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The development charade: empowerment, and other myths

Written by Stephen Williams

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Rasna Warah provides an interesting explanation of how this anthology got its curious name. She was working for one of the 20 UN organisations operating in Afghanistan in 2002, shortly after a US-led coalition ousted the Taliban from power, when she had a chance meeting with a Canadian aid worker. He asked her: "Which category do you place yourself under? Missionary, mercenary or misfit?" Presumably he had formed the opinion that all expatriate development workers fell into one or another of these three categories.

Although Warah admits she never quite answered this question, it must have resonated with her growing doubts of the ‘development movement' that she was part of and provided the motivation that was to lead her on a journey of self-examination that culminated in this book. Like the very best journeys of self-examination, hers involved the contributions of many colleagues, friends and acquaintances who, like her, were mainly based or had worked in East Africa.

Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits

An Anthology

Edited by Rasna Warah

£11.95 AuthorHouse

ISBN 978-1-4343-8603-8

Inviting them to provide their perspectives on what development really means to the peoples of Africa, she assembles a chorus of differing voices. But they sing in tune and - as the saying goes - they all sing from the same hymn sheet.

We know much about Warah's own views on development work in Africa. They can be gleaned from The Development Myth, the chapter authored by her that opens this anthology. It was edited extracts from The Development Myth that were published in African Business last month (February 2009 issue) as part of the magazine's cover story, AID - Who benefits?

One telling sentence from this chapter reads: "Visits to Kibera and other sites of degrading poverty offer [development workers] an opportunity to ease their conscience and to gloss over the fact that foreign debt, imposed economic reforms, unfair trade policies, corrupt governments, not to mention centuries of slavery and colonialism, are among the main causes of poverty in Africa - not the lack of sufficient foreign aid."

However, it is clear from subsequent chapters that it forms a part of the narrative, it is not the effectiveness or otherwise of official development assistance that is the main theme of this book. Rather, it is the broader subject of multilateral development organisations and both the international and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that are discussed in depth in the following chapters.

A good example of this is the chapter after Warah's, penned by Victoria Schlesinger, a science and environmental journalist, who describes a visit to a village in western Kenya called Sauri. Sauri was chosen to become a Millennium Village Project (MVP), its population consequently becoming the most hated in the region due to their neighbours' envy of the perceived benefits of MVP selection it had attracted.

She not only writes about Sauri's involvement with international development groups but also describes how economists (including the redoubtable Jeffrey Sachs), local politicians, researchers and aid professionals, described as "VIPs in SUVs", have all sought to leverage their own self interest from the MVP's ‘holistic approach' to poverty alleviation.

NGO theatrics

The activities of well-meaning yet ultimately short-sighted professional developmentalists are by no means restricted to plucking small communities out of obscurity to stimulate their economies and upgrade social services such as healthcare and education in a social experiment that, having proved its worth, can subsequently be ramped up to a regional, national and pan-continental programmes. They have also impacted the creative sector, as outlined by Bantu Mwaura who describes what he calls "NGO theatre" in Kenya.

NGO theatre, in Mwaura's own words "is single-mindedly concerned with the specific development issues that seem to animate the donor community", and ever since it emerged as a continental crisis in the 1990s, it is HIV/Aids-driven theatre has dominated. Produced by NGOs, it has results in actors, producers, playwrights and directors, who might have spent their time in engaging in creative works of their own, being lured by quick and easy NGO money. They are now "acting, producing, writing and directing plays that have little entertainment value" while abandoning participatory, traditional cultural practices, including song, dance, poetry and storytelling theatre.

Promoting traditional, travelling theatre groups of a participatory kind has been one of Binyavanga Wainaina's interests in recent years. Wainaina was the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing laureate who used the prize money he was awarded to set up East Africa's first on-line literary magazine Kwani? He has also been involved with a renaissance of progressive repertory theatre in Kenya.

Wainaina has become something of a populist people's laureate; his sardonic, acerbic style taking pinpoint accurate aim at the international community's simplistic and often absurd attitudes toward, and involvement with, the continent. In this anthology, he contributes an essay entitled The power of love. It is a swipe at the We are the world tear-jerker anthem sung by an assembly of Western pop stars who had decided to set out to ‘save Africa'. Like Schlesinger, he notes the phenomena of ‘VIPs in SUVs'.

He writes: "The resources poured in have been incredible. Tens of thousands of 4x4s are tearing the country apart looking for a project to love. It used to be that big expensive cars were needed by the Fathers of Our Nations, so they could Develop our Nations. Now it is the Lovers of our Nations, and of course, they need cars to be efficient. Standards must be maintained. Things need to be run to International Standards."

