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Al-Nahda
In all my years of writing, I have been tempted only once, in 1995, by the little siren that whispers, “you, too, can write a poem. Go ahead, do it.” Mercifully for all of us, I don’t have a copy of that poem; it has disappeared to the ether of the internet. But the subject of the poem is still relevant: NGOs. Or, more accurately, the inefficiency and false piety of many mega NGOs. It is always good when one’s intuition is backed up by hard evidence; more pleasant still when one’s sense of inferiority is refuted by compelling evidence. Today’s Alnahada is about right intuitions and false prejudices. And the source is one book: Jeffrey D. Sachs’ The End of Poverty. About The Author & The Book Jeffrey Sachs is an economist who has achieved the status of secular sainthood. Mother Theresa used moral arguments to shame people into helping the poor; Sachs uses statistics and the laws of economics to convince rich countries that it is in their interest to help poor nations. He had a hand in repairing the economies of South American countries (like The book, as its title suggests, argues that it is quite possible to bring about the end of poverty or extreme poverty in the world. This is possible for two reasons (1) technology and (2) income gap. The rich are so extraordinarily rich and the poor are so heart-breakingly poor that all that would be required is for a transfer of wealth of only 124 billion, a puny 0.7% of the income of the twenty two nations who make up the Donor Assistance Committee, to lift all people up from extreme poverty (can’t meet basic needs) to poverty (can meet basic needs, but no more.) The author laments that despite pledges made by the donor nations, the goals are unlikely to be met because Today’s situation is a bit like the old Soviet workers’ joke: “We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us.” Many poor countries today pretend to reform while rich countries pretend to help them, raising the cynicism to a pretty high level. The main thesis of the book is to draw attention to the need of direct foreign investment and donation to poor countries, specially in Africa. The argument is: if a vehicle is stuck in the mud, it will never move, unless it is given an external push. This may or may not be persuasive to you (depending on your ideological bent); what is undeniable is that he has persuaded many people, including those most inclined to say, “pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps” to commit to help. To the shock of many, Bush committed to provide huge funding to assist Africans with AIDS, Curing The Complex This is not a book review, so I will stop there and let you judge The End of Poverty for yourself. What I want to do instead is to try to provide excerpts from Dr. Sachs books as alternative answers to the disturbing ones given in response to this question: why are we Africans lagging so far behind the world in everything? The disturbing answers, whispered or taught are: it is their culture. They are corrupt. They are lazy. They are badly-governed. Many of these explanations are actually internalized because for example, every government in 1. What Culture? In 2006, an African is told to feel inferior; a Moslem is told to modernize his religion and a Moslem African...well, he better lock himself up at his home and wait until he is told it is safe to come out:-)
Thankfully, everything we are told turns out to be wrong. In The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom To Overcome Tyranny & Terror, Nathan Sharansky chronicles how many Western experts used to erroneously argue that the East cannot handle democracy because of their “culture.” It turns out that the same bogus “cultural” argument used to be made about the East and how it will never develop. The experts had predicted, for example, that In a paper he presented, Mr. Zemehret Yohannes, one of PFDJ’s shining lights actually argued that our values and culture is communal and therefore we have to modify capitalism and democracy to fit our culture. What culture exactly prevents us from developing or self-governing? He did not elaborate. But the “culture” argument is used for everything and this book demolishes most of them. For example, let's take a hypothetical Muslim country and we were to say that there was a revolution that resulted in that country being governed entirely by Islamic law. What prediction would you make about (a) population growth in the country and (b) female school attendance at the country? I will go first: I would say the population would explode because birth control is frowned upon in religious societies and female school attendance would decline, because religious societies tend to be traditional societies. And I would be wrong on both counts, according to Professor Sachs, if we take the case of
While on the subject, a lot of the debates in the Eritrean internet are completely based on emotion, fear and prejudice, no doubt influenced by Western "cultural" explanations of Islam that it is irrational, fundamental, etc. "Yet some of the fastest growing economies in the world in the past decade have been Islamic...Bangladesh, 3.1%; Tunisia, 3.1%; Indonesia, 2.3%." People around the world are the same: they want a better life for their children than the one they have.
Forget Western biases for now, even our own intellectuals believe it. In “We and Our Region”, the inimitable Fessehaye Woldu quotes Zanzibar’s Abdulrezak Gurnah for describing Africans as “men sitting under a tree waiting for the mango to ripen.” Don’t know about Zanzibar but when I was 8 years old, not only did I know that the best way to accelerate the fruit-ripening process was to bury the fruit in a sack of flour but to deny any knowledge of it when the forgotten spoilt fruit ruined the flour. But that is not scientific. But seriously, are we Africans lazy? Here’s an interesting poll mentioned in the book: The World Values Survey asked the world if it is “specially important for children to be encouraged at home to learn hard work.” Here is the tally of how the world answered the question in the affirmative: Americans 61% South Africans 75% Nigerians 80% Tanzanians 83% And Eritreans? The pollsters for World Values Survey were arrested for working against
This is a relative word and, Sachs argues, corruption is directly linked to poverty and not to culture or values. “
One thing those of us who harp on democracy need to acknowledge is that there is no direct relationship between development/wealth and the presence or absence of democracy. Intellectual honesty requires of us to admit that one of the economic marvels of the world, NGOs My mercifully-lost poem was unkind to NGOs—which many criticized as an uninformed and emotional diatribe. I was referring to the gigantic NGOs and international agencies like the World Bank and IMF who provide no real help, and then blame the poor countries for their disastrous policies. Sachs describes it in a dramatic manner: Contrary to popular perception, the amount of aid per African per year is really very small, just $30 per sub-Saharan Afrian in 2002 from the entire world. Of that modest amount, almost $5 was actually for consultants from the donor countries, more than $3 was for food aid and other emergency aid, another $4 went to servicing This is even more dramatic in my adopted country, the At some level, at some non-cerebral, stubbornly-Eritrean, probably-irrational level, I confess that I, for nano-seconds, think the eviction of NGOs from All Eritreans, pro or anti-government, help their families in One solution is provided by Dr. Sachs—the reform shouldn’t apply just to the governments of the developing countries but to the NGOs themselves. But now, there is an innovative and exciting solution which I hope will eventually find application in Here’s how it works: there is a farmer in, say, Hagaz. He needs, say, an ox. Or fertilizer. You go to the Internet, see the picture of the farmer and, using Pay Pal, send your money. He uses the money, buys his ox or fertilizer, and improves his life. There is no middle-man, no administrative fee, no consultant fee. Every penny goes to the farmer. You sleep with a clean conscience; he sleeps with his fed children. Some American volunteers came up with this idea—a great one, until the NGOs and governments take it over.
Isn’t it time for us "the educated Eritreans" to come up with something like this—without the pro-PFDJ Eritreans thinking it is an insult to the PFDJ and the opposition supporters actually thinking it is a distraction from the campaign to bring change in Eritrea?
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