Africa: Why the Obsession With NGOism?

Africa has been told so many colossal lies, but some grand civilizational falsehoods have become so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that generations cease to question them.

Perhaps the most expensive and most enduring lie ever sold to Africa is the pious fiction that an army of foreign-funded Non-Governmental Organizations can develop a continent.

This patent lie told to us for ages is one of those absurd propositions that it could only have gained acceptance among Africa’s political elites because they have long outsourced the difficult business of thinking for themselves.

A question that Africans ought to have asked decades ago is: if NGOs are the indispensable engines of development, why is Africa, after more than half a century of hosting tens of thousands of them, still the world’s favorite exhibit in the museum of underdevelopment?

The question is not intended to diminish the sincerity of every individual who works within an NGO. Many are undoubtedly decent men and women motivated by genuine compassion for their fellow beings.

The outcome of the NGO’s quangos’ invasion of Africa is before us for all to see.

Despite the saturation of our continent with countless organizations ostensibly dedicated to fighting poverty, poverty in Africa has displayed an astonishing talent for surviving their relentless assault.

Every conceivable social problem has acquired its own donor-funded bureaucracy. There are NGOs for governance, gender, sanitation, youth empowerment, climate justice, conflict resolution, and almost every affliction known to humanity.

NGOists’ four-wheel drives have become as familiar on African roads as taxis and Matatus in East Africa, Danfo in Nigeria, and Trotro in Ghana.

Their workshops fill expensive hotels, where they wine and dine on menus with prices that look like International telephone numbers.

As NGO conferences multiply with almost biological enthusiasm, their Consultants, who receive salaries that would make many African cabinet ministers blush with envy, shuttle endlessly between airports. Meanwhile, their reports only accumulate dust in government offices.

Yet Africa remains exactly where it was expected to remain, still utterly dependent.

In his remarkable book “The Lords of Poverty”, published more than thirty years ago, Graham Hancock performed what amounted to an intellectual autopsy on the international aid establishment.

It was not pretty.
Hancock argued that the aid industry had gradually evolved into a gigantic bureaucracy whose continued existence depended less upon eliminating poverty than upon administering it.

Poverty, in effect, had become the indispensable raw material feeding an immense humanitarian machine.

The thesis was dismissed as unnecessarily cynical. Three decades later, Africa itself has become Hancock’s most persuasive witness.

What has the vast humanitarian enterprise actually accomplished that can honestly be called development?

Some questions we should ask include: Which African country has graduated from dependency because NGOs camped within its borders? Which nation has become an industrial power because donor agencies organized enough stakeholder consultations? Which economy has built machine-tool industries through capacity-building workshops? Which country has transformed itself from an exporter of raw materials into a manufacturer of finished products because foreign consultants taught villagers how to write project proposals?

The reason why NGOism failed is elementary: Development has never been a charitable enterprise. At one public function, a Dutch Prince, Claus, dramatically removed his tie and shouted: “You can’t develop people. People must develop themselves.” He was echoing Julius Nyerere: “You cannot develop people. You must allow people to develop themselves.

Unfortunately, NGOists do not appreciate the psychological import of claiming to be developing people; their paternalistic mindsets suppose an innate superiority complex.

Development has always been an industrial enterprise. The historical fact is that nations become prosperous by building factories to manufacture things, generating electricity, educating engineers, protecting strategic industries, mastering technology, investing in scientific research, and, more importantly, exercising sovereign control over their natural resources.

That is why we must view the NGO phenomenon within its wider geopolitical setting.

Western governments that display extraordinary enthusiasm for financing NGOs exhibit remarkably little enthusiasm for dismantling the profoundly unequal structures of international trade.

They lecture Africa endlessly about development while subsidizing their own agriculture, protecting their own industries and erecting tariff barriers against African manufactured goods. They encourage Africa to export cocoa but not chocolate, cotton but not textiles, bauxite but not aluminum, lithium but not batteries, crude oil but not petrochemicals. They preach free markets to Africans while practicing economic nationalism at home with almost religious devotion.

This contradiction is not accidental.
An industrialized Africa would negotiate with the world as an equal. A dependent Africa negotiates from its bended knees. A technologically sophisticated Africa would compete with the advantage of having immense mineral wealth.

A permanently aid-dependent Africa remains a compliant supplier of cheap raw materials and an eager consumer of expensive manufactured goods.

It is therefore far more convenient to finance programmes that alleviate the symptoms of underdevelopment than to support policies that might eliminate the condition.

Niger offers a particularly revealing illustration of this contradiction.

For decades, after ostensible independence, French NGOs proliferated across the vast impoverished nation and spoke eloquently about humanitarian concern and sustainable development, blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, French commercial interests got uncontested privileged access to Niger’s uranium under arrangements that many critics regarded as profoundly unequal.

Khadija Sharife brilliantly chronicled France’s perfidy in her 2010 article originally published in Pambazuka: https://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=9947

Africa’s governing (groveling) ruling class has become so intellectually colonized that it now mistakes dependency for partnership. African Ministers put on their best Saville Row suits to proudly announce the arrival of yet another donor-funded initiative as though national dignity consisted in attracting foreign benefactors rather than building productive economies.

These plantation supervisors measure their success by the number of NGOs operating within national borders rather than by the number of factories, research laboratories, steel mills, and industrial parks they build.

Another question that begs for answers is why African leaders unconsciously accepted the degrading proposition that Africans are destined to be permanent wards of international charity.

The permanent generosity of another people has never developed people. There is no free lunch in international politics. Every grant serves an interest as every donation carries an expectation. The smiling benefactor represents strategic calculations that extend far beyond the sentimental language of humanitarianism.

Shame alone ought to compel African governments to wean themselves from this degrading addiction to organized dependency.

The plantation supervisors who masquerade as leaders must awaken from their slumber and rediscover the elementary truth that nations are built not by donors but by producers; not by workshops that generate paperwork but by workshops that manufacture machines.

Countries are not developed by perpetual charity but by productive labor, scientific excellence, and fearless political leadership.

What Africa needs is not NGO. Africa needs justice in international trade, sovereign control over her resources, industrial ambition worthy of her immense potential, and leaders with sufficient courage to reject the narcotic of dependency.

Until that awakening comes, the continent will continue to mistake the management of poverty for development, while congratulating those who have perfected the lucrative business of ensuring that neither ever truly ends.

©️ Ọdọ́fin Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan, Ọdọ́fin I of Kasoa)

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