4. New democracies – South Africa and Afghanistan

Key issues

• Accountable, capable, responsive government is an important condition for eliminating poverty.?It is hard to support and affect from the outside, as shown in two different examples below.? Military intervention has its place, such as Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone in 2000, and military support to Ukraine today.?But armies can’t build democracies, as we learned very harshly in Afghanistan in 2021.? More support for civil society can work (see South Africa example) but is increasingly cracked down on by authoritarian regimes.
• Government donors attach far too many conditions to their aid and want to tell other countries what’s best for them. It’s the wrong approach and doesn’t work. ?When accountable, capable, responsive government exists, relatively unconditional “budget support” is one of the best ways richer countries can help.?It has become less popular in the last decade but the push for loss and damage climate funds might bring it back under a new name.
• We have not made anything like enough progress yet in “untying” aid to developing countries and giving it directly to charities and other organisations based in those countries to implement programmes.?

After one year at DFID, I got the immense privilege to go and work in South Africa. I had visited the Nelson Mandela Peace Garden in Hull as a child and jumped at the chance to play any part in this new post-apartheid democracy. The one piece of advice I got for living in a brand-new country was ‘don’t drink and drive.’ At the time, I thought ‘Duh, of course not.’ ?I’d never even owned a car and only driven my parent’s car.?When I got there, I realised why my boss said it. Drink driving was common and people with diplomatic number plates tended to get away with it. ?Looking back I am shocked at how little preparation was given to young people being sent on their first overseas posting and it is quite rightly a bit better these days, with much more focus on safeguarding among other things. ?

One of my responsibilities was to support the 1999 Elections. Nelson Mandela was elected President in 1994. These would be the first elections organised by a non-apartheid and democratically elected government. ?On polling day, I was observing the election in Northern Cape Province.?South Africa’s modern constitution allowed prisoners to vote – something the UK is still resisting.?I was appalled by the conditions inside the prison. We went to a dorm for 20 men which was literally packed with three times as many prisoners with standing room only. But they were delighted to be voting. Many inmates asked for help understanding the huge ballot paper and the guards explained it. It didn’t seem very secret, but it still seemed fairer than not explaining it. ?Huge effort went into ensuring this was a free and fair election. The result was a genuine landslide for the ANC – 66% of the vote, even higher than in 1994. It can be hard for people outside South Africa who rightly love Nelson Mandela, to understand how keen the country was to elect Thabo Mbeki. After five years of reconciliation, black people understandably wanted to see more change. I attended the inauguration ceremony for President Mbeki, which included an extraordinary fly-by of three South African Airways jumbo jets flying low in formation. ?They also interrupted the end of the new President’s first speech, leading afterwards to a typically brilliant bit of South African advertising, with the slogan ‘Dear Mr President, we apologise for arriving early, it’s a hard habit to break.’?

Accountable, capable, responsive government is an important condition for eliminating poverty. DFID and others have continued to struggle over the last 25 and more years to work out how best to improve governance around the world and maybe the UK should be humbler about how accountable, capable, and responsive our own democracy is. ?It was not part of the Millennium Development Goals but was added as goal 16 in the new Global Goals in 2015. ?

The UK Thatcher Government did next to nothing to help create democratic change in South Africa.?She famously dismissed Mandela as a terrorist. ?But the ANC and other civil society organisations did get financial support from the British public and also from the European Union and some European governments, particularly Sweden. ?This kind of support to human rights and other organisations struggling to bring to democracy to their own country, proved more effective than any recent foreign military intervention I can think of has. I'll come on to the example of Afghanistan shortly.

If a government is broadly doing the right thing, relatively unconditional “budget support” is one of the best ways richer countries can help, because it supports the national systems that need to be built, instead of building better parallel systems which will one day have to be removed. ?Clare Short led the way and then other countries began to copy DFID. Sadly, after 2005, budget was gradually eroded and is now non-existent in UK assistance. ?UK Ministers began to use budget support as a stick instead of a carrot – they would suspend it for governments that did things ‘wrong’.?This encouraged parts of the media to demand more and more budget support to be cancelled, contrary to all of the evidence that it was one of the most effective forms of assistance.?Restoring budget support to low-income countries would be a very effective policy for the UK Government to rediscover.?