Yet another writer talks about ‘VIP's in SUVs' - Lara Pawson, a past contributer to African Business who has worked across Africa as a journalist and as an editor for the BBC World Service. In her contribution, A Charitable Apartheid, she describes how NGO staff are clearly defined as either Western expatriates or local staff, and enjoy very different treatment from their employers in terms of salary structures, housing, and transport facilities.

"From the moment a Western aid worker arrives in Africa, he or she joins the upper echelons of the social and economic hierarchy," she writes. "His or her living standards are on a par with the local elite - a far cry from the average African household. For example, aid workers have their own transport: usually a large, white four-wheel drive."

Her comments brought back memories of the time this reviewer spent in Dar es Salaam and how, waiting for a dala-dala (local bus) to travel into the city in the morning, would pass the time counting the number of near empty 4x4s that would pass by. Usually they had the name and logo of a NGO emblazoned on the door with a local driver up front and a single occupant in the rear, studiously reading papers before getting to his or her office.

It was not unusual for more than 50 of these vehicles (forbidden by their organisations from picking-up local people) to pass-by before a jam-packed dala dala would arrive to pick-up the people waiting at the stop.

Perhaps Pawson's most pertinent comment regarding development workers in Africa is one that she borrows from Arundhati Roy who noted that NGOs often act as the frontline promoters of the neoliberal project, "accountable to their funders, not the people they work among..."

This book's third and final part is given the tile the Politics of Aid by Warah and lays bare - in four powerful chapters by Sunny Bindra, Maina Mwangi, Issa G Shivi and Firoze Manji - just why there has been a groundswell of criticism aimed at what might be described as the failed model of international development assistance. At the root of the problem is what an African proverb, quoted by Bindra, so eloquently illustrates: "The hand that receives is always below the hand that gives."

Men behaving badly

Bindra chooses to discuss how President Yoweri Museveni "went ballistic" when the then UK Secretary of State for International Development, Hillary Benn, announced the withholding of some British aid in the wake of allegations that Museveni was using government funds to finance his 2006 election campaign and the arrest and jailing of the president's main challenger at the ballot box, Kizza Besigye.

"It makes you wonder, does it not," Bindra writes, "about the nature of [donor/recipient] relationship? Both sides seem happy - one to bestow, the other to receive - until, for whatever reason, the flow is interrupted. Then the acrimony begins. ‘Don't tell us how to run our lives,' says one side. ‘You're misusing our money and abusing our trust,' says the other. ‘Don't interfere in our affairs,' shouts one. ‘You happily took our money and blew it on parties,' screams the other."

In discussing the relevance of aid to Africa, Maina Mwangi (a Kenyan investment banker working in Nigeria) chooses to point out that, by its very nature, aid is a blunt instrument. With spending priorities set by a political process, he says, the resulting misallocation is there for all to see.

The problem is that politicians want to use aid for headline-grabbing grand projects. For example, a dam will have a higher priority than classrooms or clinics. "The dam, once built, has an almost metaphysical existence; it is there in all its massiveness, a physical manifestation of the ability of the political class to ‘deliver development'. No need to worry about maintenance, or the provision of irrigation systems to improve agricultural productivity, or roads to help farmers get their produce to market, or reliable tide registries, or anything else," Mwangi notes.

Shivji examines the explosive growth of NGOs in Africa, all seeking international aid funds. "All you have to do is learn the particular language that NGOs use," he avers, "be adept at writing reports and proposals that flatter your sponsors and damn your rivals in government or other NGOs, and [it almost goes without saying] learn to drive a 4x4." Shivji tells us that in Kenya, more than one new NGO a day (many bogus or ‘briefcase') are registered each day.

Before Warah wraps up this anthology with an afterword, Firoze Manje provides the final chapter to this fascinating miscellany. Manje, a former director of Amnesty International's Africa Programme, is the founder and director of Fahamu, which among other activities is a publisher with bases in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Oxford UK. He is also the editor of Pambazuka News. Taking issue with the whole NGO issue he asks if "they will continue to define their role as part of the political economy of a form of development that breeds and sustains inequalities and conflicts, or whether they will rally to the standard of solidarity and rights." Throwing down the challenge, he tell them: "The choice is yours."

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This review first appeared in the March issue of African Business magazine. Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits was self-published by Rasna Warah and is unlikely to be found on the shelves of bookstores. However the facilitating publisher, Authorhouse offers an on-line mail order service. Visit: www.authorhouse.co.uk. It is also available at amazon.