In her 1999 book, No Logo, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein complained that her generation of Left-wingers missed a trick. She came of age during the first wave of what’s now known by its enemies as “political correctness”; and for Klein’s generation the big fights were about representation and language. Who got to use the n-word? How should people with disabilities be referred to? And so on. 

These fights over representation were important ones. But while they were being had, largely unnoticed and unopposed, the ground was shifting drastically in the material realm. Globalisation meant that during the same period, companies and brands had acquired market value – and unaccountable clout – greater than some nation-states.

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While their marketing bumf pumped out messages of impeccable wokeness, their shoes and T-shirts were stitched by starvation-wage children in sweatshops in the third world. These companies were able to lobby against, or use global supply chains to sidestep, laws that protected labour rights, unionisation, safety regulations and the payment of corporation tax. While we were arguing over language, in other words, poor people all over the world were getting poorer.  

The story Klein tells is one that resonates with our times in general and with one moment in particular. You’ll by now be familiar with Dooleygate, right? Stacey Dooley, a well-respected investigative documentarian propelled to mainstream superstardom by winning last year’s Strictly Come Dancing, posted a selfie posing with a Ugandan child taken while she was making a film there for Comic Relief.  

David Lammy responded to Dooley thus: 

“The world does not need any more white saviours. As I’ve said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes. Let’s instead promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate.”

He went on to denounce the “tired tropes” of Comic Relief’s campaign, and to declare his reluctance to be involved in a “PR exercise”. Here, it seems to me, is a perfect collision of the politics of interpretation and material politics.

For, yes. A PR exercise is what it is. And that’s no bad thing. The whole point of Comic Relief is to get as many Britons as possible to donate money to help those less fortunate than themselves. Many of the less fortunate are in African countries. The best way of achieving this aim is to get these unfortunates on the telly and get newspapers to write stories about them. And the best way of achieving that aim is to get the cameras on them. We know where newspaper and TV cameras go: they follow celebrities. The TV show Drop the Dead Donkey was so-called because of the old newsroom saw to the effect that – in terms of news value – a thousand dead Africans equals 100 dead Italians equals one dead donkey in a Home Counties village fete equals one minor injury to a daytime TV personality.

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Comic Relief works with what it’s got. If it takes Stacey Dooley to get a disadvantaged Ugandan child on the front page of the Daily Mail, we may lament the situation, but rather than maintain our ideological purity by declining to participate in a rotten system, we may also say: so be it. As noted White Saviour Bob Geldof put it back when he was organising Live Aid: “Give us the money. There are people dying now. So give me the money.” Or, in the crisp words of Bertolt Brecht: “Grub first: then ethics.”

We can argue back and forth, though Mr Lammy does not, about the extent to which this is colour-coded. Would Sir Lenny Henry in place of Stacey Dooley have made things different? Is it Dooley’s skin colour or her killer cha-cha-cha that put her in the frame? Is it white privilege or first-world privilege that we’re deploring?

It’s true that all this shows how invincibly and tediously the media focuses on trivia. It’s probably true, worse, that many mainstream outlets still pay more attention to white celebrities than black ones, and that they like to slot overseas children of colour into picturesque suffering-victim roles. It would be great to – in Lammy’s tellingly abstract and underpowered words – “promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate”. But Comic Relief doesn’t, I think, pretend to speak for all of Africa, and it’s not a debating society: it tends to focus on “victims” because victims are the people it’s trying to help.

This is not to say that we should all be happy with the so-called white saviour stereotype; nor that it’s either true or helpful or remotely OK to portray the continent of Africa as a monolith of third-world despair populated entirely by FGM victims, teenage warlords with vintage AKs and Toyota Hiluxes, or potbellied tots with flies around their eyes for whom the only glimmer of hope can come in the form of cuddles from well-groomed regulars on the sofa of Good Morning Britain.

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That stereotype ignores the ebullient economic growth to be found on the continent, sidelines the agency of Africans, perpetuates colonial-era paternalism and so on and so forth. Hollywood movies that reproduce these ideas for no reason other than Oscar nominations and box-office profit are a particularly worthy target of opprobrium. But all of this is upstream of the immediate case in point. A photograph of one celebrity with one child is being made to bear a crushing weight of metonymy.

There are good, and complicated, arguments underpinning this silly Twitter spat. You may argue, with justice, that many of the problems to be found on the African continent are the legacy of colonialism. That opens onto a wider conversation about institutional redress.

