CHAPTER 1
The depoliticisation of poverty
Firoze Manji
1998 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which emerged from the triumph over genocide in Europe. Ironically the anniversary occurs in the aftermath of genocide in Africa which claimed the lives of more than one million men, women, and children in the space of nine months. It was a tragedy made more painful by the criminal failure of the international community to take action to prevent its occurrence or to deal effectively with its consequences.
Reflecting on the achievements of the last 50 years, some might be forgiven for feeling that the UDHR offers little cause for celebration. That is not to say that there have not been victories over that period. But in spite of them, the conditions of the people of the Third World are desperate. The social gains of independence from colonial rule have been rapidly eroded, as economies collapse under the combined weight of debt and structural adjustment programmes. Meanwhile the rich get richer, the poor poorer. While the average income of the top 20 per cent of the world's population was 30 times higher than that of the bottom 20 per cent in 1960, by 1994 it was 78 times higher. Nearly one quarter of the world's people have an income that is less than US$1 a day — a proportion which is rising. Each year, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) calculates the human-poverty index, based on a series of measures including the prevalence of illiteracy, life expectancy, degree of malnourishment, and access to health services and safe water. In 1996 over one billion people fell below this point, the position deteriorating in 30 countries; these were the worst figures since UNDP began calculating the index in 1990 (UNDP, 1997). Development, it seems, is failing.
The anniversary occurs in the context also of increasing number of conflicts in Africa. Such conflicts are frequently portrayed as being the result of apparently 'irreconcilable ethnic differences' which not only pervade the continent today, but are also viewed as intrinsic to its history. Mass violations of human rights are seen, therefore, as an 'inevitable', if regrettable, consequence of these 'ethnic' conflicts.
Growing impoverishment and conflict, and the increasing incidence of apparently ethnically based violence, have a common origin. They are the products of a process which began as popular mobilisation against oppression and exploitation — a movement for rights — which ultimately became warped into a process which became known as 'development'. Far from helping to overturn the social relations which reproduced injustice and impoverishment, the main focus of development was to discover and implement solutions which would enable the victims to cope with impoverishment, or find 'sustainable' solutions for living with it. Over the last few decades, development NGOs have played a critical role in that process. Their roles have gradually changed from articulating an embryonic anti-imperialism to becoming an integral part of postcolonial social formations.
Africa is a lens which discloses the general characteristics of development. The features are not particular to that continent. They are to be found also in Asia and Latin America, albeit tinted by the specific histories of those regions. By focusing on Africa, the complex inter-relationships between rights, poverty, and development can be revealed, with the knowledge that those in Asia and Latin America will hear resonances which chime with their own experience.
This paper discusses the historical processes which transformed the struggle for rights in Africa into an arena for a particular model of development. That model itself is, it is argued, the cause of some of the major conflicts which have arisen in Africa, including those which led to the genocide in Central Africa. The role of NGOs in the depoliticisation of poverty is examined in the context of these developments.
From rights to 'development'
The story of independence in Africa is frequently portrayed as the story of the machinations of nationalist leaders in mobilising popular agitations against the colonial powers, and their prowess at the negotiation tables. What is frequently omitted in such an account is the story of what was happening on the ground, in the forests, villages, urban ghettos, classrooms, and workplaces, in spite of — not because of — these leaders.
The period following the Second World War witnessed an unprecedented level of popular mobilisations and the formation of numerous popular organisations throughout the continent. Such developments were informed at the grassroots not so much (at least, not initially) by desires for abstract concepts of self-determination, but more by struggles for basic rights that we're part of the everyday experiences of the majority. The initial spark for most people was provided by the desire to organise to claim rights to food, shelter, water, land, education, and health care, and the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom from harassment and other forms of human-rights abuses. Different social groups focused on issues with which they were themselves most preoccupied — aspiring local capitalists organising to oppose restraints on their freedom to accumulate, while squatters organised to claim their rights of access to land.
It was these civil agitations (urban and rural) which provided the impetus to the liberation movements. Political independence was achieved through the ability of the leadership of the nationalist movements to capture the imagination of these formations, uniting them in the promise that only through self-determination and independence could all their aspirations be achieved.
