We have all heard rumours that foreign aid goes to dictators and their luxurious lives, or to pointless infrastructure projects that are abandoned after a few years. And while we intuitively understood that there was some truth to the stories, it has been difficult to confirm them in practice.
That is, until Donald Trump started digging into the USAID scandal. The US aid agency has recently been ordered to limit its activities and spending, and to scrutinise its commitments more closely.
USAID has spent millions on various strange projects around the world, here are some examples: $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists to avoid ‘gender binary language’, $4.5+ million to ‘combat disinformation’ in Kazakhstan, $1.5 million for ‘arts for inclusion of persons with disabilities’, $2 million for gender reassignment and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala. It has also supported the criticised WHO with millions of dollars. Malicious tongues claim that USAID is part of the toolbox for implementing various regimes around the world, in addition to spreading propaganda and engaging in advocacy projects.
How this benefits ordinary Americans is hard to say, as it is the taxpayer who funds these extravagant activities. And many are now amazed at how USAID has been able to continue its operations year after year.
And in Sweden we have SIDA, whose activities are also being questioned, but they continue to spend taxpayers’ money on similar oddities. From a Swedish perspective it is of course worse, since the US is still an empire and is expected to engage in some form of influence, but why little Sweden should engage in such things is a mystery. Especially when healthcare, schools and infrastructure are collapsing at home. Sending money to dictatorships and fluffy projects in the third world is directly unjustified and anti-citizen. All Swedish policy should to some extent favour its people, that is the basic rule.
What we see here is probably the world’s largest money laundering, where the system’s management and administrators enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers, without the population of developing countries having benefited significantly from this money after half a century of aid. Instead, many choose to travel to Europe and live on aid here too, in a perpetual subsidy cycle that never seems to end.
It is also a sign of profound superiority to continue to send aid to poor countries, year after year, on the assumption that their citizens cannot fend for themselves, that Western aid is a necessity to feed the population. That they could not do without us. Whether the aid is paid at home, or in their own countries.
