A necessary evil

Where is the meaningful cultural exchange? And where is the voice of the South? Pascal Mailu, Programme Officer in ANPPCAN-Kenya questions development workers and the Western development agenda as such.

Two years ago, Kenya's current Minister of Planning and Economic Development (Professor Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o), told the National Assembly that the African continent loses up to 75 percent of aid money on so called technical experts either from the West or deployed in the country courtesy of the West.

Although much has been said about this approach of sending development workers, the six million dollar question still remains; Who sets the agenda for development assistance, and by extension, is the sending of development experts to African countries by their Western development partners the best way to go about it?

Suffice to say that the role that external aid has played in the development arena in the African continent cannot be downplayed. A diversity of development initiatives in the continent have been successfully financed by Western governmental or non-governmental development agencies, ranging from the construction of bridges, roads, hospitals, schools and houses for the marginalized, to the provision of the basic essentials of life like relief food, medicine and water, to the formulation and execution of human rights advocacy campaigns for the oppressed.

However, it is an open secret that aid is also employed as a tool by most Western countries to advance their political, social and economic agenda in the South, and it therefore follows that in most cases, the agenda for development in most African countries is set by their Western partners. The so-called "donor trends" mainly dictate which, how and when respective development programmes will be implemented, thus forcing their African partners to toe the line in terms of streamlining their programmes to fit in and cope with the dynamics of the West. Even when Western partners accept to support local initiatives, the sets of conditionalities that accompany the aid are sometimes unrealistic and detrimental to the local populace. While it is understandable that the money belongs to them and that they have the prerogative of giving conditionalities, it beats logic for some of the conditionalities to stifle the very development that the money is meant to facilitate. And even though most Africans have abused the resources provided to them by their Western counterparts, the practice is not unique to Africa, but permeates even the most prestigious Western monetary institutions -the IMF and the World Bank. Furthermore, the Western partners have in most cases continued pumping resources to countries or development initiatives even when they know that a large percentage of the same goes into people's pockets. A good example is the former president of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, who continued enjoying enormous support from the West despite knowledge that most of the monies were being stashed to bank accounts in the West while human rights abuse had become the order of the day in the country. Thus the question of what the West considers its primary objective...to facilitate development or to cultivate good relations where they have interests.

One such condition or trend that is employed by Western partners is the dispatching of development workers/experts from their countries to provide "technical assistance" to their local partners. In the first place, there is an abundance of local expertise in some fields where agencies are forced to import experts. Despite this, a substantial volume of resources are spent on the sustenance of the development workers, whose terms of service are perceived as immorally generous by the local employees as well as the communities they serve. The duration that the external experts spend in their respective local development agencies is in some cases also not adequate to translate into any substantial improvement in the quality of the programmes that they are deployed in. In my opinion, most of the time is spent getting acquainted to the local variables, and as the development worker starts to appreciate the differences on the local scene, it is time to pack and give the next development worker a chance.

Intercultural exchange is frequently quoted as a key objective of sending development workers from the North to the South. However in my opinion, this is hard to achieve, as both parties rarely take time to deliberate on or exchange cultural values through talks or other activities. Furthermore, few agencies (if any) make any primary consideration regarding the development workers' geographical station of origin (e.g. whether urban, semi-urban or rural) in relation to the stations they report to in the South so as to facilitate meaningful intercultural exchange. Thus in some cases, development workers are sent from urban working stations or residences in the West to urban stations in the South. The crosscutting general similarity in the features of urban settlements the world over thus means that both parties cannot learn much from each other, thus frustrating one of the supposed key objectives of the initiative. Furthermore, it is my belief that intercultural exchange is spontaneously and economically fulfilled by the tourism industry in the country.

Even where development workers are effective in the work they are deployed to do, their style of operation in some cases generates tension and conflicts within the local agencies. Some of the development workers/experts' for instance come to Africa with a know-it-all attitude, believing that the local personnel are mere recipients of information and skills/expertise on development issues. This superiority complex intimidates the local personnel and impacts very negatively on the two parties' co-operation, thus choking the very development that the strategy was meant to facilitate. In some instances, the external development workers are expected to be, or just feel primarily accountable to their mother agencies. This generates a lot of tension in their relations, as the local agencies perceive them as spies who report on the internal goings-on to their mother agencies. However, some of their efforts to promote democracy in the local institutions/organisations they work for are progressive, as they lead to a widening of the democratic space through critiquing the authoritarian African organisational culture. In some cases this leads to a deliberate sieving of the information that the development workers are supposed to get, thus limiting their knowledge and involvement in the local initiatives.

So where does this leave the development worker? In my view, like the beneficiaries of the 8-4-4 system of education, the development worker is the victim of a system whose appropriateness and viability raises many uncomfortable questions. While most development workers are people who genuinely aspire to positively contribute to development work in their African workstations, the distractions that the continent offers in terms of tourist attractions sometimes actively competes with their primary objective of facilitating development.

In a nutshell, most agencies have therefore taken to accepting the development workers as a necessary evil more to be condoned than fully appreciated. Otherwise if their Western partners were flexible, they (local agencies) would predictably prefer to be instead, provided with the direct funding to either utilise it on other more pressing needs or hire the same services locally at a cheaper rate, thus guaranteeing more control/direct accountability over all personnel and simultaneously saving on resources.

In my opinion therefore, the recipients of aid should be given more say in charting out the development agenda and especially the question of deploying external development workers. Otherwise it is difficult for them to perceive their relationships with Western donors as partnerships, since in ideal partnerships the agenda should be addressed through elaborate dialogue and consensus building. Only then can we guarantee meaningful and sustainable development, as the local agencies will have more space in detailing what they need and by extension on their priority areas without the fear of missing out on funding.

"We should scrap all debts and we should scrap all official aid as well. But where would that leave Africa? Well, it would leave the continent exactly where it should be: with the Africans."

Paul Harris, The Observer, Sunday February 16, 2003