You could make a case that charities such as Comic Relief represent a piecemeal, voluntary and privatised substitute for formal statal responsibility and reform of trading arrangements. You can argue about the role of Western overseas aid and NGOs in African politics. You can make the case, too, that photographs-of-anonymous-tots fatigue can set in in the West – if we’re seeing the same images year after year we’ll assume that nothing is changing and there’s no point in making a donation. Though, by that token, if we don’t see any images at all, it’s hard to imagine we’ll be spurred to action.

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But to insist that making instrumental use of a style of image should be verboten – that we should swim upstream by changing the entire weird set of prejudices that determine Western media news values before we feel comfortable offering help to actual children in need of food or clean water or basic education – is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Indeed, given that concern over “white saviour narratives” is primarily of interest to those who create and consume Western media, it starts to look like moral narcissism. That kid on Dooley’s hip isn’t – though I risk the charge of cultural appropriation by presuming to speak for him – likely to be much concerned with being slotted into the tired old tropes of a postcolonial master narrative.

He’d probably just like… well, we haven’t heard what he’d like yet because Dooley’s film hasn’t come out yet. And because nowhere in the barrage of hot takes over this has it been reported what Comic Relief is actually doing in that part of Uganda.

Tuition fees we’re already familiar with. Those, however, don’t include the highly inflated price of textbooks. Gated access to academic journals is another money spinner. But not content with all of that, the US sector has found a new way of extracting cash from students.

It all revolves around the use of digital platforms to provide course content – this includes the setting of assignments, online quizzes and exams, and even the automated marking of course work and tests.

This new technology has a great deal of potential, but as Laura McKenna explains in the Atlantic, students in the US are being made to pay through the nose for it:

“Along with the traditional textbooks, many college classes now require students to purchase access codes—which cost $100 on average…”

“…as demonstrated in a new report by Student PIRGs, a collection of college student-run advocacy groups that works alongside U.S. Public Interest Research Groups, students are starting to question their merits: The access codes threaten to exacerbate the already-high cost of college materials, undermining the used-book market and reshaping the college experience.”

It’s not just the price of the access codes that’s a concern, but also the way in which they’re sold:

“…they often come bundled with the associated textbook, students are then forced to buy that textbook, even if they otherwise wouldn’t because they already have a copy or could find a cheaper version elsewhere. What’s more, because access codes expire at the end of the semester and cannot be reused, if a student drops, withdraws from, or fails a class and wants to retake it, she must purchase that code again.”

The irony is that these digital platforms could be used to loosen, not tighten, the institutional stranglehold on higher education. Online access not just to course texts, but assessment and tuition too, could spread the benefits of a university education across the world.

America’s elite academic institutions seem determined to see just how far they go in privileging and monetising access to knowledge; but British universities are in an good position to fully harness the internet and create a disruptive, open-source, model of higher education. Three key advantages immediately come to mind:

• Firstly, the English language.
• Secondly, a disproportionate share of the world’s top universities (only America has more).
• Thirdly, a creative sector with the media and technology skills to build the digital platforms and produce the content.

Of course, all of this will require money. If this isn’t to be extracted from students, where will it come from? An appropriate source would be the UK’s overseas aid budget.  The UK is the only G7 (and G20) nation to meet the UN’s 0.7% target for aid spending. Currently, this cashes out at around £13 billion per annum. What if just one tenth of that were allocated to an online, open-source higher education service?

Year by year, that would build up into the world’s most advanced learning resource – one available to millions around the planet currently excluded from academia’s ivory tower.

When I was born in 1962, approaching two-thirds of people on the planet were trapped in absolute poverty. Today, although the global population has more than doubled, that figure has fallen to just one in ten.

This is astonishing progress. It should be a source of immense pride. But if your business model is built on the concept of posing as a do-gooder to help ease the burden of poverty, this presents a big problem. Especially when you have promoted yourself so well in the past that you have convinced politicians around the world to pour billions into your sector and millions into your pocket. To keep pressure on governments to keep that cash flowing the big international charities are expanding into new areas like any other smart organisation confronting change.

Some of them are focusing on fashionable issues such as conflict resolution or climate change. Others prefer endless conferences to supposedly foster entrepreneurship – even in countries where it needs no encouragement. But Oxfam, a left-leaning brand, has had the bright idea of tapping into current concerns over inequality to retain relevance. So the bosses spent chunks of that cash – raised from idealistic schoolchildren and kindly grannies – to hire a head of inequality and started to switch their attention from the poorest people on earth to the richest.

