I'm not sure anyone (ever) has believed the just monetary aid was what Africa needed. Indeed, the recent Live 8 stuff was explicitly
not to raise monetary aid but instead to concentrate on achieving "higher awareness" (whatever that might mean). Trying to pretend otherwise is pure straw-manning.
As for free-trade : in a sense, yes. Free trade is absolutley needed in Europe and the United States so areas where the developing world has a chance to export (e.g. agriculture and textiles). Highly subsidised and controlled European agricultural markets are not an example of free-trade and never have been.
However, I would say that free-trade means whatever the speaker who uses the term wishes it to mean. It is becoming as meaningless as "freedom" and "democracy" among politicians. For instance, a key component of "free trade" for the United States is pressuring other countries to enforce rigid intellectual property laws. In concrete terms this usually means increasing the number of arrests of people who "pirate" software, cracking down on trading of counterfit goods, etc. The perversity of restricting trade of a harmless, safe under the banner of freedom of trade does not occur to the people persuing such a poolicy.
Similarly, "free trade" in parts of Latin America and Afghanistan is dedicated to trying to stop farmers grow the most profitable crop they can grow (opium or cocoa in many cases) using violence in some cases. Again, the irony is lost on the policy makers.
I'm also skeptical on the following remark
Quote:
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Another disturbing fact of the MDG, noble intentions notwithstanding, is that they have been used as benchmarks by African states to promote centralized national development, even though the past century taught us a clear historical lesson: that central planning and authoritarianism fails and that market economies and democracy work.
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Now, this depends entirely on what you mean. Yes, the Stalinist states in the Eastern block were failures under most measures, especially when compared to their Western European counterparts (although in many cases comparisons were unfair). Yes, the countries who have done reasonably well economically have generally been democracies. However, I can think of no country which has been an economic success where national government has not had a huge roll to play in economic development on all sorts of levels. The countries with the highest levels of economic development (North-West Europe, the United States, Japan to an extent) have (or have had) large state involvement in the economy to varying degrees.
Among developing countries the countries which have flirted more directly with neo-liberal privatisations (e.g. in Latin America) have generally faired quite badly (in relative terms) in achieving long-term economic growth and stability. The countries which our media fawns over as the next big thing (China, India) have government systems in some senses which are far more controlling than our own.