Cold War for reasons far removed from fighting poverty. 
More importantly, economic growth in Africa dramatically rebounded at the end of the Cold War 
as the aid tap was turned off, as the need to continue to manipulate Third World countries was 
temporarily non-existent. What became clear was that rich and powerful countries, especially, were 
fighting over the control of the local economies and politics of weaker countries, while at the same 
6 Stockholm Syndrome: love and trust for one’s oppressor.
112 Mba 
time preparing for the possibility of using the inhabitants of these Third World countries as cannon 
fodder, in case of an all-out shooting world war. The Cold War windfall for Africa and other regions 
was not about fighting poverty in the first place. As a matter of fact,
…[i]n most cases, aid is guided less by the needs of the recipients than by the donor country’s 
domestic and international interests…Donors must balance a number of considerations, 
including political alliances and maintaining good relationships with ex-colonies where 
donors often have important interests. Domestic donor interests include not only citizens 
with humanitarian concerns, but also commercial interests that see both opportunities 
(sales of their goods) and threats (competition from developing countries) from foreign aid 
(Deaton 2013, 259–269; also see Perkins 2004; 2016; Moyo 2009).
As if on cue, as I was completing this article, a G7 summit was being held in Cornwall, the United 
Kingdom, from 11 to 13 June 2021. Led by the United States of America, the G7 countries, considered 
the wealthiest nations, released a joint communiqué – Carbis Bay G7 Summit Communiqué – at the 
end of the meeting that contained agreements that signalled what analysts in the West hailed as 
representing “a dramatic return of America’s post-war international diplomacy” (Kanno-Youngs 
2021). In what one commentator said evoked a déjà vu feeling about the 1883–1884 Berlin 
Conference, the G7 countries announced a plan they called “the Build Back Better World (B3W)” 
initiative to counter China’s growing influence by offering developing nations an infrastructure plan 
that could rival President Xi Jinping’s multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road initiative (Holland and 
Faulconbridge 2021). The White House further claimed that apart from using this aid scheme to 
confront China, it was also about projecting American business values as positive alternatives to the 
Chinese model. What all this comes down to is that this was not really about helping the so-called 
developing nations to reach a certain infrastructural milestone in 2035, but everything was about 
protecting and advancing American, G7 and NATO values. The interest or well-being of poorer 
societies was secondary, if ever it mattered.
The above report gives additional credence to the lessons of the global games thought experiment. 
And this brings us right back to the question of whether any kind of aid, including health aid, was 
ever conceived in the interest of the recipients. Vaccine nationalism, an ongoing phenomenon thrown 
up by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic helps remove almost every doubt. At the same G7 summit, the 
South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, lamented the shortage of vaccines in African countries, 
pointing out that only about two per cent of Africa’s 1.2 billion population has been vaccinated 
against the virus due to the unavailability of doses. Whereas richer nations in the global north had 
vaccinated up to fifty per cent of their populations. Among other appeals, he charged that it was 
about time African countries were allowed to produce their own vaccines if Africa were to join 
the rest of the world in emerging from the COVID crisis. The report was that his appeal enjoyed 
widespread support at the summit (Makhafola 2021). But this was not the first or only time an 
appeal of this nature has been made to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines. The Director 
General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and her World Health 
Organization (WHO) counterpart, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had made a similar plea back 
in March 2021 (Pietromarchi 2021). But all kinds of objections were raised against patent waivers 
by big pharmaceutical companies protected by laws enacted by governments in the Global North. It 
remains to be seen whether things will change this time, but as Ramaphosa highlights, “…the cost 
of inaction [in this case] is measured in people’s lives”. Ramophosa’s warning could not have been 
more prescient, unfortunately, given the eventual rise of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, which 
ironically has become the dominant strain in many countries, including First World countries, aside 
South Africa itself. One would not be very wrong to argue that if the wealthy countries and powerful 
governments really cared about Africa and other poorer regions, the COVID-19 pandemic presented 
an excellent situation to demonstrate an abiding goodwill. The fact that leaders of governments and 
institutions from the Global South, especially Africa and India have had to make this call repeatedly 
and unheeded for so long to no avail in the face of a global pandemic, more than underscores the 
desire by the governments of First World countries to start every proverbial race earlier than weaker 
regions, at all costs.
