BARGAD
Firoze Manji, the Kenyan editor of Pambazuka News, talks to French magazine La Decroissance.
LA DECROISSANCE: You assert that in Africa, ‘NGOs unconsciously take part with the current oppression’ and you go as far as comparing that with the French collaboration of the Vichy regime. What could we say to all those well-wishers from the rich countries who think they are helping Africa with those NGOs supporting development?
FIROZE MANJI: Some have criticised me for the use of the analogy about collaborators and the Vichy regime in France. It is true that Vichy was a collaboration with an occupying force. But I would argue that African countries, like many countries of the global South, are also occupied territories. Only in this era, we are dealing not with colonial occupation, but with occupation by corporations and oligopolies. They control production of almost all aspects of life.
Our governments, once the product of our liberation struggles, have been rendered supine clients of corporations and of the international aid system over the last thirty years as a result of the neoliberal structural adjustment programmes. Our governments are more accountable to Northern governments and to the international financial institutions than they are to citizens.
Social and economic policies are all set by these institutions, not by the citizenry. And the implementation of neoliberal policies involved forcing the state out of support for the social sector – health, education, sanitation, water , communications, agricultural production (at least small scale production) etc, leaving these sectors to be privatised by international corporations: The health sector is effectively privatised, with good health care for the rich, but facilities worse than under apartheid for the vast majority.
Water, energy, communications – all these profitable sectors have been privatised. And as the state retrenched from the provision of services, it was left to the other private sector – the development NGOs – to provide services to the poor, with the assistance of the aid industry. What was once our birthright, won through the struggles for independence and liberation, are now charitable services provided not as a right, but nobless oblige by the NGOs who are accountable only to their funders.
But let me make my point clear here: I am not concerned with the motives of the people who work for these NGOs: I am sure many of them do the work out of genuine concern for the poor. But objectively what they end up doing is being the sweet pill, the ‘human face’ of neoliberal policies. The NGO sector is not homogeneous: There are a few who genuinely act to speak truth to power, to challenge the process of pauperisation that has condemned the vast majority of our people to misery. But the majority of the NGOs speak about ‘poverty’, but actually do little to challenge those forces, including the oligopolies, who create pauperisation. So back to the Vichy state: If you don’t challenge the legitimacy of these occupying forces, then many would be justified in describing your actions as collaborators in the process of pauperisation.
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