This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 25, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Corruption in African countries still throttles the well-being of Africans, but government to government aid from

Western countries hasn't been shown to curtail it, quite the opposite.

That according to Michaela Rong, author of It's Our Turn to Eat. She spoke at the Cato Institute June 22, 2009.

It's been, I think, a bigger problem in Africa's development,

holding back its development,

then just about any other issue.

People talk about the problem of debt,

people talk about global warming now. But really corruption has worked against all the efforts

to deal with those issues and it comes straight from the top and if you're talking

about Kenya's particular example the Goldenberg scandal which happened in the

early 1990s really created a 10-year recession.

Anglo-Lissing, which was a new scandal, has created a crisis in which 1,300 people died because corruption eventually led to political instability in Kenya and massive ethnic clashes after the election.

So I think you can't separate corruption from the political instability we see across Africa.

What's the role of foreign aid in either maintaining or stopping the corruption that exists?

I think too often what you see in Africa and Kenya has been an example of it but it's not the only

example and I've written about this in previous books notably about the role that Aid played in propping up her

Mobutu Seseo and Zaire.

Too often, the foreign donors tend to lose perspective of why they're lending or giving money to Africa.

It was here no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, because they wanted to be able to keep lending.

And so the aid programs often take on a momentum of their own and donors are more

...