Up until a couple years ago, entering the international airport in the West African dictators' paradise of Equatorial Guinea was a matter of splashing across two inches of muddy water standing on the floor of the terminal, a tin-roof wood shack. Airport workers sat in the unlit gloom inside, glowering. Looking out of the hut, travelers could see a modern building rising out of an adjacent clearing, cubist and glassy in the manner of airport terminals everywhere.
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"Is that the new airport?" visitors would ask, picking their way across the puddles on the terminal's floor. "No, that is the president's wing," Equatorial Guineans would tell them.
"It's named after the president?" visitors inquired. "No, it is the president's," the Equatorial Guineans would say.
In Afghanistan, some have taken improvements of a kind most noticeable to visitors -- a renovation that has brought order and marble floors to Kabul's airport, cell-phone networks where there were none in Taliban times -- as signs that things may be looking up for Afghans. Peter Bergen made that case earlier this month in a blog post titled "The Afghan Phoenix." Bergen wrote of "markers of real progress over the past eight years, which in a small but important way is exemplified by the turnaround at Kabul airport.''
It's an understandable conclusion -- particularly because development work in Kabul until recently has offered up so few other big projects. But the lessons of decades of international aid in Africa teach that it's misleading to think the airport is a real indicator of economic progress.
With a GDP per person of only $700 a year, few Afghans are going to be rolling their suitcases across the marble floors for flights out. Prestige projects, like airport renovations, that bring comfort to Afghanistan's foreigners and well-off in themselves are signs only that lots of money is flowing in. The misadventures of aid in Africa show that progress is measured in shrewd, targeted projects that improve the fortunes of ordinary people, in ways that can be seen by eye, accounted for in a spreadsheet, and kept out of the hands of the many seeking a cut.
In five years traveling Africa as a reporter, I learned a flashy airport stands among the top five of every misgoverned country's development must-haves. That held true even in countries otherwise stomped flat to the ground by war and misrule. Other among the dictators' development delights invariably were a presidential palace; a palm-lined, paved road connecting the palace to the airport; and a cell-phone network. If the local religion allowed, there would be a beer factory. (In cases of rebel reversal of fortunes for a regime, the airport might take a few mortar hits, but fighting to preserve and control the beer factory would be heroic and to the death.)
For the worst autocrats, that was all the development a country needed. The top-fives allowed a leader to meet his fellow African rulers at his (a.k.a., the country's) airport and impress them on the drive back to the palace. There, the leaders could drink beer and talk about how well things were going. The cell phones were for dialing up Swiss bankers, to wire out whatever foreign aid or payments for national resources came to hand.
Any trickle down to the public was inadvertent. In Equatorial Guinea's case, the people were left to line the rutted, colonial-era roads, selling roasted bush rat-on-a-stick to passers-by.
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