Develop me: Poor leadership and loss of African pride

via Develop me: Poor leadership and loss of African pride – NewsDay Zimbabwe March 23, 2015 by Tapiwa Gomo

THE lagging development in Africa is explained in various narratives depending on who is addressing it.

The reasons range from lack of leadership, high profile corruption, dictatorship, the assumed primitiveness of the Africans in general, lack of appropriate policies to adopt the Western lifestyle and a dozen others.

Despite the many acres of literature on this subject, the people in Africa remain poor, if not getting poorer.

The continent has become an experimental destination for trying new models and ideas, including sometimes new drugs. The sincerity of these efforts to address problems also varies with who is conducting the experiments.

From the economic perspective, it has been the structural adjustment programmes, the economic partnership agreements and a wide range of others which emphasise policy reforms.

In the health sector, how circumcision reduces HIV transmission remains a mystery in our lives, but they are also drug trials which had good intentions.

In all this, the questions remain, what has crippled a continent to such levels of vulnerability to become an object of subjugation? This is not an easy question to answer.

A visit to an African rural village especially during the planting season, will demonstrate how hard working the African villager is.

Men hustle to secure farming inputs including the embarrassing act of working for their neighbours to secure enough seeds for their field.

Women carry and breastfeed babies as they work in the field from dawn to dusk. Girls carry out domestic cores before and after school.

Similarly boys plough the fields before and after school.

All this is sustained by one or two, not so good quality meals per day. By sunset, every member of the family’s face is a sad story of sweat, tiredness and an incontrovertible edge to rest. There is no time for self-defining.

There is a serious problem here. All this hard work is rewarded in most cases once or twice during harvest times a year by which time the value of their income will have been eroded by inflationary pressures and price increases that is if we discount other natural shock such as drought, pests and general leakages.

Their Western counterpart works twelve times less and yet they earn twelve times more than their African counterpart.

The second problem is that African family has no other choices, like their Western counterpart, apart from tilling the land for survival.

Failure to farm means that the family will starve unless there is a well-funded NGO to provide food aid.

But then here is another conundrum. Why then work long hours in the field to earn a little when one can maintain their vulnerability and qualify for aid. The African sun is hot. In some areas the land is hard and rocky.

The NGO providing food aid also collaborates with another one which fights for human rights and children can now focus on their school as part of their rights with glaring possibilities of securing a job with the same NGOs.

Family production has gone down but consumption needs are being met, so everything at family level is now balancing. But at national level the economy is starved of farming inputs, prices go up and unemployment skyrocket.

Government income, in the form of tax remittance, dwindles. Companies start to close down. The government can no longer afford to pay civil servant salaries, including teachers for the same children freed from intensive labour by free aid.

Tensions ensue between the government and its people.

NGOs, and their donors, too are angry that the government is reneging on its promises and children and human rights are being violated.

International funding, which is supposed to support economic growth is diverted to civil society organisations to advocate for rights from the poor government.

The unemployed and disenchanted are mobilised to protest in the streets.

On the other hand, the little funding that trickles into government coffers is used to deploy uniformed forces to repel the mounting protests.

Again, productive funds are used for non-productive purposes.

It is understandable that everyone has a justifiable right to be annoyed by the situation, but something is wrong here.

Bad policies or lack of them have become a national security threat.

When the new African government took over, it over celebrated its victory over colonialism and focused more on consolidating political power forgetting that the real power lies in establishing policies that should have supported the African villager.

It was basic interventions as simple as agriculture mechanisation which would have reduced the working hours, increased family production – income of which would have been used to diversify.

It is such basic intervention which would have ensured family pride but the government missed the opportunity.

The family traded their pride to save themselves from sweat, hard labour and low income.

It is no longer a short-term problem. The children who complete their education leave the country in search of, not better, but any type of employment to look after their parents aged and worn-out by hard labour in the farm.

The longer it takes the government to fix problems back home, the longer they stay in the Diaspora and the more others leave also.

The investment in education is lost to countries that have better policies to make better use of educated hands and minds.

Tapiwa Gomo is a development writer based in Pretoria, South Africa