Waters shoulders the burden March 11, 2008
Posted by smiffy in Development, International Politics.trackback
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
What do John Waters and John O’Shea of Goal have in common? Not the fact that they’re both self-promoting bores who are the darlings of radio discussion programmes less for the insight of their opinions than for the shrillness of their hysteria. No, they both care deeply about Africa; they care so deeply in fact, that they realise it might be necessary to destroy Africa in order to save it.
Waters’ most recent column in The Irish Times (sub req’d) could be taken straight from the John O’Shea book of wisdom. He points to the success of an ongoing project run by Bóthar Ireland in partnership with Heifer Project International, which provides heifers to families in Uganda who use the dung and urine in order to produce energy.
At the scale at which they operate, initiatives like Bóthar’s can be extremely successful in lifting individuals out of extreme abject poverty. There are few who would argue with Waters’ statement that:
There are no absolute, objective reasons why a country such as Uganda should have poverty or inequality on the scale that exists. The land is fertile, the rainfall regular.
The main problem is an impoverished culture, to which many basic skills have been lost. The key resources required are know-how and a jump-start. After that, the people are capable of taking charge of their lives with passion and energy.
However, where the column starts to go off the rails is where Waters states that:
Those responsible for dispensing official western government aid say that such initiatives can only scratch the surface unless accompanied by systemic, infrastructural development, which can only come about through partnerships between western donor states and African governments. The problem with this, as John O’Shea and others have been pointing out for aeons, is that Africa is rendered developmentally incontinent by corruption.
From the traffic cop who invites the defaulting motorist to “share” the fine (pay half and he’ll tear up the ticket) to the kleptocrat at the cabinet table, the ubiquity of graft and theft render much of the continent unamenable to systemic intervention.
This is precisely the line taken by John O’Shea whenever the issue of direct government aid is raised. While on the face of it, it seems like a strong, principled approach to tackling corruption, on deeper inspection it’s actually completely defeatist or entirely self-servign.
It is certainly true that corruption is a serious problem in many African states, and that it limits the potential of substantial social and economic progress. However, it is equally true that the only way to tackle such corruption – at any level – is to engage with the national governments and civil societies in those states and try and use the lever of direct support (including direct Budget support) to encourage reform. Such an approach is, of course, anathema to someone like John O’Shea who believes that that all aid to Africa should be channelled through NGOs (like, conveniently, GOAL). O’Shea’s mindset is neatly ridiculed in a recent letter to The Irish Times:
One might conclude that Mr O’Shea is now so blindly prejudiced against African governments that even when they do something right his Pavlovian reaction is one of condemnation. This is not the basis for a rational evaluation of events.
- Yours, etc,
EOIN DILLON, Ceannt Fort, Mount Brown, Dublin 8.
These aren’t easy issues, by any means. The idea that aid intended to develop the infrastructure of an impoverished state and help raise the living standards of its citizens is actually being used to support what are often corrupt authoritarian regimes can leave a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth. But if one is serious about achieving the Milennium Development Goals which go beyond basic survival to address issues such as primary education and gender equality – what choice does one have? GOAL might be able to build an individual school or clinic, but only a functioning state can develop and maintain a health or education system.
This is a point well made by Amartya Sen in his Development as Freedom, where he demonstrates that strong social growth (that is, respect for human rights, the rule of law, gender equality, civil society) is a prerequisite for sustainable economic growth which enhances the well-being of all citizens in a state. Of course, it goes without saying that even substantial government-to-government aid isn’t sufficient to create a society where all citizens are able to achieve a quality of life on par with that enjoyed in the West. The wealth of the West is, to a large extent, built on the poverty of the developing world and without a real political will to addressing this (for example in relation to WTO negotiations or reform of the CAP) this is not going to change. However, in terms of the discussion about humanitarian vs. development aid, this is something of a side issue. Indeed, the debate on how best to achieve real progress and reform, economically and socially, in the developing world is one that’s far too broad to be tackled in this piece. What is certain, though, is that it won’t be achieved through electricity from cow shit alone.
