(TALKZIMBABWE) NGOs: Auxiliaries of the neocolonial agenda

NGOs: Auxiliaries of the neocolonial agenda
Reason Wafawarova - Opinion
Sat, 04 Jul 2009 14:04:00 +0000

THE Zimbabwean Prime Minister has returned from a tour of Western capitals that was meant to seek a lifting of the illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe by the Western coalition, as well as to seek material support to implement the policies of the new inclusive Government.

Through his Press conference after the trip Prime Minister Tsvangirai made it clear that his trip was a success in that he got pledges totalling about US$500 million, albeit to be channelled through Western NGOs resident in Zimbabwe – the so-called implementation partners.

Other than these pledges, the Prime Minister came back with a counter assignment from the West, an assignment upon whose completion the country is meant to see the $US 500 million as “nothing compared to what will be coming” according to Mr. Tsvangirai. What is the assignment? We have political benchmarks to meet.

The Prime Minister’s hosts suddenly imposed themselves as exegetic authorities of the Global Political Agreement – an agreement whose guarantors are the African Union and SADC. To this end they tasked the Prime Minister to unequivocally remind the rest of Zimbabwe that those who did not meet the West’s bidding on the GPA were standing in the way of unlimited aid from our “Western friends”.

The GPA that the Prime Minister and his Western friends want respected is the same GPA that Cabinet members from the Prime Minister’s MDC-T party are at liberty to violate by boycotting Cabinet meetings whenever they feel like frustration has taken the better side of their rationality, as the Prime Minister tacitly explained the June 30 Cabinet boycotting by members of his party.

Frustration is not a virtue, and no one should be boasting about it or even justify ill behaviour on its misassumed merits. Most certainly, no one has a monopoly over frustration and those in the inclusive Government that assume their frustration must be viewed as a national concern are clearly overrating the power of mischief.

We are told we are solemnly supposed to treat as Bible truth that the decision to channel whatever aid was promised by Western governments through NGOs was based on the “reality” that the Central Government of Zimbabwe is too corrupt to be trusted.

And of course in that scenario the only other way to provide this assistance is not to ensure accountability but to sidestep the Government through the avenue of NGOs.

Zimbabweans are meant to see the plausibility of this position by Westerners and indeed some have hailed the move as the civilised way of doing things. One of the general consequences of neo-colonial hegemony is the destruction of self-respect and self-image.

Kenneth Clark, in his book Dark Ghetto wrote this about the oppressed black Americans.

“Human beings who are forced to live under ghetto conditions and whose daily experience tells them that almost nowhere in society are they respected and granted the ordinary dignity and courtesy accorded to others will, as a matter of course, begin to doubt their own worth. Since every human being depends upon his cumulative experiences with others for clues as to how he should view and value himself, children who are consistently rejected understandably begin to question and doubt whether they, their family, and their group really deserve more respect from the larger society than they receive. These doubts become the seeds of a pernicious self and group hatred, the Negro’s complex and debilitating prejudice against himself.”

This passage from Kenneth Clark is most telling when one looks at how the AU and SADC are demeaned and ridiculed on the issue of the otherwise impressive diplomatic score on settling the political conflict that was in Zimbabwe before the era of this inclusive Government.

Now we are being told Zimbabweans are so hopeless that NGOs have to stand in to make the inclusive Government allow aid to reach the ordinary people.

This is supposed to be greeted by raucous applause from the ranks of the African community – and of course this is the view of those with a neo-colonial sense of supremacy claiming to represent the “civilised world”.

We as Africans have come to believe in our own inferiority. We have developed a sense of shame about our own sense of capacity and even cultural identity.

Instead, we have embraced the values of an alien culture and began to ape the Western world, emulating specific aspects of its life-style: political beliefs, their sense of human rights, their sense of democracy, their eating habits, their drinking habits, music, cosmetics and even exaggerating the particular accents of the Western languages.

Albert Memmi wrote in the book Political Economy of Africa that the ambition of the ordinary African was “to become equal to that splendid model and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him”.

