The Telegraph
By David Blair
20 February 2012
Suppose a government chooses to spend nothing on equipping secondary schools, while blowing 1 per cent of public expenditure on trips for the president and the prime minister. Imagine if the two men at the top of this sorry administration reckoned their own offices were more deserving recipients of taxpayers’ money than, say, capital expenditure on health and education for a country of 12 million people.
Step forward the government of Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, the ageing autocrat who will celebrate his 88th birthday tomorrow, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the former opposition leader turned prime minister. Leaf through Zimbabwe’s national budget for 2012 and you discover the grotesque sense of priorities of the two men who run one of the poorest countries in the world.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai spent US $45.5 million on travel last year, accounting for 1.2 per cent of total public expenditure (if David Cameron and Nick Clegg followed suit, their bill for foreign trips would be more than £7 billion or $11 billion).
Meanwhile, “capital expenditure†for secondary education in 2011 was, well, a blank. If page 207 of the national accounts is correct, Zimbabwe’s government spent precisely nothing on capital assets for secondary schools last year, an omission that was probably unique in the world.
In fairness, the figures show that Mugabe and Tsvangirai budgeted $5.3 million for this purpose, generously conceding that the next generation was worth 11.6 per cent of their travel allowance. But this sum does not appear to have been spent: the amount actually disbursed was, in fact, zero.
How fortunate, then, that Britain is helping to fill the gap. The Mugabe-Tsvangirai government evidently believes that kitting out secondary schools is not worth a penny of Zimbabwean citizens’ money, but our Department for International Development (DFID) thinks that British taxpayers should write the cheques. We have duly paid £6 million ($9.5 million) to a United Nations programme that distributed 15 million textbooks to Zimbabwe’s schoolchildren.
DFID has also spent £16.5 million (about $26 million) on “emergency†medicines for Zimbabwe’s public hospitals. This is good news for the country’s suffering patients: Mugabe and Tsvangirai do not worry much about health. They reckoned that state hospitals should make do with $14.6 million (£9 million) of capital expenditure last year.
Their own offices, however, were far more worthy causes. Mugabe spent $109.3 million on his (by way of comparison, total capital expenditure on the entire health and education systems was only $32 million). Meanwhile, Tsvangirai’s office cost a relatively modest $10.9 million – a mere 75 per cent of capital spending on health. If Cameron shared Tsvangirai’s sense of priorities, the budget for running Downing Street would be well over £3 billion ($4.7 billion).
And so it goes on: Zimbabwe’s national accounts stretch to 356 pages and most reveal some glaring absurdity. Mugabe spent $5.1 million on “state residences†(i.e. palaces) last year; all the primary schools in the country made do with less than $25,000 of capital expenditure. More than two million pupils use those schools: little wonder that most have no chairs.
Meanwhile, Tsvangirai managed to spend $218,000 on “hospitalityâ€. This is a man who courageously opposed Mugabe’s tyranny for two decades, only to form a coalition with the old dictator and end up spending more on parties than on renovating primary schools.
No one would seriously defend this sense of priorities, certainly not the reforming finance minister, Tendai Biti, who was honest enough to call the travel budget of his two bosses a “cancer in the management of our public finances†(although he still signed the cheques). Nor, I suspect, would the energetic and dedicated education minister, David Coltart, view these decisions with anything except horror.
But are we partly to blame? If we pick up the bill for textbooks and medicines, does this serve only to perpetuate a grotesque misallocation of resources?
The law of unintended consequences works more perniciously in the field of aid and development than perhaps any other. DFID has embarked on the most ambitious expansion of its short history, aiming to spend £11 billion ($17.4 billion) in 2013/14, a 29 per cent jump in one year from the £8.6 billion planned for 2012/13. In the process, Britain will keep its promise to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on aid.
DFID’s operation in Zimbabwe will spend £80 million ($126 million) in 2011/12, ensuring that children get textbooks, patients get medicines and slum-dwellers get sanitation, and many other useful things.
But the government of Zimbabwe clearly has the money to do all of this. Last year, capital expenditure on the army plus the costs of the offices of Mugabe and Tsvangirai came to more than $181 million. Cut that by 90 per cent and Zimbabwe could pay for the entire DFID programme and have plenty left over.
By covering the cost of basic essentials that the government chooses not to fund, we risk underwriting – albeit indirectly – the monstrous way in which Zimbabwe’s leaders spend their country’s resources. The mistake is to believe that a poor nation simply lacks money, which leads to the obvious answer that we should step in. Often, as in Zimbabwe, the situation is more complex: how the government spends its budget is at least as much of a problem.
If you simply offer more cash, the risk is that you make an indefensible set of priorities “sustainableâ€, to use a word beloved of DFID officials.
So what is the answer? After all, there is a genuine dilemma here. Pay for the textbooks and you perpetuate the Mugabe-Tsvangirai sense of priorities. Hold back the funds and the government of Zimbabwe will not develop a conscience and find the money for children to get an education. Instead, the kids will go without books and Mugabe and Tsvangirai will carry on exactly as before. It’s also worth remembering that no DFID money goes directly into Zimbabwean government coffers: all the funding is channelled via the UN or international development agencies.
The best of two terrible options is probably to carry on picking up the bill. But this is not exactly the inspirational case for aid made by Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary. Last month, he told the Telegraph that “by building up governance structures in the Middle East and by getting girls into school in the Horn of Africaâ€, Britain would make itself “saferâ€.
The truth is more prosaic. In a country like Zimbabwe, we pay for school textbooks because the men in charge are so rotten that they prefer to spend money on parties and trips. They don’t care about their people, but we do – and so we pay up.
But what if the leaders are spending their money on far worse things than palaces and entertainment? Suppose they skew their national budgets towards building up big armies, while leaving us to fund health and education?
In the 1990s, Uganda received about half of its budget from foreign donors. President Yoweri Museveni duly constructed a powerful military machine which he used to invade the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998, helping to start one of the bloodiest wars in modern history.
Uganda could only fund this military campaign because outsiders were willing to pay such a big share of the nation’s bills. Inadvertently and indirectly, foreign donors ended up subsidising a conflict that laid waste to Congo. With hindsight, it would have been better for Africa if Uganda had not received a penny of foreign aid.
None of this suggests that aid is always damaging, nor that DFID’s budget increase is necessarily unjustified. But delicate case-by-case judgments have to be made. On balance, giving aid to Uganda in the 1990s was wrong; doing so for Zimbabwe today is probably right, but only as a policy of despair.
The danger is that if you start with the belief that aid is the way to make Britain safe – and your budget is rising by 29 per cent in one year – there is a greater chance that you will get these decisions wrong. If so, the poor will pay the price.