In Afghanistan in 2002, still working for DFID, I was again helping a brand-new democratic government to establish itself, and start delivering services to people, including schools for girls, which CARE continued to do even after 2021. Ashraf Ghani – who was the president from 2014-2021 – was the finance minister in 2002 and in charge of working with international donors. I met him several times, in a freezing office in Kabul.? He seemed totally uninterested in the trappings of power. He had a firm view of what he wanted from international donors. Our role was to support the new government’s vision, not tell him what to do. ?It was a good way to work for both of us. ?Through a World Bank Trust Fund, the UK and other governments provided the Finance Ministry with the funds for teachers’ salaries to get 3.6 million girls back into school. ?

This is why Untying Aid and Localisation are both so important. Sadly we have not made enough progress on either. Government donors attach far too many conditions to their aid and want to tell other countries what’s best for them. It’s the wrong approach and doesn’t work. ?With the Pergau scandal fresh in UK memories, the 1998 Birmingham G8 Summit committed to work within the OECD on a recommendation on untying aid – which means that a donor country should not channel all of its aid through companies or charities based in its own country. It took another three years of negotiation to untie ODA to the 49 least developed countries ‘to the greatest extent possible’ - culminating in the Recommendation to Untie Official Development Assistance?to the Least Developed Countries ?(DAC High Level Meeting, April 2001).?

From 2001 to 2019, the proportion of ODA to the least developed countries that was untied rose from 47% to 87%.

This is not as good as it looks.?It tends to mean that ODA contracts are openly tendered, but most are still won by organisations in donor countries. UK based companies and charities have actually done very well at winning grants from other donor governments because we are seen as some of the best. ?It has been estimated that this open competition has improved value for money of ODA by 25%. ?That’s good.?But it’s not good enough. Only 11% of aid projects are given to organisations actually based in those least developed countries. And that’s what really supporting people in other countries should look like.

The World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 in Turkey looked at “localisation” in humanitarian assistance specifically. It reported that, based on the limited data available, only 0.2% of international humanitarian assistance was channelled directly to local organisations in 2014.?The Grand Bargain promised to increase that to at least 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national responders by 2020. ?We have not achieved that target. In 2021 , 13 out of 53 grant-giving signatories had. Christian Aid and CAFOD have been the standout performers and there is clearly much more for others to do, including CARE and the UK Government.

Twenty years later, it is appalling to see girls in Afghanistan once again denied their human right to education. My own take on democracy and governance in Afghanistan over the last 20 years is that the foreign military should have withdrawn much, much sooner, in a carefully planned way.?NATO countries should not have done so many deals with warlords to keep the peace, and the USA should not have forced Ashraf Ghani into a power-sharing government after he clearly won the 2014 presidential election, by around 10%. He won the election on an anti-corruption platform and being forced into a coalition undermined his ability to crack down on corruption. And corruption - as well as western withdrawal - led to the government’s collapse in 2021.

Iraq and Libya similarly demonstrate that military intervention doesn’t build countries.?It should be a last resort we are willing to take to prevent (for example) genocides.?But it should not lead to long ‘occupations.’ International troops should be removed quickly and there must be a real plan for what happens afterwards. Over 20 years, rich countries spent more than ten times as much on sending NATO soldiers to Afghanistan, as they gave in development assistance. ?

Imagine how different things might have been if it had been the other way around, supporting women like those still protesting in the streets of Kabul as recently as last month (see photo above), instead of spending so much on a military strategy that ended in a chaotic evacuation. ?Rather than finding ourselves now back where we were in 2001, maybe we’d have supported lasting home-grown change.?Maybe Afghanistan would look a bit more like South Africa.?Not perfect by any means. ?But so, so much better.??

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