The balance between delivery of humanitarian aid where needed and defending human rights (or, rather, not abetting the violation of human rights) is a very difficult one. It’s addressed in a somewhat different context in Samantha Power’s Chasing the Flame where she describes how Sergio Vieira de Mello was often required to negotiate and compromise with particularly unpleasant individuals, and gloss over serious human rights abuses in order to ensure that humanitarian aid reached those who needed it most. However, for the likes of John O’Shea, and his new disciple, John Waters, these issues are very simple, and with a rather nasty, racist undercurrent. Africans can’t be trusted to do things for themselves; the only aid that should be provided should come from Western aid agencies (of course, ignoring the fact that the same kinds of messy compromises made at governmental level with African regimes are made, at a micro-level, on the ground every day by aid workers in order to ensure that they are able to deliver humanitarian aid and do their jobs effectively). The fact that this effectively condemns hundreds of millions of people to a subsistence level existence does seem to cause them much concern. Far more important that we stay morally pure in dealing with them.
Waters concludes his piece by stating:
Intervening at the lowest level of necessity, they move people off the subsistence line and, over time, create functioning micro-economies which allow communities to become self-sufficient and optimistic. It is difficult to resist the idea that, coupled with a multiplier of some kind, such thinking might be the key to a more equal and functional Africa.
Difficult to resist? It’s easy to resist, as it represents the height of sanctimonious wishful thinking. Certainly initiatives like Bóthar’s may lift people from the subsistence line, but they’re not going to build road, install IT infrastructure or train doctors. That’s something that requires moral compromise and a willingness to make tough decisions. However, if one believes that Africans aren’t capable of that kind of progress (or don’t deserve the opportunity to try), it’s easier and cleanier to see them as ‘Half-devil and half-child’, dependent on the generosity of the Man from GOAL.
Oh yes, an argument fully in line with neoliberal thinking. Being poor is the poor’s fault. Africa’s problems are Africa’s fault.
A point made in Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, which becomes obvious on reflection, is that the impact of corruption on economic development is ambiguous. Corruption doesn’t necessarily mean negative economic consequences: you would have to look at such things as what those who receive bribes actually do with their money, bribes being a transfer of wealth. So, looking at the last half century he says, well, Zaire under Mobutu was corrupt, and it did dreadfully, but so was Indonesia, and it did quite well.
Tomas MacGiolla wrote a brilliant letter to the Irish Times in Niovember 2006 regarding John O’Shea’s pronouncements on the Congo. I copy it below.
The Irish Times
November 20, 2006 Monday
Policy on Irish aid to Africa
SECTION: LETTERS; Pg. 13
A Chara, – John O’Shea of Goal has been writing to you for years criticising African governments and their corrupt rulers, calling on the international community to do something about it and trying to force the Irish Government to stop giving them any assistance.
He always writes in the name of Goal so I can’t oppose his arguments lest I be seen to oppose the great work being done by the voluntary workers in Goal. Is he speaking for them or is he expressing his own personal political position? Do John O’Shea and the members of Goal not see that the international community which he refers to is composed of the colonial powers who still control Africa and who decide who will or will not take power?
They also control the funding for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation and decide which crops they will grow, what companies will control the mineral, oil and other wealth, and the whole economy of the country.
In his latest letter John O’Shea again attacks Uganda, about which he seems to be paranoid. He now tells us that the International Court of Justice ordered Uganda to pay reparation to the Congo Republic for the plunder of the Congo’s mineral wealth. All I can say to this is that they have necks in this so-called International Court of Justice. They know, and John O’Shea must know, that the whole international community has been plundering the Congo’s wealth for the last century – led by “little Belgium”, on whose behalf 40,000 Irishmen died in the first World War. Roger Casement had exposed the brutal genocide of King Leopold of Belgium on the Congolese people long before the war started, but his report was suppressed by the British government. Believe it or not, John O’Shea of Goal, little Belgium is still in charge of affairs in the Republic of Congo. They put forward the new constitution and they organised the election of Joseph Kabila as president. They also at least supervised, if not actually carried out, the assassination of his father, Laurent Kabila who was a follower of Patrice Lumumba – also assassinated 30 years earlier in 1961. We have all benefited from the plunder of the Congo. Every mobile phone contains a mineral from Coltan which was cheaply dug from the soil and forests of the Congo with no benefits to the Congolese people. We all owe it to the people of the Congo to at least learn the truth of what is going on and not listen to John O’Shea of Goal.