Now they release a wearily-predictable annual report attacking the wealth gap just as phalanxes of plutocrats gather amid the snow-capped mountains of Davos. This year they have condemned “an unacceptable level of inequality”, claiming that 82% of money generated last year went to the richest 1%. Much of their data is questionable and in truth, the core concept is pretty meaningless. Income inequality in Britain, for instance, has just worsened with footballer Alexis Sanchez’s £2m-a-month pay deal with Manchester United – yet circumstances have not changed for millions of Britons toiling away in offices, fields and factories.

Yet put all this to one side. For the simple fact is that Oxfam is displaying hypocrisy of the most breathtaking magnitude. Yes, there are valid questions over undeserved corporate pay that has boomed to grotesque levels (and I wrote about them, earlier this month, for UnHerd) – along with many other issues surrounding modern capitalism. But Oxfam underscores the very problem it attacks. Even as it begs for cash on its website with emotive pleas for £5 a month to pay for a goat for two impoverished families, it is clear that charity most definitely begins at home for this outfit.

Take a look at the most recent financial data from its United States arm. Raymond Offenheiser, who pompously boasts of spending 20 years “leading the fight to end global poverty” as the organisation’s president, took home a pay package last year worth more than $500,000. This puts him in the richest 0.1% of the world population with income 134 times the global average. There are at least 13 more senior executives pocketing generous six-figure salaries, with even the communications chief given more than $300,000. Funnily enough, while begging for donations to provide shelter or education for poor people, the group never mentions you might be funding their PR person’s pay for a few minutes.

They are far from alone. The sector is stuffed with fat cats as it sucks thirstily at the teat of swollen state aid. Many prominent charities have mutated into corporate behemoths clad in compassionate garb.

David Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary who fled into the arms of International Rescue Committee, saw his pay packet rise by almost $80,000 to $671,749 according to most recent data. Would he really not do this job for a little less as he tours the world pontificating about the need to alleviate human misery? “By standing with us, you show that you are here for humanity,” says Miliband. To put his pay in perspective, he gets more than 1,560 people on average wages in a country such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are many more revolting examples like this. The boss of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, given hundreds of millions of pounds by Britain, took home more than two million pounds in four years. Save The Children, which boasts of “securing” contracts worth £91m from Britain’s Department for International Development in 2016 has a president in the US pocketing more than half a million dollars a year and almost 200 staff at its international body, based in London, on six-figure salaries – nine of them getting paid a cool quarter of a million dollars annually. 

If Oxfam and its fellow development giants really cared about inequality, perhaps they should put their own houses in order. Clearly the poverty industry has become very lucrative for those at the top. This can be seen also with soaring pay and profits among the private consultancies creaming off cash from taxpayers, some of whom even avoid tax. Meanwhile local offices of big charities can struggle for funds. I have also heard from African staff angry at being paid less than Western colleagues, let alone having housekeepers and school fees covered. Such is the neo-colonial arrogance of a sector that poses as saviours of the poor.

Yet there is one more layer of hypocrisy in this saga exposed by Oxfam. For these are powerful players in society, both in developing nations with influence over public services and in Western countries with input into political debate. Some analysts and experts ask valid questions over whether their efforts make matters worse in developing nations by propping up dictators, fuelling conflict, fostering corruption and undermining democracy. Yet the media all too often see them as saintly organisations and just throw soft-ball questions at their representatives.

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This is especially true of the BBC, which sees itself as an arm of the aid sector with its own scheme spending government money on development projects and endless promotion of the cause through anachronistic events such as Comic Relief. It has run a few decent investigations such as a recent Panorama exposing foreign aid diverted to Syrian extremists. But why are aid chiefs not grilled in key radio and television slots over their hypocrisy, their pay, their mistakes, their false claims? They should be treated no differently to business bosses or politicians. Instead they are simply given time to pontificate about their supposed good deeds.

Meanwhile big charities exploit struggles of magazines and newspapers in an age of digital disruption. They have departments to lure naive celebrities as ‘brand ambassadors’, knowing they can win flattering coverage and get cuddly pictures into print when visiting projects abroad. And they take journalists on free trips, knowing media budgets are being cut and they will get supportive articles for their work – usually without any indication of who funded the coverage. Christian Aid once defended spending on journalist trips to me by pointing out the resulting coverage would have cost ten times more in advertising. Yet how many journalists would be so complicit in promoting other powerful institutions?

The poverty industry is now a vast sector employing more than 600,000 people.

Spending surged 9% to more than £100bn in 2016, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

There are nations that get aid from the West, then give away millions to poorer places with their own development programmes.

