Africa needs stronger parliaments to monitor aid

from Reuters

By Daniel Flynn

DAKAR (Reuters) - Britain and other Western donors need to spend money on strengthening African parliaments to ensure they can hold governments to account for how aid is being spent, a group of British MPs said on Monday.

The cross-party delegation, which toured four African countries, said that foreign aid may have weakened Africa's democracies by making governments less accountable to their elected national legislatures.

"Historically, donors have tended to work over and around parliaments rather than with them," read the 69-page report from the Africa All Party Parliamentary Group.

"Aid ... strengthens recipient governments and risks making them more accountable to donors and less accountable to their people," it said, concluding that civil society groups often usurped parliament's role as a financial watchdog.

The report cited research by the Overseas Development Institute which found that donors, including Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank, were partly responsible for Africa's weak parliaments.

It urged donors to earmark more funds for strengthening parliaments, which often lacked the staff and facilities to monitor state expenditure and whose elected members were often poorly paid and motivated.

The study cited complaints from parliaments in Zambia, Tanzania and Malawi that they were unable to approve their own budgets and so were beholden to the executive.

"African parliaments have the potential to provide a safeguard to ensure that foreign aid is used to relieve poverty and promote economic development," said the report.

Only two of Africa's 53 states have enjoyed uninterrupted multiparty democracy since independence: Botswana and Mauritius. "Big Man" government by powerful presidential figures, sometimes swept to power by coups or fraudulent elections, was common for decades in post-colonial Africa.

Parliaments have made strides forward in recent years, however, as one-party states have disappeared. Legislators in Nigeria, Zambia and Malawi were able to block efforts to enable third terms for presidents, the report noted.

Many assemblies, though, remained shackled by constitutional limits. Often they lacked the power to reform legislation presented by the government and could only accept or reject it.

The report urged donors to work with African legislators to strengthen their role in monitoring the executive, and to focus on medium-term reforms, not just short-term funding exigencies.

The group also noted the rising importance on Chinese aid in Africa and warned that the Asian giant was unlikely to become major actor in strengthening parliaments.

To overcome a lack of research into how African parliaments work, the group urged DFID to publish studies on where it had carried out parliamentary strengthening work. It called on the agency to make an annual report to every recipient country's parliament on aid programmes.