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these sources are available and provide comparable amount is a vital explanation to why EU conditionalities may not be coherently adhered to.
The availability of these new donors do not only serves as substitute of EU aid that keeps declining over the years, but also is more reliable, flexible and consistent.
The new donors also enable the regime to carry on significant development projects that until today greatly serve as reasons of support to the regime. These projects funded by either Taiwan or Kuwait unlike EU projects are not based on government fulfilment of conditional requirements such as adherence to democracy and human rights but rather commitment to strengthen relations in the case of Taiwan and repay-ment obligation in the case of Kuwait.
5.3 FOREIGN AID CONDITIONALITY FOR DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN
RIGHTS PROMOTION
Donors in order to inculcate certain principles and norms to recipient countries have often relied upon aid. Aid as conditions in itself has been used to promote reforms in trade and economic policies as well as establishment of bilateral relations. The Euro-pean Union as bastion of democracy and human rights has gone beyond conditioning aid to trade and economic reforms to also attach democracy adherence and respect of universal human rights for continuation of cooperation and aid.
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To find if EU aid is enough to promote democracy and human rights in The Gambia, I look at the various efforts by EU in the promotion of democracy and human rights in The Gambia. Apparently, apart from the Cotonou Agreement that serves as bases for cooperation between The Gambia and EU, the Union is also engaged in democracy promotion through institutional reforms in the form of training for judiciary and na-tional assembly members. It is also engaged in the media and the public finance management as well as advocacy such as the access to justice programme. These are all geared to make institutions responsible and accountable to the people. Regardless of all these efforts, institutional reforms in The Gambia remain to be desirable. The independence of the judiciary is still far fetching as the executive still controls the appointment and dismissal of judges. The national assembly after series of training on budget scrutiny, human rights and rule of law still enact draconian bills such as the indemnity bill 2001 and media bill enacted in 2012. The media also remain critically short of basic standard as the state media reports cover only government policies and other views hardly aired on both national television and radios while private media exercises self-censorships. Therefore, on a general assessment, EU democracy and human promotion activities in these institutions have little or no significant impact.
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The most used leverage is the Cotonou Agreement that has obligation for The Gambia government to fulfil in order to receive EU aid. These obligations can also be dis-cussed through the Cotonou Agreement mechanism such as the political dialogue. In this, the European Union provides incentives in form of aid for countries that show improvement in democracy and human rights while it also under the same Cotonou Agreement applies aid suspension and cancellation to countries that default or violate the agreement.
In the case of The Gambia, this agreement and use of aid as incentive have failed to improve democracy and human rights. Since the resumption of EU aid to The Gambia after 1996 elections, EU net aid were intermittent from as low as 1.6 million dollars in 1997 declining further to 1.4 million in 2006 and rising considerably to its highest ev-er of 38 million in 2011. Eithev-er this rise and fall of aid could be as result of the decline of democracy and respect of human rights or yet still the inconsistency of aid on the other hand resulted to the decline of democracy and human rights in The Gambia.
This study could not establish the causality here. Nonetheless as the Polity IV and Freedom House data indicate, The Gambia from 1998-2001 scored very high on the Freedom House scale at 7 points for political rights and 5 points for civil liberties in-dicating not free status. This occurred at a time when the average aid to The Gambia
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from the EU was US$ 5.5 million. Human rights however improved moderately from 2002 to 2008 to 4 points for political rights and civil liberties indicating partly free status. This occurs at a time when EU aid steadily increases rising as high as $9.8 mil-lion in 2008. Conversely, 2012-2014, human rights conditions deteriorated to not free status scoring 6 points on both civil liberties and political freedoms aping approaching the 1998 status at a time the EU had threaten sanctions and even withheld aid. The same is equally true for the Polity IV data that shows stagnant scores of -5 from 2000 to date. This data does not show the causality of the failure of democracy and human rights promotion in The Gambia, what it however indicates is that foreign aid from the European Union regardless of its flow, had little or no impact on democracy and human rights promotion. Slight increase and consistence of aid yielded some positive gain for democracy and respect for human rights, but was so minimal to relate the
gains to the volume of aid. Furthermore, observations from these data indicates that since The Gambia has other reliable bilateral donors, EU’s sanctions or threats of
sanctions have not been successful but rather further pushes The Gambia away from the norms promoted by the European Union.
In order to correlate data to the general view of Gambians concerning EU aid and democracy and human rights consolidation in The Gambia, I initiated few questions.
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On the availability of foreign aid particularly from the European Union, respondents were asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to three question statements intended to view their opinions over the use of foreign aid conditionalities and if aid is enough to democra-tize and promote human rights in a country.
Most of the respondents 67.7% agree that EU aid should be tied to liberal democracy and respect of human rights in recipient countries. It is important to note that these respondents support for conditional aid has much to do with the trust of their
govern-ment in the dispensation of the fund instead of the benefit of democracy and human rights. one of the respondent say ‘ aid without conditions breeds corruption,
misap-propriation, embezzlement on the side of elites and suppression of political opponents,
so aid with conditions could help improve democracy, human rights and increase chances for individuals to realize their natural potentials’.
Another respondent is similarly concerned with dispensation of aid by recipient coun-tries and says that councoun-tries should welcome aid with condition for the following rea-sons:
1. Conditions on aid might increase incentives for policy reform by recipient’s devel-oping country government.
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2. Allocating aid to countries with good policy environments might increase the im-pact of aid spending for intended purposes and
3. Aid conditions might help increase our ability to account for how the money was used and what effects it had in the recipient end’.
This was evident in the response to the second statement that asks if respondents think aid conditionality can lead to transition or consolidation of democracy and respect of human rights in recipient countries. Contrary to the support for conditional aid, 63.3%
believes that conditional aid cannot lead to democratic consolidation or respect of human rights. Moreover, 90.3% believes that foreign aid is not sufficient to condition developing countries to consolidate democracy and improve human rights. This attest to most literatures on foreign aid and democracy promotion such as conclusive re-searches by Bermeo, (2011); Knack, (2004) and Morgenthau, (1969) all which show a zero impact of aid on democracy consolidation.
Asked which form of aid should developing countries prefer? Of the respondents, 61.3% prefers aid without conditions attached as against 38.7%. This question com-plicated my puzzle since it created some self-contradiction in the respondents’ an-swers. Even though 61.3% still prefers aid without conditions attached, 67% of the same respondents nonetheless believe that aid should be tied to democracy and
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spect to human rights while still having low expectation of the impact of such condi-tionality on democracy and human rights in their country. What this information somehow indicates is that respondents do not have enough faith in the transparency of their leaders and since there are no sufficient mechanisms for accountability, condi-tional aid remains one undesirable option to ensure accountability. As such, most view these conditionalities as accountability mechanisms instead of effective democracy consolidation and human rights promotion tools. This keeps resonating in their re-sponse to why recipient countries should prefer either of the two. While some think aid without conditions might not be transparent, others expressed concerns of the bad records of accomplishment of developing countries concerning the utilizations of aid fund. The table on the appendix I page 102 /give a detail of the responses.