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Out of Africa?Foreign aid is part of the problem, but so is corrupt politics.

By Francis FukuyamaUpdated Monday, May 4, 2009, at 6:47 AM ET

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So the question is: If bad politics is at the heart of Africa's development problem, how did it come to be that way, and how can the region evolve in a different direction? Here the two authors, obviously, differ markedly. Dambisa Moyo is ready with evidence to back up her lengthy indictment of foreign aid as the source of bad government. She notes that during the Cold War, aid was given out indiscriminately to rulers like Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who flew his daughter to a wedding on a Concorde the moment Western donors agreed to reschedule a loan. Were it not for the continued availability of concessional loans, she argues, African countries would be forced to get their acts together and meet international governance standards so as to be able to access global bond markets.

There is a lot to this argument. Foreign assistance in the past has simply fueled the patronage machine and helped keep corrupt rulers in power in places like Somalia and Equatorial Guinea. African governments, many of which receive upward of 50 percent of their national budgets from international donors, find themselves accountable not to their people but to overlapping and contradictory echelons of foreigners. Even seemingly benign interventions like humanitarian food aid can undercut local farmers or be used as a means of strengthening the ethnic base of particular politicians.

But Moyo's case that Africa would have good government if it weren't for the influx of aid stretches credulity. The roots of Africa's political malaise go far deeper than the post-independence foreign-aid regime. Unlike East Asia before its encounter with colonialism, more than half of sub-Saharan Africa was not governed by a state structure at the time of the European scramble for Africa that began in the 1870s. The Europeans built colonial institutions on the cheap, seeking to govern vast tracts of territory with skeleton administrations. The big man of contemporary African politics is in many ways a colonial creation, since Europeans sought to rule indirectly by empowering a series of local dictators to carry out their purposes. And, finally, colonialism imposed a set of irrational borders on their colonies. South Sudan fought a 30-year civil war with the regime in Khartoum only because a long-dead British administrator in Cairo didn't want to offend Egypt by giving it to Uganda, where it more naturally belonged.

Moyo's blanket condemnation of foreign aid also fails to discriminate between, say, military assistance given to Zaire during the Cold War, and anti-retroviral treatments dispensed by the Global Fund or PEPFARS (the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, initiated by the Bush administration), which get virtually no mention in her book. The fact is that the aid business has learned something, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Fewer blank checks are given to dictators and more relief is targeted at areas like public health, which have produced measurable results. Were aid to stop as she suggests, a whole lot of Africans would die prematurely. Other programs, like the Millennium Challenge Account, created by the Bush administration in 2004, are targeted at better governance and anti-corruption. They may not be sufficient to fix African politics, but they hardly contribute to the underlying problem.

If ending foreign aid will not cure Africa, does Maathai's Challenge for Africa present a better alternative? Grassroots activism can galvanize local solutions and put pressure on governments to perform better. But civil society is ultimately a complement to strong institutions and not a substitute for them. Toward the end of her book, Maathai points to the need for visionary leadership and nation-building from the center, as Julius Nyerere did when he knit Tanzania's multiple linguistic and ethnic groups together through the use of Kiswahili as a national language. But historical nation-building projects have often required much stronger medicine than she or most other contemporary Africans are willing to contemplate, including changes of borders and the sometimes forceful incorporation of "micro-nations" into larger wholes.

If neither of these books provides wholly satisfactory solutions, both at least focus on the real core of the problem, which is the region's level of political development. In this realm, solutions are going to have to come from within the region itself. It is a positive first step for the discussion to shift away from what the outside world owes Africa and toward what Africans owe themselves.

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Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and director of its International Development Program.

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