Utter madness of exporting the dole
AFTER the Mail reported how £9million was spent on ethiopia’s version of the spice Girls... After we revealed more than a quarter of a billion pounds was spent on a runway on a south Atlantic island where planes can’t land...
And after the countless other stories of flagrant waste, appalling mismanagement or stupefying corruption involving billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money... it hardly seemed possible we could be shocked by another story about foreign aid. And yet, here we go again. in a breathtaking example of mindless largesse, we reveal today that over the past five years more than £1billion has been handed out – via ATM cards or in cash payments – to thousands of citizens in some of the most corrupt countries in the world.
in the minds of our well-paid foreign aid officials, these schemes involve small individual sums going to help some of the world’s poorest people. The reality, of course, as one MP sums it up, is that the Department for international Development is simply ‘ exporting the dole’ and paying for it with YOUR money.
The results are entirely predictable. Look at Pakistan, a country where barely 1 per cent of the public pay any income tax at all, and which is notorious for its dishonest government officials. As Guy Adams reveals today on pages 7 and 8, local reports suggest many senior officials involved in the Benazir income support Programme – to which we are giving £300million over eight years – are under investigation for ‘looting’ funds.
An audit has identified more than 125,000 ‘suspicious’ beneficiaries of the scheme. The project’s former chairman has also been questioned over claims of embezzling £23million. Asked by our reporter on the street, people freely admitted they bribed a politician to get a cash card.
Whitehall officials deemed the project ‘high risk’ but went ahead with it anyway. And why not? There’s no semblance of accountability when DfiD’s most senior civil servant just received a knighthood in the New Year’s honours.
Around the world, such payments have spiralled from £53million a year in 2005 to an average of £219million, in countries such as Uganda, Rwanda, Burma, ethiopia and Zimbabwe – a veritable Who’s Who of corrupt nation states – making proper oversight next to impossible.
The Mail must stress it is not opposed in principle to any foreign aid spending. But surely we should be helping people to help themselves, by building schools, hospitals and roads, providing clean water, or offering relief from natural disasters and in war zones?
We should not be setting a target for spending 0.7 per cent of GDP – £12billion and rising every year – before we even decide how much is really needed.
if these cash handouts were discovered at a time when the public purse was overflowing it would be bad enough. But at a time of austerity and when Britain is still borrowing huge sums – £76billion last year – it is an outrage too far.
As this newspaper has revealed recently, there is clear evidence of a crisis in elderly care. Last week we learned some patients will wait four weeks for a GP appointment. And as we report today, the sick are being told to attend A&e only in the case of a ‘genuine lifethreatening emergency’.
Ministers now have more than enough evidence to conclude that David Cameron’s ‘look how kind i am’ foreign aid law is a recipe for profligacy, and that vast amounts would clearly be better spent at home, to meet our responsibilities to our own. The only question left now is, when will the penny drop?