I certainly am not going to disagree on front line assistance requirements to alleviate suffering. It would be pretty inhuman to do so. However there is a lot more nuance to the situation. I don’t come at this topic lightly having spent a lot of time both working and travelling various parts of Africa and spending time talking with people working front line in various places. Am wracking brain trying to remember the names of a couple of extremely well written books on the topic but am failing and search fail too. There are some great Congolese and South African authors who I feel deal with the topic well but it’s been such a long bloody time I can’t for the life of me remember names. The immediate needs are obvious but does aid dependency help long term? I hope that this USAID discussion flare up results in a more educated discussion on the manner that such a beautiful and rich continent gets so abused
Discussion
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"The immediate needs are obvious but does aid dependency help long term?"
Probably not and most likely humanitarian aid is also often more a benign element of a larger neo-colonialist policy than anything else. But this doesn't detract from the fact that hundreds of thousands of lives could be at stake in the short and medium term. And you can't just end up with humanitarian aid all of a sudden without attempting to find an alternative, not to mention giving timely prior notice.
For sure. On the neo colonialism, just look what the EU did to Mali with the whole milk bullshit. Its interesting that the article talks a lot about HIV. Thats a very emotive one for people. I had a long chat to two volunteer doctors who were leaving south Africa many years ago. They skirted around the topic of HIV related aid and the work they did so I tried pressing a little as they seemed to be hinting about something nefarious that was more than what they were openly talking about. The response I finally got was "we'd prefer to change topic as there are things that we would rather not discuss as we consider talking about them to be too high a risk for our personal safety". That conversation has always stuck with me. I do hope all these topics can be discussed more openly and less politically. Who knows!