There are nations with space programmes being handed aid.

There are nations stuffed with millionaires given aid.

Immense sums are sloshing around the world, much of it simply making rich people even richer.

So give thanks to Oxfam for raising the issue of inequality – so long as they turn the spotlight on their own greedy, indefensible and very wealthy fat cats.

Ibrahim is right. This simple and obvious fact – that politics lies at root of many woes – is often ignored in the debate over development. So the entrepreneur chose to do something different to many other wealthy philanthropists, who routinely fall for fantasies that simplistic solutions imposed from outside can solve complex local issues. He decided to dedicate himself to promotion of good governance.

To encourage change, Ibrahim adopted a twin track strategy:

• First, he offered a multi-million pound prize to democratically-elected leaders who improve politics, strengthen human rights and then stand down voluntarily. Tellingly, there have been just four winners since it was inaugurated in 2006.
• Second, he oversees an annual index, taking data from multiple sources, that ranks the progress of nations.

The latest edition, just released, reveals worrying trends:

• Especially in some key nations such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Nigeria.
• Yes, most African countries are judged to have bettered governance over the past decade, but these improvements have slowed or even declined in some cases.
• Participation in politics and civil society seem to be slipping.
• Crime and political violence “remain on concerning negative trajectories”.
• Better health care is top of the class, but education progress on a continent with more than four in ten citizens aged under 15 has almost halted.

It is easy to overdo the pessimism and fall for damaging myths so prevalent in the West of a continent beset only by problems. There are 28 nations, led by those with best governance, that have improved economic opportunities for their citizens. Capitalism, consumerism and technology are delivering real change to people’s lives. Yet the overall deterioration in outlook underlines my view that torrents of Western aid are at best an irrelevance, and at worst corrosive by propping up despotic regimes while hampering democracy.

Many experts – especially those not beholden to the money-drenched aid sector – would agree. Foremost among them is Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Economics after a lifetime studying global poverty. Two years earlier he stunned the development world by demolishing ‘the aid illusion’ so adored by smug Western politicians and celebrities, pointing out that substantial aid flows achieve the opposite of their aims by compromising institutions, contaminating local politics and undermining democracy.

Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel from the Brookings Institution calculated the global poverty gap – how much it would take to push everyone on the planet over the poverty line – was $66bn. This is less than half the $142.6bn given last year in development aid. No wonder there is controversy over such spending – and that we see fat cats creaming off cash intended for the poor. An industry created by naive Westerners has spawned an insidious form of colonialism, one that feeds vanities of politicians at home while fuelling conflict and corruption abroad. Just look at the latest scandal over Adam Smith International, the biggest specialist private aid contractor, with allegations of funding jihadists and fictitious people on the payroll.

There is increasing honesty from some about that aid being an instrument of control and leverage. It “extends our sphere of influence…gives us soft power which promotes our vital interests abroad,”’ wrote former Tory minister Nick Herbert last week. Yet African leaders have been largely happy to take free cash on offer from foreigners. So it was fascinating to hear a new narrative proposed by Ghana’s leader Nana Akufo-Addo, who won power a year ago amid concerns over a stumbling economy, sharply-rising debt and soaring corruption – especially since it was such heady stuff.

The business-minded president, setting out his vision for his continent’s future to the Royal Africa Society in London in October, challenged fellow African leaders to hasten democratic advances, respect liberties and move “beyond aid” since it was “unhealthy” for both donors and recipients. “We do not want to remain the beggars of the world,” he said. “We are not disclaiming aid, but we do want to discard a mind-set of dependency and living on handouts.”

Akufo-Addo argued foreign aid failed to deliver growth and attacked its dependency culture it created:

“This new generation of African leaders should help bring dignity and prosperity to our continent and its long-suffering peoples. We no longer want to offer the justification for those who want to be rude and abusive about Africa.…we have learnt from long and bitter experience that, no matter how generous the charity, we would remain and, indeed, we have remained poor.”

The president has since been reiterating this message back home. Last month, for example, he urged the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to collect taxes effectively to help wean the nation off foreign aid. “We should become like all the progressive countries in the world, a country that depends on its own resources to buttress its own development, and not a country going around cap in hand begging,” he said.

This stance offers a significant change. And he is not alone in saying such things. Paul Kagame, the thuggish Rwandan president, proposed a deadline for his nation to stop relying on donors and is leading the African Union’s push to wean itself from foreign funders. But the arguments carry more weight coming from a democrat, not an autocrat – especially the leader of a middle income nation seen as a standard-bearer in sub-Saharan Africa, the first to win independence and holder of a series of peaceful elections since 1992.