I would finally point out to him that the diamond capital of the world is not in Uganda, nor is it in the Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone or South Africa. No. The diamond capital of the world is in Antwerp, (which is, surprise, surprise, in Belgium), where there are 30,000 people engaged in the job of cutting and polishing diamonds for the international jewellery business and the industrial market. Enough said.
Yours, etc,
TOMÁS Mac GIOLLA, Chapelizod, Dublin 20.
It is, incidentally, perfectly possible to do business with bodies and in areas which are institutionally corrupt. The arms industry is thoroughly corrupt, yet it thrives: so does construction. And, indeed, professional football.
..and Fianna Fail unfortunately have not been a failure either.
The obsession with African corruption seems to me to be an update of a longstanding narrative blaming Africans for all of Africa’s problems, basically absolving colonialism, imperialist meddling, and structural adjustment programmes of any wrongdoing.
As Ceri Dingle, of “LM Network” fame, pointed out on Spiked a while ago, “The assumption behind allegations of corruption is that huge amounts of aid and funds have been pouring into Africa in the first place. In truth, the total amount of aid to African countries in the past 50 years amounts to very little. Estimates suggest that 60 to 80 per cent of aid even in 2005 was destined for Western consultants, over-priced technical advisers and operatives.” (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3978/)
Which makes it pretty frustrating to see Africans’ criminal tendencies trotted out as an excuse for the failure of systemic relief.
hmmm…. that’s counterintuitive for LM/Spiked… which I guess is the point…
I guess so, if you accept the caricature of them as right-wing libertarians. Their Third World-oriented charity group, Worldwrite, actually have it right on a lot of issues relating to development and aid, even if these well thought-out critiques of the West’s patronizing low opinions and expectations of Africans happen to be put across through extremely low-budget documentaries.
Anyhow, in the 50s and 60s, it was Africans’ communalist, traditional mindset that prevented development. In the late 70s and 80s, it was their preference for socialistic states and big spending. Now its their reliance on loans and their theiving, graft-loving ways… Which makes me wonder what’s the next proposed barrier to development, and worse still, the next Western-devised solution.
Standing ovation for Cadre Macgiolla there. Anyone interested in these issues should beg, borrow, buy or steal a copy of Alex de Waal’s Famine Crimes. This excellent book is subtitled ‘politics and the disaster relief industry in Africa’, and demonstrates how in all too many cases NGOs are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
de Waal demonstrates that the refusal of NGOs to demilitarise the refugee camps they set up in Zaire after the Rwandan genocide (not camps for genocide victims, but for genocide perpetrators, btw) played a major in aiding raids by Hutu extremists over the border into Rwanda. Eventually the RPF regime decided to slap down the Hutu militias and intervened in Zaire (as Tomas points out the prize of Zairian/Congolese diamonds and coltan was another major incentive).
On a wider note, de Waal argues that by taking up the humanitarian slack NGOs block the formation of the ‘political contracts’ between ruler and rule which led to the conquest of famine in South Asia (de Waal follows Amartya Sen’s line about the political nature of famine). The final word: ‘the humanitarian international may be the ‘human face’ of neo-liberalism, but it is a charitable face with little or no accountability’. Quite so.
Nah, I think you’re right mbari… funny how as you say the discourse changes but the message doesn’t…
I’ll have to get my hands on that DJP… sounds really focussed and sensible…
“the refusal of NGOs to demilitarise the refugee camps they set up in Zaire after the Rwandan genocide”
Because NGOs are so-well equipped to take on heavily armed militias?
You’re stretching the point beyond breaking there. You can’t blame NGOs for everything.
They could have withdrawn their services from the camps, thereby depriving the militias of comfortable bases from which to perpetrate their attacks, keep the pot boiling, and generally make a bad situation worse.