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 113
Conclusion
The most important question for critical scholars concerned with aid ought to undergo a fundamental 
modification. Rather than ask why failure is the norm in international aid-giving, they should 
increasingly follow the trajectory of this research to ask: what is served by the failure of aid? In 
this way, if one considers the expansion and entrenchment of a Western presence and influence in 
the local politics and social life of people in Third World countries and the attendant weakening 
of local state actors and institutions, especially on the global stage, as the principal effect of aid, 
then the promise of development or humanitarian assistance serves simply as a point of entry for 
an intervention of a very different character. Seeing things from this perspective, foreign aid is not 
a channel for the transfer of capital, goods and services from affluent nations and/or institutions 
to poorer societies with the aim of eliminating poverty that was in the first place created by these 
affluent nations and institutions. Aid is a mechanism for reinforcing and expanding the exercise of 
the hegemonic power of First World countries. To penetrate weaker countries, powerful countries 
often chant the “poverty” or “human rights” trope as a pretext to launch an intervention that may 
have no effect on poverty and human rights abuses, but does in fact have other concrete effects, 
however much these other destabilising concrete effects are denied as the intended outcomes. 
The current catastrophe in Afghanistan read within the economic context serves as one of the 
severest rebuke against aid dependency in living memory, a deathly rebuttal of any argument 
in defence of aid. The World Food Programme (WFP) recently announced that – in what could 
become the world’s worst ever humanitarian crisis – more than 23 million Afghans or most of that 
country’s population need urgent humanitarian support, as they face acute food shortages in the 
near future. This is because the Afghan economy which had depended on international aid for more 
than 75% of its public spending for decades has quite simply collapsed as the Taliban took over 
governmental power and the aid tap was suddenly cut off. Afghanistan may still rebound through 
internal rebuilding and value creation, but for now, what the disturbing situation in that country 
teaches us is that aid does not bring about lasting development or enduring wealth creation. The 
biggest lesson, in my opinion, is that aid means very little outside of its politics.
Conversely, those who advocate for more aid need to explain how it can be given in a way that 
deals with the political constraints immanent in the regnant global order. Deaton (2013, 288) has it 
that 
[t]hey should also think hard about the parallels with the colonialism that came before the 
era of aid. We now think of colonialism as bad, harming others to benefit ourselves, and 
aid as good, hurting us (albeit very mildly) to help others. But that view is too simple, too 
ignorant of history, and too self-congratulatory. The rhetoric of colonialism too was all 
about helping people, albeit about bringing civilization and enlightenment to people whose 
humanity was far from fully recognized. This may have been little more than a cover for 
theft and exploitation. The preamble to the charter of the UN, with its ringing and inspiring 
rhetoric, was written by Jan Smuts, premier of South Africa, who saw the UN as the best 
hope of preserving the British Empire and the dominance of white “civilization”. Yet at its 
worst, decolonization installed leaders who differed little from those who preceded them, 
except for where they were born and the color of their skins (also see Gebremariam 2021).7
Thomas Sankara was more forthcoming in criticising debt and external political control arising from 
and legitimated by foreign aid to Africa. This he did by calling for a united front against debt and 
foreign aid in a famous speech he delivered at the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (now 
the African Union) in Addis Ababa in 1987:
We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come 
from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us 
before. Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed 
7 Also see Sasha Alyson (2021) at https://karmacolonialism.org/yes-its-still-colonialism/.
114 Mba 
re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign 
rules (Sankara 1987, cited in Akugizibwe 2012).
So, one must conclude that aid is hardly ever given to a poor country for the purpose of tackling 
poverty among its citizens. Aid is given by those who know they must give to keep the current 
unjust global order in place, a global games arena where only they can be winners in every economic 
summit or plan, in every trade agreement and in every negotiation on the proverbial world table. Aid 
is therefore necessarily tied to the global order in such a way that the only way to make aid effective 
or altogether end aid and its penurious impact would be to jettison the international order or remake 
the current world system built on the unjust and oppressive structures of slavery and colonialism and 
their afterlives (Getachew 2019; 2020; Táíwò, 2022). 
Acknowledgements
Other Universals Consortium – a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 
ORCID iD
Chika C. Mba – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0125-0138
References
Akugizibwe, P. 2012. “‘Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa’ – Thomas Sankara.” 
This is Africa, 23 July [media platform]. https://thisisafrica.me/politics-and-society/
debt-cleverly-managed-reconquest-africa-thomas-sankara/ 
Alyson, S. 2020. “Karma colonialism.” https://karmacolonialism.org/
Alyson, S. 2021. “Yes, it’s still colonialism.” https://karmacolonialism.org/yes-its-still-colonialism/
Benyera, E. 2021. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the recolonisation of Africa: the 
coloniality of data. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003157731
Bolton, G. 2008. Aid and other dirty business: An insider uncovers how globalisation and good 
intentions have failed the world’s poor. London: Ebury Press.
