AFRICA-ECONOMY: No Aid Cuts by Tokyo, Japanese Official Says

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 15 1996 (IPS) - Western countries have reduced their aid to Africa and other parts of the developing world but the word from a Japanese official here is that assistance from Tokyo will remain unchanged.

“I don’t think we have aid fatigue in Japan yet,” Dr Shinsuke Horiuchi, Japanese ambassador to Kenya, said here this week.

Tokyo is the biggest source of aid for developing nations, providing 22 percent of total aid provided by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which groups the world’s main industrialised nations.

Unlike Italy, Belgium, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, which have reduced their official development aid (ODA), Japan has increased its assistance in recent years.

However, Africa’s share of Japanese assistance has been low. Latest Japanese official figures on ODA show that, in 1994, Tokyo disbursed 90 percent of its loans to Asia, four percent to Africa, 3.7 percent to Central and South America, 1.5 percent to the Middle East, and 0.8 per cent to Eastern European and other nations.

“I think gradually this trend is going to change, because we feel strongly that Africa shouldn’t be marginalised,” Horiuchi said. “If it is marginalised, the rest of the world will lose.”

Between 1984 and 1994, Tokyo disbursed loans totalling 7.8 billion dollars to 28 Sub-Saharan African countries through its Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF), established in 1961 to promote economic cooperation with developing countries.

Twenty-one OECF-funded projects and programmes are now being implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa, including a 2.9-billion-yen landslide protection project in Mauritius and a 10.7-billion yen project to build a diesel-powered electricity plant in Kenya.

Japan also funds programmes involving research on and the control of infectious diseases — like malaria, hepatitis, filariaris, diarrhoea and schistosomiasis — in Kenya, the largest African recipient of OECF funding.

About a quarter of OECF aid to Africa has gone to Kenya, followed by Ghana (13 percent). However, Tokyo’s assistance to Uganda has increased sharply by more than 1500 percent in the past 10 years, to the chagrin of opponents of the government of Ugandan Prime Minister Yoweri Museveni.

“I think it’s a big mistake from the part of the international community, including Japan, to reward Museveni for suspending multi-party elections,” a Ugandan opposition leader who refused to be named told IPS on Thursday.

The politician, who is in a self-imposed exile here, urged the Japanese government “to apply the same rule for everybody. It shouldn’t single out Uganda” for special treatment.

Like other industrialised nations, Japan has tied its aid programme to respect for human rights and democracy by recipient nations. In the past three years, it has suspended loans to Zaire and Nigeria in reaction to human rights violations in those countries.

But Horiuchi pointed out that Museveni’s case is unique in that he allowed everyone in Uganda to participate in elections. “To me,” he said, “that’s democracy”.

The Ugandan president has not lifted a 10-year-old ban on party politics imposed when he seized power in 1986, arguing that multi-partyism would polarise Uganda along ethnic lines, but he has allowed opposition politicians to run for election on an individual basis.

Horiuchi argued that democracy differs from one country to another. “For example, our democratic system differs from that of the United States, Britain and others,” he said, adding that Japan would contribute 1.5 million dollars — out of a total of 20 million dollars Museveni has requested from international donors — for presidential elections in May.

Tokyo, apparently happy with Museveni’s resolve to restore peace and order in Uganda after 16 years of brutality under ex- presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote, has increased Japan’s annual assistance to that country from 3 million dollars in 1986 to 50 million dollars to date.

An area in which Japan has come in for much criticism is the imbalance in its trade with the rest of the world and Africa is no exception to the general rule.

In 1994, Sub-Saharan Africa exported nine billion dollars worth of goods to Japan, but its imports from the Asian nation amounted to 670 billion dollars.

Horiuchi described the imbalance as “unfair” and said it “has to be redressed,” adding that the Japanese External Trade Organisation (Jetro), a non-profit governmental organisation, was trying to reduce the gap between his country’s exports to and imports from Africa.