After the Ballot: Coming to a Donation Box Near You

I am intrigued by the recent proliferation of web-based giving and I have been keeping a curious eye on sites such as Kiva.org and Heifer International, in an attempt to understand what is going on. A few days ago, I found the Guardian Unlimited’s new idea: Katine. You can read all about it here. I was somewhat displeased, to say the least, to find that the Guardian thinks this Ugandan village exists in a time-warp. Indeed, Guardian readers are invited to lift these poor suffering villagers out of the Middle Ages into the twenty-first century by their generous donations. I could not make this up if I tried and so I left two disobliging comments and called it a frustrating day. Yet, even as I ranted and raved at the Guardian Unlimited’s dangerous flights of fancy, it occurred to me to wonder why I bothered—there are many less complicated and more effective ways of torturing myself. For example, I could read about elections in Kenya, more on which below.

The larger question, as far as the Guardian goes—which isn’t very far--is really one of the place and purpose of western philanthropy in Africa. Thoughtful Africans, in East Africa and elsewhere, have concluded that aid dollars demand too great a price in African dignity and autonomy and it has been argued that the aid industry serves to excuse African governments from many of their responsibilities towards their own people. Moreover, policy making becomes skewed, as priorities are determined by donor countries and organisations – it is their money, after all, if one ignores the tiny details of the continuing saga of colonial grand larceny—without reference to those most likely to be affected by such policies. We all understand this, and we even understand that just as the original version of colonialism was ably supported by the civilising and Christianising mission, so also the contemporary corporate and political predators are well-served by an aid industry which pretends there are no political foundations or power dynamics involved in any of this; that wars, poverty and disease are simply African conditions existing without known cause or culpability; that it is a mere accident that best paid members of this industry, grass-roots credentials notwithstanding, are likely to be white; and that several decades after these schemes were introduced for our ‘development’ one needs a microscope to find signs of progress.

Given all this, critics of these philanthropic development efforts say, it behoves us as Africans to check the mouths, teeth and dental records of these gift-horses very carefully. Better yet, reject the ‘gift’ and think of another way. I understand this viewpoint, and I want largely to agree. Ever since MMK of the much-missed “Bullets and Honey” blog came up with the ‘dollar a day’ label for us, no further explanation of the peculiarly distorting effects of the aid industry has been necessary. I too, am tired of being from the begging-bowl people. I too, think supporting entrepreneurship is a good idea. I, too, think that harnessing the energy and creativity of Africans is a much better thing to do than parachuting externally-designed schemes and projects into long-suffering African communities who would be forgiven for supposing that all white people everywhere regularly drive around in white four wheel drive vehicles with improbable acronyms stencilled on the doors. I too, would like to get out from under this infantilising burden of perennial rescue missions. Really, I just want to tell the lot of them to eff off.

Here’s the problem, though. The part of me that dearly wants to tell the patronising, condescending, pitying, self-indulgent, largely ignorant and frankly annoying western do-gooders that they can shove their plans and projects up the nearest sweet-spot is forced to stop and recognise that I am not about to go and build a school in any rural community anywhere in Africa anytime soon. There we have it: I am not about to do it, and I am not planning on doing it, and they—aforementioned condescending, pitying, etc.-- are. Were I a mother with school-age children in one of these communities targeted by the aid industry, then, what would be more compelling for me—a principled objection by a fellow-African who makes much more money than me but isn’t inclined to share it, or a scheme to build clinics, schools and etc. proposed by foreigners who moreover have the money to back it up? This is not rocket science: principled objections do not pay rents or school feels, ever. Choosing between my principled zero dollars, and the patronising million dollars doesn’t even take a second’s thought—Show Me The Money.

This rock-and-hard-place business is intolerable, and it is our own fault. Here we Kenyans are, for example, on the verge of undertaking one of the most closely watched elections in African history, and our considered response is to regress into ethnic factions whose rhetoric is so predictable as to be actively boring. I’ve blogged about this already and bring it up here only because the irony struck me quite hard: on the one hand, I am arguing with the Guardian’s editors about their incapacity to accord Africans their full historical standing, and on the other, I am treated to the spectacle of Kenyans who seem all set to ignore and in fact to destroy the benefits of precisely this historical standing. It is not that I think that ethnic identities are anything other than fully contemporary—I do not subscribe to the notion that these are remnants of history mistakenly hanging onto the present. They are as current as the upcoming Safaricom IPO, undoubtedly, but how useful are they as frameworks through which to view our collective future? If we continue along the present trajectories of fragmentation, there will not be much to celebrate in January of 2008, whoever wins, and then we really will need rescuing by the four-wheel-drive civilising-mission types. Should we ask the Guardian to turn its attention to Kenya when it has finished in Uganda?

It is astonishing that the mere prospect of an election can cause Kenyans to drop the ball in this fashion. People, here’s the thing: all things considered, each of the three presidential candidates is more than qualified—they all obviously have the experience and the will to do the job. ALL of them—we would be fine with any one of them, if only we can get round to forcing them to behave like presidential candidates and not like contestants for a high school beauty pageant, complete with associated pettiness and triviality. Kibaki is all for laissez-faire capitalism and economic growth, Odinga is concerned about social justice and redistribution, and Kilonzo Musyoka has positioned himself as the perfect compromise between the former two positions. These are all perfectly legitimate political positions, and what the rest of us have to do now is decide which platform works best for our interests.

One of the dirty secrets of politics is that major parties or candidates really cannot afford to be too radical in any direction; the campaign bombast and thunder have more to do with speaking to crowds than with serious policy intentions. Case in point: Kibaki’s free-school scheme, which his own civil servants keep telling us isn’t going to be nearly the manna-from-heaven that we would suppose it to be. It is not that I am picking on Kibaki as having singularly unrealistic election pledges, but rather that as he recently was heard to tell others not to engage in unrealistic political pledges, he should himself perhaps take the log out of his own eye. To weigh his idea against the education platforms of the other candidates would mean that we engage in a serious debate about realisable goals and ambitions, consider the probable sources of funding, discuss whether this is a good use of our tax shillings or not, and make a decision based on the unglamorous calculations of planning, pragmatism and profit, whatever we consider a ‘profit’ to be.

I am aware that this is much less exciting than the dramatic battles between good and evil that the candidates and their supporters are attempting to present to us—being irrepressible drama queens, the lot of them. The current hysteria over the ethnic foundations or support base of this one or that one are worrying only because the self-interest of the political actors threatens to overwhelm their common sense—it works for them to declaim and denounce and declare in full throat. It doesn’t work for us, and their self-inflicted absence from rationality is no reason for us to play along. Their talent for theatre is neither here nor there: our ambitions as a people are. If we are not able to comport ourselves with the degree of gravitas and maturity that we should expect of ourselves, the Guardian Unlimited and its friends will be happy to lift us out of our degenerate, quaintly archaic, pathetic and suffering medieval ways. These are the choices: grow up fast and get a grip, or surrender to our dollar-a-day fate. Bono for President, anyone?