Calderisi, R. 2006. The Trouble with Africa: why foreign aid isn’t working. New Haven: Yale 
University Press.
Chakravarti, A. 2005. Aid, institutions and development: new approaches to growth, governance 
and poverty. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. 
Coates, T.-N. 2014. “The case for reparations.” The Atlantic, June. https://www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/#v-the-quiet-plunder 
Collier, P. 2007. The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done 
about it. New York: Oxford University Press.
Deaton, A. 2013. The great escape: Health, wealth, and the origins of inequality. Princeton: 
Princeton University Press.
Easterly, W. 2001. Elusive quest for growth: Economists’ adventures and misadventures in the 
tropics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Easterly, W. 2006. The white man’s burden: why the west’s efforts to aid the rest have done so 
much ill and so little good. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, J. 1994. The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic 
Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ferguson, N. 2009. “Foreword.” In: Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better 
way for Africa, by D. Moyo, 9–11. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gebremariam, E. B. 2021. “Reflections from teaching African Development using decolonial 
perspectives at LSE.” London School of Economics [blog]. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
internationaldevelopment/2021/05/25/reflections-from-teaching-african-development-using-
decolonial-perspectives-at-lse/ 
Getachew, A. 2019. World making after Empire: the rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton: 
Princeton University Press.
South African Journal of Philosophy 2022, 41(1): 103–115 115
Getachew, A. 2020. “Colonialism made the modern world: Let’s remake it.” New York Times, 27 
July. https://nyti.ms/39xf8OP 
Gilley, B. 2017. “The case for colonialism.” Third World Quarterly. doi:10.1080/01436597.2017.1
369037
Griffiths, P. 2003. The Economist’s tale: A consultant encounters hunger and the World Bank. 
London: Zed Books. doi:10.5040/9781350250987
Holland, S. and G. Faulconbridge. 2021. “G7 rivals China with grand infrastructure plan.” Reuters. 
https://www.reuters.com/world/g7-counter-chinas-belt-road-with-infrastructure-project-senior-
us-official-2021-06-12/
Kalu, K. 2018. Foreign aid and the future of Africa. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78987-3
Kanno-Youngs, Z. 2021. “G7 News: Summit ends with agreement on global minimum tax and 
common threats.” New York Times, 13 June. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/13/world/
g7-summit 
Makhafola, G. 2021. “Ramaphosa again calls on rich G7 countries to support Covid-19 vaccine 
patent waiver.” News24. https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/ramaphosa-again-
calls-on-rich-g7-countries-to-support-covid-19-vaccine-patent-waiver-20210613 
McNeill, D. 2009. “What is wrong with aid? What is wrong with Africa?” Forum for Development 
Studies 36(1): 199–211. doi:10.1080/08039410.2009.9666430
Moyo, D. 2009. Dead aid: Why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa. New 
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nsah, E. 2021. “NGOs and poverty reduction in the North West and East region of Cameroon.” 
Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Ord, T. 2013. “Aid works (on average).” https://studylib.net/doc/13259236/
aid-works--on-average--toby-ord-president--giving-what-we  
Perkins, J. 2004. Confessions of an economic hit-man. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler Publishers.
Perkins, J. 2016. The new confessions of an economic hit-man. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler 
Publishers. 
Pietromarchi, V. 2021. “Patently unfair: Can waivers help solve COVID vaccine 
inequality?” Al Jazeera, 1 March. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/1/
can-a-waiver-on-ip-rights-solve-vaccine 
Pogge, T. 2008. World poverty and human rights: cosmopolitan responsibilities and reform. 2nd 
edn. Malden: Polity Press.
Riddell, R. 2007. Does foreign aid really work? New York: Oxford University Press.
Sachs, J. 2005. The end of poverty: Economic possibilities for our time. New York: The Penguin 
Press.
Sachs, J. 2006. “Depoliticize Development Aid.” Economist’s View [blog]. https://economistsview.
typepad.com/economistsview/2006/03/jeffrey_sachs_d.html 
Shirley, M. M. 2008. Institutions and development. Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar. 
Singer, P. (Original work published in 2002) 2004. One world: the ethics of globalization. 2nd edn. 
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Singer, P. 2016. One world now: the ethics of globalization. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stiglitz, J. 2002. Globalization and its discontents. New York: Norton.
Táíwò, O. O. 2022. Reconsidering Reparations. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/
oso/9780197508893.001.0001
Received 27 June 2021; revised 11 March 2022; accepted 16 March 2022