What de Waal finds obnoxious about this particular case is the way in which NGOs appear to have believed that they could act in some apolitical fantasy world where their actions were not likely to have consequences. In fact, he asserts that the NGOs allowed the Hutu Power gang to play them like a cheap violin:
‘The extremists laid a trap for the humanitarian international and sprang it twice.’ How did they spring it? By encouraging the movement of thousands of Hutu civilians into Tanzania and Zaire, an exodus in which the perpetrators of the genocide could freely mingle. de Waal points out genocide perpetrators hardly fit the legal definition of ‘refugee’, but that this was ignored by NGOs. In fact, the issues of genocide and justice were ignored by NGOs working in the region in the aftermath of 1994. The media images of yet more ’starving Africans’ were a free gift to NGOs which depend for their existence on donations from the western public whose media does not adequately represent the reality of a situation like that in Rwanda during and after the genocide (that’s how you get Tipper Gore visiting the Hutu camps and saying ‘we’re glad to have met the victims of the genocide’!)
de Waal’s book also has a walk on part for John O’Shea. The post-genocide government wanted to register foreign NGOs, and make their personnel subject to Rwandan law. It also closed displaced person camps in the former ’safe humanitarian zone’ the French had set up during Operation Turquoise. When they closed the Kibeho camp, they botched the job, and in the ensuing riot between ’several hundred’ or ‘8000′ people were killed. NGOs, including Mr. O’Shea, started shouting the odds about a ’second genocide’, this time by Tutsis on Hutus. O’Shea is quoted as saying ‘it is silly to think we should help the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government to establish itslef. Our government should nto now send the 1 million pound aid it has promised that regime. The dispute is ethnic. . . The Tutsi are bent on regence. The 8000 deaths at the weekend are just the start’.
Well, no, actually they weren’t the start, at least not in Rwanda. There does appear to have been targetting of Hutu civilians later on after the RPF intervened in Zaire/DRC itself; but that intervention was a product of the persistent activities of the Hutu militias, something for which the NGOs do bear a share of the blame. Like John O’Shea himself they are all too often part of the problem, not part of the solution.
You took down the picture? Fucking weak.
Yes, I took down the picture but only because it wasn’t showing up when I looked at the site – all that came up was the box with the little red ‘X’.
It certainly wasn’t a matter of taste.
Hey smiffy,
You are being fingered as the ‘hidden hand’ behind the disappearance of politics.ie by some of the wandering vagrant refugees on indymedia
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/86559&comment_limit=0&condense_comments=false#comment222588
At last, a two-footed sliding post challenge on Waters and O’Shea!
Re, “darlings of radio discussion programmes”. I remember a late night Vincent Browne radio show with O’Shea and (afaicr) two similarly high up bods of Trocaire and/or Concern. It was about aid and development unsurprisingly, and it started off with the latter two trying to politely show O’Shea the obvious error of his views on development issues. Only to descend..
Errors such as his unerring focus on native African corruption despite the fact it takes two to tango in the game of corruption and we should focus on the powerful non-African partners in the IMF/WB looking for a minority elite to corrupt. They’re more than happy with an undemocratic regime once it follows their damaging prescriptions.
Or the general lack of focus on the continent’s economies being in control of the international institutions of finance, which in turn leads to disaster for non-corrupt democratically elected governments who aren’t really in control.
Or the historical route to development of most developed economies which runs counter to today’s prescriptions. A developmental route which should not be hampered by requirements for premature institutional development. A form of racially applied impurity with respect to holding back on native development and local choice, which just does not stand up to historical scrutiny anyway. etc etc
Africa grew steadily, if modestly, and more equitably, in the decades prior to the neoliberal era (as did Latin America) when African governments had more of a say over how they developed so we already have a real world example of how Africa has responded to local control of its finances in the past.
Some of the above was mentioned but O’Shea was having none of this and I remember it ending up in an exasperated if roundtable fashion.
*
(I see someone got in on Chang already but the corruption and development has been highlighted by Stilgitz and by Ha-Joon Chang in “Kicking Away the Ladder”, and the later Bad Samaritans: Rich Nations, Poor Policies and the Threat to the Developing World.)