To wean a country off the toxic teat of aid takes more than just patriotic pride, even in a country such as Ghana that has reduced dependency. The concept requires a shift in political culture, one that forces elected leaders to focus more on serving domestic audiences, rather than foreign donors. As one impressed British diplomat told me, Akufo-Addo’s stance has potential to strengthen self-belief, increase accountability and deepen democracy – especially if backed publicly and privately by his ministers.

There are many ways aid corroded Africa.

It has fanned conflict and corruption.

It distorted government priorities to satisfy donors.

It calcified public services with pointless bureaucracy to churn out panglossian reports.

It fuelled disturbing false narratives of white saviours and infantilised native peoples.

It funded waves of new colonialists driving around in costly jeeps telling locals what they need.

And it even wrecked the image, ensuring many Westerners are scared to visit a continent of 54 diverse nations that they constantly see portrayed as a place of fighting and famine.

As Mo Ibrahim recently told the Financial Times, African politics demonstrates all too often that “it is the head of the fish that goes rotten first.” So how good to hear the president of Ghana demand that his country moves beyond aid. The hope is that this display of leadership and self-confidence, like previous political trends, fans out from Accra across the continent. And perhaps even that his bold words about welfare dependency and handouts are heard in Westminster.

Though the physiocrats went wrong by overlooking the added value created by non-agricultural sectors of the economy, it is true that progress in agriculture enables other economic activity. If we weren’t able to rise above subsistence level, then none of us would have the time to do anything else but sow and reap to fend off starvation. But when a surplus of food is produced, then farmers can support a growing population of other workers – including those who make tools and develop methods for enhancing agricultural productivity.

This virtuous circle of surplus and reinvestment has driven growth throughout recorded history and continues to be important today – especially in the poorest countries where subsistence agriculture is still a big part of the economy. To escape poverty it is vital that farmers invest in their land.

But what if it isn’t their land? Or, rather, what if they can’t prove it’s theirs? Without secure rights to a piece of land, you’re less likely to invest in the long-term improvement of its soil, or build a workshop on it, or install a solar panel there.

The importance of property rights to development is something that is well understood, but according to Frank Pichel for Project Syndicate it is still a major problem in many parts of the world. A major component of that problem is the lack of adequate documentation:

“According to the World Bank, more than 90% of Africa’s rural land is undocumented. Overlapping and conflicting land-management systems are the norm, as are inaccessible, out-of-date, incomplete, inaccurate, or nonexistent land records. But while dysfunctional systems of land tenure have no doubt cost African governments millions in foreign investment, they have hurt African farmers most directly.”

As a result, the grounds for investment are missing – literally:

“Africa’s small family farmers – already burdened by soil degradation, climate change, and resource competition fueled by surging populations – face an even more challenging bureaucratic hurdle: no paper to prove that the land they call home is theirs. Uncertain of their ability to control their farms into the next season, farmers’ planning horizons shrink. Instead of investing in terraced fields, planting trees, and buying high-quality fertilizer, Africa’s farmers seek to maximize short-term profits. This is particularly true of female farmers, who face an additional thicket of discriminatory land laws and customs.”

In this respect, what Africa needs is more bureaucracy – i.e. a reliable system for surveying land and documenting its ownership. A properly functioning legal system is required to enforce property rights – but the authorities first have to know exactly who is entitled to what.

The economic, social and environmental benefits are clear:

“In Tanzania, women with secure rights earn three times more than their landless counterparts. In Nepal, children whose mothers have secure land rights are 33% more likely to be well nourished…

“Communities with clear legal control over land manage those resources more assiduously than those with shaky tenure. The same can be said for individuals. In Ghana, farmers with strong land rights are 39% more likely to plant trees. In Ethiopia, farmers are 60% more likely to invest in preventing soil erosion when they have secure rights to their plots.”

When western nations first began accurately surveying and mapping their land, it was a top-down process. For instance, Britain’s Ordnance Survey grew from a decision by George II to map the rebellious Scottish highlands. This came fast on the heals of Louis XIV, who ordered the production of the first modern map of France.

In the 21st century, technology is enabling local people in developing countries to take the initiative instead:

“Advances in GPS, drones, and cloud computing have given communities the ability to document land – with or without official recognition or support.”

British aid money is being used to support these grassroots initiatives – which, if we want aid to help people become less dependent on outside help, is exactly the right approach.