I have less and less time for the work of the organisations and people launching their work from London, DC, Tokyo and Paris - the DfID’s, Oxfam’s and Save the Children’s of this world - who claim to be central to bringing development of Africans and those parts of the world that are in a similar mire.
Not because they are bad or do bad things. Clearly they have capacity for good – but, in their current guises, they have little or no role in the kind of transformative change I (and I think most progressives) really believe in.
For example, take Bob “man of 2005” Geldolf. Whilst he might claim that he’s been able to save a million children’s lives in Africa, him and his entourage of charities, musicians and politicians have done more than anyone else to justify the global, regional and national power structures that stamp out any hope of freedom, diversity and equality for poor people living in Africa. And furthermore they’ve done more to silence those who legitimately cry for a shift in power structures that shape their world. They are responsible for Africans finding themselves humiliated once more.
But this article is less about the mega NGOs - they will carry on milking the guilt of the rich and perform some vital and important acts, particularly in sharing expertise and providing vital resources in emergency situations. This article is more about how Africa is losing one of its core tools for self-realisation: ideology.
***
The independence era, which you hear people talk about in terms of bitterly missed opportunities or “at least I was there in that time of hope” fondness, was a time where African leaders were globally great (see, for example, George Alagiah’s account of Ghana’s independence days in his book A Passage to Africa). They were espousing new and great theories that would set the path of Africans to homespun emancipation. Nkrumah, leader of Africa’s first independent country, Ghana, talked about a political economy that would both meet the rigours of the global economy, through state control of natural resources and aspirations of African unity, whilst at the same time build domestic structures that would ensure that all Ghanaians, from very diverse backgrounds can develop in the ways that are meaningful for them. On the other side of the continent Nyrere, the independence leader of Tanzania, was building a Ghandi-inspired socialist vision of the country that was built on the notion of homegrown economic development.
These ambitions and dreams were lifted by the spirits of newly emancipated, self-determined people across a continent that had, for the previous 400 years, been a cauldron for big companies and countries to spoon whatever took their fancy, from humans to diamonds to oil.
50 years on, the resources of Africa continue to serve small elites, many more are dark skinned now, but the capital flight from the continent is indicative of how the development of Africa is not for Africans or owned by Africans, even in supposed cases of success like Botswana. The main crisis of the continent is not the widely written problems you know of, such as:
- imperialism built through the military-industrial complexes of the US and EU
- savage out-of-view exploitative global corporatism
- race to-the-bottom principles of the WTO.
No. The main crisis is that the North’s development discourse is the increasingly unchallenged idea at the centre of Africa political thought. This non-ideological, management-bureaucratic thinking of “development” (as defined by the Washington Consensus groups) is largely accepted among the political and business groups across Africa for pragmatic, coerced or corrupt reasons, rather than ideological ones.
The result is elections between people wearing different colours but talking the same talk: reducing the size of the state; privatising public services; opposing corruption; developing stable macro-economic institutions to inact monetarist policies; empowering women. These decisions, which may or may not be right for the myriad of countries of Africa, are plucked out of World Bank papers (read: manifestos) time and time again, for African country after African country, by African leader after African leader without grounding these policies in big picture values that paint an impression of what their countries can be like and should look like, and how they will get there. (And by big pictures values, I don’t mean the usual tripe that basically means a little richer than now.)
The lack of big picture values and ideology, of visions of utopia, leave the African elite with an empty bureaucratic leadership. The visions of the great African leaders were so important because they were visions that merged socialist, capitalist, ruralist, village-based conceptions of the world and twisted them into a uniquely African phenomenon. They may have been flawed but they were developed with the view to connect to the everyday experiences of the vast and diverse rural experience of Africans with their newly independent destiny. Anti-corruption may well be something that connects to the everyday experience of rural and urban Africans, but without a clear value base that attempts to deconstruct why it has permeated and infected so many levels of African societies (beyond the usual simplicity of “poor leadership”), there will be no clear strategy that effectively removes that cancer.
The real power of values - whether it is Nigerian religious-individualism or Tanzanian market-collectivism - is that it mobilises, it engenders, it creates opposition, and it creates accountabilities. An ideological landscape is utterly practical and utterly essential to development.
The fact is, however, that ideology is not dead in Africa, it is underground. Bright thinkers traverse the continent debating, dissecting every political theory that exists in the world, building African derivatives and making new ones. The problem is that these political fighters and intellectuals are being prevented to build their voice and gain in strength to be major political players. It is here we come back to the development industry, because it is this philanthropy that removes the working class and poor African political voice on the local and global level, reducing them to starving wrecks or white-saved, white-teethed, carefree bathers bathing under newly, white-fitted water pumps.
On an everyday level people are intellectually and emotionally dispossessed of their political urgency by external money changing their worlds with little or no local accountabilities and control - on scales that are huge. Everywhere in Africa the unionists, environmentalists, Marxists, feminists, libertarians, pan-Africanists are debating the future, but this debate is extinguished from national or local debate as soon as foreign money comes into play and decisions are made.
“Better wages for cotton T-shirt workers” doesn’t fit well with a bid for cash for a free school, which could have been funded locally if employees were given living wages. But whilst better wages would be the one sustainable thing to do for improving the lives of this community, the free school (which only has funding for 2 years and therefore will be shut down after that) both sustains the influence and power of the big external NGOs and the influence and power of the politicians who can claim that they are not renegading on their educational duties to their people, whilst keeping international finance and industry happy.
***
Ideology needs to return to centre stage in African political discourse on a huge scale. This is largely going to be an internal exercise. But external actors can look to campaigns like the abolition of slavery and anti-apartheid campaigns, which were based on solidarity rather than charity, so we hear and connect with the many political voices from Africa.
The development NGOs and government organisations, however, have no mandate for the politicisation of people. So they are stuck in a quagmire of doing a bit of good, in a wider environment that does a lot of damage. That’s why I simply don’t really care about them any more.
Any organisation, like unions, political parties, think tanks, libraries, museums, universities and schools, that can build mutual links with African groups should; and allow us to hear the ideological visions of every voice in Africa. We’re all fed up of the diet of ultra-sad dying or ultra-happy saved Africans, solidarity links will give us a glimpse of reality and might also help fuel a renaissance in African political philosophy.
