This extraordinarily important book should be read by everyone who cares about Africa, but who recoils from the egotism and self-indulgence of Comic Relief and Live Aid. Paul Collier is the director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, and has spent his career working on and in the continent. His proposition is that one out of the world's six billion people, almost all in Africa and central Asia, lives in abject poverty. We want to help them escape from their condition, but most of the current panaceas are ineffectual or mistaken. He is withering in his scorn for zealots of both right and left.
He castigates the right for its bland assertions that all aid is squandered, ending up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt rulers. He denounces the left, whose nonsenses are most vividly exemplified by Christian Aid's poster campaign depicting a pig (capitalist, of course) perched on a hapless African woman. London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Collier notes contemptuously, possesses the only Marxist economics department in Britain.
Far too much foreign aid to Africa, he says, is tailored to suit the commercial interests of the donors, rather than the welfare of the recipients. His catalogue of foreign complicity in corruption - notably by the leading oil companies - is devastating. The Chinese government is the most shameless, with its promise to tyrants: "We won't ask questions."
He argues that western socialists who want to see high trade barriers retained in poor countries to protect their existing industries have got it all wrong. First, draconian restrictions on imports render customs services the focus of corruption, a mere passport to riches for their officers. Second, he thinks it essential for these societies to escape from dependence on a few basic primary commodities, into low-cost manufacturing that can provide jobs. The West must accept goods from the poorest countries on preferential terms to protect them from Asian competition, which at present they cannot fight.
Among the most controversial passages of Collier's book is a plea for western military interventions in failing societies, though he acknowledges that, after Iraq, these are unlikely. He cites Sierra Leone as a model of successful intervention, where 1,000 British troops saved the country from collapse. Since he estimates that the failure of a single state can come close to £50 billion in direct costs and forfeited growth (statistically, once a society has disintegrated, it takes an average of 59 years for it to recover), he believes judicious interventions are cheap at the price. The Americans lost their nerve in Somalia after the notorious case of Black Hawk Down and loss of a mere 18 US lives. Somalia is now in a state of apparently irredeemable anarchy. Collier suggests that it is cheaper to help a country become tolerable for its people to live in than to defend ourselves against the criminals and terrorists whom collapsed societies export to the West.
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His enthusiasm for military intervention represents the only strand in his argument from which I dissent. In principle, he must be right. In practice, however, the West in general and the Americans in particular are fantastically bad at handling alien cultures. The British achievement in Sierra Leone represented a startling moment of exceptionalism, founded in the fact that the local government and people welcomed them.
We shall get military interventions right only when we learn to provide essential civil and economic back-up to the commitment of soldiers - people who can help run banks, sewage works, electricity plants. Until then, the commitment of western troops abroad will almost invariably end in failure, as in Iraq.
Collier is notably interesting in his analysis of African civil wars. The alleged grievances of rebels are usually absurd and meaningless. Rebel soldiers are recruited from desperate young men without education, who perceive no other means of supporting existence. Poverty and greed prompt a recourse to arms: "On both sides interests develop that only know how to do well in war." Angola offered the most spectacular example, where the MPLA government, aided by the Cubans, battled for its oil, while Jonas Savimbi's Unita, supported by the CIA and white South Africans, fought for diamonds. I blush to recall that 30 years ago I was among the useful idiots who thought well of Savimbi.
Collier's most important message is that, while outside aid is essential to enable the estimated 58 bottom countries to drag themselves out of destitution, solutions can come only from the inhabitants. The West must support those who display the will to reform their societies: "We should be helping the heroes." First, the good people must be encouraged not to emigrate as soon as they acquire education and skills. Second, when by some miracle an embryo reform movement develops in a country such as Uganda, it needs a lot of technical assistance fast, to show a fragile government how to do things.
Reform is often deeply unpopular in its early stages, because the pain to local people exceeds any discernible benefit. Excessive cash aid can be disastrous, because it stifles the development of businesses and the generation of exports. The vital task, says Collier, is to promote economic growth. Growth, growth, growth, is his slogan, and he abhors western socialists who despise it. He recalls the foreign Marxists who flattered President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania during his disastrous regime, quoting a Tanzanian who remarked bitterly: "If they think it's so wonderful, why don't they come and live here?"
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Collier says: "Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all." It is vital, he says, to choose the right moment to provide aid; to disburse it in manageable quantities, and ensure effective monitoring. Many foreign-aid bosses are reckless, partly because they get paid for spending money not withholding it. An essential condition for aid should be the presence of a relatively free media, because in societies where democracy is fragile, newspapers and radio offer the most effective checks on corruption.
Collier pleads first for international action to check the corruption of foreign natural-resource extraction companies, in which the outside world is complicit. He suggests that China's desire for greater global influence could make it willing to join some international agreement in return for a bigger voice at the top table. Making resource-extraction companies comply with agreed governance standards is much more important, he says, than environmental standards. The poorest nations need better trade deals, but not of the kind the West usually offers: "The development lobbies themselves, notably the big western NGO charities, often just don't understand trade. It is complicated and doesn't appeal to their publics, so they take the populist line." Western banks, and, above all, the Swiss, must stop providing havens for billions stolen by kleptocracies. Aid must be better directed, above all to avoid grotesquely expensive infrastructure projects that feed corruption.
There is something in his book to enrage all African and western vested interests. Almost every page offers some original insight for everyone who professes to care about the Third World, yet is bewildered about how best to help it. Collier may not be right about everything, but he writes with deep experience and understanding of African societies. The bottom billion need our money, but they also need vastly more enlightened aid policies than those that the West operates today.
Hospital corners
'There are plenty of horror stories about aid,' writes Paul Collier. 'I came across one case where three donor agencies each wanted to build a hospital in the same place. They agreed to coordinate, which doesn't always happen, but then faced the problem of having three incompatible sets of rules for how the work should be commissioned. It took them two years to reach a compromise, which was that each agency should build one floor of the hospital under its own rules. You can imagine how efficent that was.'
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Read on... books:
The White Man's Burden by William Russell Easterly (OUP £16.99), Examination of the West's aid efforts
The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier
OUP £16.99 pp224
Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.99 (including p&p)