Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. He has been the executive producer of a wide range of programmes and television documentaries for Channel 4 in Britain and he is managing director of WAG TV, a London-based independent TV production company. One of his main specialties is the catastrophe of economic aid to Africa.



FP: Martin Durkin, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Durkin: Thanks for asking me.

FP: I’d like to talk to you today about aid to Africa and how such aid destroyed African society and caused much misery and destructiveness.

Let’s begin with the general question: How has aid hurt Africa?

Durkin: Aid is like welfare writ large. But the mechanisms of destruction work in different ways and are ultimately even more devastating.

Aid goes into Africa and is either snaffled by the ruling elite or their flunkies, or else, in shockingly small amounts, does what it’s meant to. Let’s look at the effects of the misappropriated aid first.

Vast amounts of aid is siphoned off in various ways by the ruling elite. According to an old UN report, in 1991 alone, $200 billion of AID ended up in foreign private bank accounts of African politicians and government officials. In Kenya and elsewhere, government officials have larger foreign bank accounts than business people. If you want to get rich in Africa, you join the ruling party or get in with the mafia that masquerades as a civil service, judiciary and police force. By hook or by crook, that’s where the bulk of aid money ends up.

Now many people say, “Oh well, even if a little gets through, it’s worth it.” But they are missing the point – big time. In Africa, being in government is so massively lucrative, thanks to aid, that the rulers refuse to relinquish power. As one African commentator has put it, “the primordial instinct of the ruling elite is to loot the national treasury, perpetuate itself in power and brutally suppress all dissent and opposition.”

In a word, political power means you get your dirty mits on all that aid money, by the sackful. These vile people with chunky gold rings are corrupt aid millionaires, sometimes aid billionaires. So it’s no surprise they wish to hang on to power.

FP: So aid to Africa actually helps keep dictators and dictatorships in power? It fuels the oppression of the people?

Durkin: Aid kills democracy. It makes being in power enormously lucrative. When going into (corrupt) politics or becoming a (corrupt) state official is a more attractive career option than starting a business, it will obviously end in tears. It means that politics attracts gangsters, indeed creates gangsters. The gangsters don’t want to relinquish power, so another set of gangsters, thinly dressed as liberators, arm themselves and make war.

The chain of cause and effect is so glaringly obvious, and yet the liberal left in the West really get uppity if you point it out to them. They are believers in state patronage, on a national and international level, and are blind to its hideous consequences.

FP: And so, therefore, aid would also fuel conflict as well, right?

Durkin: Absolutely. Sure enough, it is the refusal to relinquish or share power in African countries that leads to insurgencies. Civil wars in Africa always, always, always start with disputes over the electoral process. Fiddling elections or refusing to hold them was what led to civil war in Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, etc, etc.

And who are the guys who are picking up arms against the government? These liberation forces are upstart hoods who fancy a bit of what the other lot are getting. It makes sense to raise an army and try to take over government in Africa. It’s a way of becoming a billionaire.

FP: So the liberals in the West that feel all good about themselves by supporting aid to Africa are actually triggering civil wars and insurgencies in Africa, right? They are complicit in the deaths of Africans?

Durkin: These are aid-wars. They should be called aid-wars. There are many on the left – most people on the left I’m sure, who genuinely want to help Africans (and indeed poor people generally). The difficulty is, their desire to help people comes second to their emotional commitment to socialism. The left and the greens are utterly wedded to their anti-capitalist ideology. They refuse to listen to arguments, no matter how cogent or well supported, that contradict their political prejudices. You can tell a green that their opposition to the use of DDT has resulted in the needless deaths of literally millions of people from malaria. What’s their reaction? The greens still support the ban on DDT.

In the end, their subjective self-righteousness counts for nothing. It doesn’t matter what they think they’re doing. It matters what they’re actually doing. So, yes, I think we need to confront people on the left with the consequences of their policies. They are killing people. They have blood on their hands.

Aid we should distinguish from charity of course. There are many people who, with the help of charity from individuals, are doing wonderful work in Africa. But these are sticking plasters when what is needed is surgery.

FP: So in a nutshell then, the barbarity and oppression we see in Africa is a result of what?

Durkin: The savagery that we see in Africa is not because there’s something funny in the water. It’s not because they’re still hunter-gatherer types at heart and can’t forget some archaic gripe with the neighbors. Africa used to be quite a nice place 40 years ago. But since then, a gigantic volume of aid has wrecked the fabric of civil society. And what has all this aid done to fight African poverty? The UN declared in 1999 that 70 countries – all aid recipients – were poorer than they had been in 1980. The countries that had received the most aid – like Liberia, Zaire and Somalia – had descended in barbarism and anarchy.

Once again, the process by which aid corrupts is blindingly obvious. And yet we keep shovelling the stuff in. As for the trickle that actually buys food for people, every study we have shows how this pushes countries into a terrifying dependency on food imports. I needn’t spell out the devastating effects of this on the domestic economy (which is mainly agrarian) or on their chances of fighting their way to affluence.

The big shame is that we don’t let African farmers sell their food to the US and the EU. Subsidies, tariffs and so on. People who are against free trade in food should be really ashamed of themselves.

FP: So even helping to buy food for Africans ends up hurting their economies? Can you spell out a bit how this occurs and the devastating effects here?

Durkin: The reason Africans don’t have food is civil war. African farmers know how to grow food. Indeed, they know how to grow food so well, that the EU and USA put up trade barriers to stop them from exporting it and undercutting their own farmers. Famine in Africa is rarely caused by natural disasters these days. It’s caused by aid.

Giving poor people food seems to make sense to us in the west. We see a homeless tramp and we direct them to the nearest soup kitchen. But on the scale we’re talking, the economic effect of just giving people food is not good. Suppose your economy relies on producing cars. But it’s in a bad way, not least because rich countries nearby have put up trade barriers to prevent you selling your cars to them. Then they see you’re doing badly. So what do they do? They send you some free cars. The local car manufacturers are none too happy, and the economy is buggered.

Well it’s the same with Africa and food. Forget aid. Africa needs free trade.

And while we’re here we must emphasise free trade rather than the hideous slice of colonialism called ‘fair trade’. Fair Trade is nothing more than a rearguard PR exercise from the greens. They were embarrassed at opposing free trade, so had to do little linguistic fancy foot-work. Free Trade says, OK the poor can sell their food to the rich world, but only if they are organic farmer (ie. they retain backward, not very productive farming techniques), and we will favour small peasant farms (which are famously no good at producing food efficiently). People who advocate ‘Fair Trade’ are just bastards.

FP: So aid to Africa plays a huge role in destroying Africa. So, you touched on it earlier, but expand a bit on why the liberal-Left continues to support giving aid to Africa.

Durkin: It is a mix between a laudable charitable impulse and a detestable, misguided socialist prejudice. The charitable impulse is a perfectly decent one. Far from attacking it, it should be applauded. But we have to strenuously point out that (a) state aid is not charity, it is a form of state intervention, and a massively corrupting one at that; and (b) even proper charity, well organised and directed, is not the answer for Africa.

Free trade is needed to give the African economy a chance to get on its feet. And the growth of a successful, wealthy bourgeoisie is the only hope Africans have of building a healthy political system. In other words, when the wealth comes from below, locally, rather than from above from foreign powers. Only then will the African nightmare end.

FP: Martin Durkin, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Durkin: Thank you.