The struggle for independence in Africa was thus informed, at the base, by the experience of struggles against oppression and brutal exploitation experienced in everyday life. These struggles constituted the emergence of a tradition of struggles for rights which was organic to and informed by the specific histories and experiences of those involved. Just as the bourgeois revolution which brought the capitalist class into ascendancy in Europe led to the emergence of a particular construct of rights proclaimed against the ancien régime, so Africa's struggle against the colonial yoke gave birth to its own traditions of struggle and the construct of rights. The concept of rights was not something that was 'God-given' in its universality, but forged in the fires of anti-imperialist struggles. It was informed by the need to overthrow all forms (not just colonial) of oppression and exploitation, not by constructs which had either been embodied in the UDHR or imported into Africa by those nationalist leaders who had spent periods in exile or study in the imperial homeland.
These struggles laid the basis in many countries for the emergence of a national; consciousness which would provide some legitimacy to the nation-State that was about to be established. But that dynamic was not to be permitted to reach its logical conclusion. While the liberation struggles had begun the process of forging a common national identity, this identity remained fragile at the time of transfer of power, even in those countries (such as Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau) which had to undergo protracted wars of liberation.
Once thrown into power, the nationalist leadership (composed usually of representatives of the newly emerging middle class) saw its task as one of preventing 'centrifugal forces' from competing for political power or seeking greater autonomy from the newly formed 'nation'. Having grasped political self-determination from colonial authority, it was reluctant to accord the same rights to others. The new controllers of the State machinery saw their role as the 'sole developer' and 'sole unifier' of society. The State defined for itself an interventionist role in 'modernisation' and a centralising and controlling role in the political realm.
Born out of a struggle for the legitimacy of pluralism against a hegemonic colonial State, social pluralism began to be frowned upon. The popular associations which had projected the nationalist leadership into power gradually began to be seen as an obstacle to the new god of 'development'. No longer was there a need, it was argued, for popular participation in determining the future. The new government would bring development to the people. The new government, they claimed, represented the nation and everyone in it. Now that political independence had been achieved, the priority was 'development'. Social and economic improvements would come with patience and as a result of combined national effort involving all classes (harambee, in Kenyatta's famous slogan). In this early period after independence, civil and political rights soon came to be seen as a 'luxury', to be enjoyed at some unspecified time in the future when 'development' had been achieved. For the present, said many African presidents, 'our people are not ready' — echoing, ironically, the arguments used by the former colonial rulers against the nationalists' cries for independence a few years earlier.
In the colonial era, government social services for Africans were almost non-existent. Where they were provided, the purpose was largely to ensure the integrity of the structures of colonial rule. In periods of serious outbreaks of epidemics in the shanty-towns and over-crowded ghettos, health services were provided principally to stave off the possibilities of infections spreading into white society. In some instances, limited education was provided when certain basic skills would be necessary for the administration of the colony or for the particular forms of exploitation. For the vast majority of the rural population, it was left to a clutch of charities and missionary groups (what in today's jargon would be recognised as NGOs) to exchange their spiritual wares for material support in education, health, or other social services. For white settlers or the agents of colonial rule, however, State expenditure on the social sector was usually generous. Although on the eve of independence there were to be significant changes in the extent to which investments were to be made in the social sectors, for the most part the State's function in these sectors was to provide only for a minority.
The situation was to change dramatically at independence. It remains one of the most remarkable, and yet least acknowledged, achievements of independence governments that, within the space of but a few years, access to health services and to education was to become effectively universal. No matter how much one may criticise the forms of services provided, it is a tribute to the capacity of the State to implement such far-reaching social programmes. While NGOs may today debate and shower praises on each other for their own capacities to 'scale-up', the new governments at independence implemented programmes of 'scaling-up' in a manner that no NGO has ever dared contemplate. The impacts of these interventions are undeniable and were to be reflected in the subsequent dramatic changes in average life expectancy, in infant and child mortality rates, and in the improvements in nutritional status of the young. Huge improvements in all these parameters were to be observed throughout the continent by the end of the 1970s as a result of these social programmes. Aggregate figures for Sub-Saharan Africa show, for example, that life expectancy increased from 38 years in 1960 to 47 years in 19 78, despite the fact that GNP per capita increased only modestly from US$222 to US$280 (World Bank, 1981).
But at the same time as this infrastructure was being built (often with the financial support of official aid agencies), a transformation had taken place which led to a demobilisation of the popular movement which had given rise to independence. Popular organisations which had emerged out of the struggle for rights (social, political, economic, or civil) were provided no further role in the process. Rights were no longer the flag around which the oppressed could rally. Indeed, the concept of rights was codified and rarefied in laws and constitutions whose relevance or application was determined by the self-proclaimed, and increasingly unaccountable, guardians of the State. A gradual shift took place, so that concerns about rights and justice were replaced by concerns about 'development'. Certainly there were major problems faced by the newly independent States in addressing how the forces of production (whether industrial or agricultural) could be developed to drag Africa out of the destitution created by colonial rule. But the discourse was not about development in the sense of developing the productive forces. It was about creating an infrastructure which advanced the capacity of the new ruling class to accumulate, and smoothing away those inefficiencies that hampered the capacity of international capital to continue its exploitation. It was expected that, through trickle-down effects, poverty would gradually be eliminated. This was the agenda of 'modernisation', the paradigm of development which was to hold sway until the end of the 1970s.
Central to this paradigm was to see 'poverty', rather than rights and freedom, as the main problem facing 'developing countries'. The victims of years of injustices, whose livelihoods had been destroyed by years of colonial rule, were now defined as 'the problem', and thus the stage was set for the entry of the development NGO to participate in the process of depoliticising poverty. In Kenya, for example, peasants had been uprooted from their land and forced to eke out a living in marginal land with low yield-potential and which required immense labour to produce. The new paradigm required that ways be found to enable them to find sustainable (and participatory) approaches for surviving on such land. The need for carrying out land reform which would overcome the injustices created by colonialism was gradually forgotten.
The structures of accountability and democracy which were inherent in the movements centred on rights were gradually marginalised and replaced by the ascendancy of the expert, supported by bureaucratic and centralised decision-making under the guise of 'national planning'. Political associations were soon to be discouraged, if not actually banned, while trade unions were constrained, incorporated into the structures of the ruling party, or simply disbanded. In many countries, those structures which had emerged to organise around basic rights had all been either subsumed under 'development' or discarded within ten years of independence. The political hegemony of the new post-independence rulers had been asserted. Their capacity to attend to the 'basic needs' of the population gave them some legitimacy and allowed, in some instances, reasonable national cohesion. But the development of national consciousness, born fragile and imperfect in the struggle for rights in the 1950s and 1960s, began to lose sustenance, its life-blood dissipating. The age of the development expert, the relief expert, and subsequently the conflict-resolution expert, had arrived.
It is true that, in the early period, there had been a fairly broad moral and humane discourse. Nyerere, Senghor, Kaunda, Houphouet Boigny and others articulated their ideas on development or socialism usually in moral terms, with a discourse about African socialism being concerned with sharing, solidarity, and the common good. But, in practice, appeals to morality failed to address the structural issues related to the integration of the economies into the international economic order, which continued, albeit in a new form, to extract wealth from Africa into the hands of multinationals in the imperial heartland. It also failed to deal with the fact that those in control of the State and its organs had discovered that power and access provided by the State machinery was a significant source of wealth and private accumulation. While those like Nyerere sought to control the capacity of functionaries using the State as a source of accumulation, in many other countries such restraint was largely unknown. Access to the State as a source or means for accumulation of private wealth became an end in itself among the elite, the emerging ruling class. Favour, patronage, and frank corruption were seen as means for limiting competition to the honey-pot. And in many cases the most cohesive force able to compete for access to the State was the military, Certainly in West and Central Africa, coups d'état became (and sadly remain) commonplace.