This is what is happening when some of us Africans hanker to fulfil Western benchmarks on what we are told are matters of democracy, human rights and all the other truisms the NGO community is running amok with.

It is most amazing how old themes persist from generation to generation. It has been argued by people like John Daniel that the culture of dependency was perpetuated by the distortion of Africa’s cultural systems and their eclipse by alien cultural values, and that this formed an essential part of colonial domination.

After the granting of formal independence by former colonial empires, Africa has been smoothly transforming from colonial to neo-colonial dependency. The culture of dependency has been perpetuated in post-colonial Africa and it continues to serve the instrumental ends of imperial metropolitan powers.

Africa’s response to the persistence of this subordinate culture was initially that of initiating socio-political education programmes like Ghana’s National Service Scheme, Mozambique’s political education programmes and of late Zimbabwe’s National Youth Service Programme and many other such examples from across Africa.

These programmes were denounced heavily in the West as either covers for barbaric brainwashing of citizens or just as plain Communist programmes with no room in “democratic societies”. None of these programmes was a success story, and it must be noted that Africans helped a lot in shunning and denouncing these efforts as primitive and failing to identify with the “civilised Western models”.

Capitalism has values and the three pillar values are acquisitiveness, competitiveness and individualism. Needless to say, these are antithetical to the corporate and communal values of traditional Africa.

Neo-colonialism seeks to perpetuate the relentless and multi-faceted assault on the surviving non-capitalist values of Africa. This assault is taking both a conscious and an unconscious form, and those who undertake it do not necessarily do so with a malicious or self-serving intent.

Rather, their attack on African culture and values is prompted by their ideological stance which regards Western culture as the ultimate refinement and repository of all human excellence, virtue and industry.

Nonetheless, the onslaught is no less brutal for this perception. The primary actors in this onslaught are the Western imperial regimes, operating in collusion with such auxiliaries as the NGOs, sponsored political parties, and the so-called pro-democracy civil society.

These groups play the same role that was played by the missionary, the trader and the educator in executing colonialism.

Today these functionaries are assigned the task of socialising and orienting the African psyche to the Western capitalist incursion and sense of civility.

During the colonial era similar functionaries, as described already, were assigned the role of altering the African mode of economic behaviour and social thought so that Africans would undertake the labour roles assigned to them for the benefit of the coloniser.

In that era, the missionary assumed the role of the preacher and the educator, and attacked virtually every aspect of African culture; branding African Traditional Religion (ATR) as barbaric, ancestral beliefs as witch-craft, social customs like polygamy as pagan and evil, while economic behaviour was scorned as lazy and inefficient.

Today, African governments are largely regarded as despotic, tyrannic and dictatorial. African solutions like Zimbabwe’s GPA and its subsequent inclusive Government are branded products of dictatorial clubs and unacceptable by Western standards.

We, Africans; in the name of civilisation and modernity, are supposed to acknowledge the hopelessness of our own race in terms of thought processes and solving problems.

It is demanded of our civic groups and local NGOs that they make project proposals that can pass the Western definition of democratic goals so as to receive funding, and our own values related to governance issues are trounced as primitive and of no relevance in a “modern global society”. We have concurred and called ourselves fighters in the “struggle for democracy”.

The NGOs that Western governments prefer to fund in helping Zimbabwe to restore its shattered economy do relentlessly promote the social relations and values of neo-liberalism – the arm that pushes the imperial agenda from the right wing.

They extol the imperatives of Western-style democracy and obedience to imperial authority – their primary funders. They stress the virtues of “private property, frugality and the need to save and to accumulate”, as John Daniel would put it.

The developing world in general and Africa in particular, are being coerced to enter the capitalist market economy as primary providers of raw materials and as hosts of foreign capital with no possibility of ever developing into value addition to their own raw materials.

This entrance is not entirely voluntary as the benchmarks from the West will ensure that any group that seeks independent ways of exploiting their resources will not go unpunished. This is the context in which Zimbabwe is under the Western sanctions regime for daring to expropriate land from white colonial occupiers.

Just like the African was enlightened only good enough to have skills required for the servicing of colonial lower echelons of the economy, the African countries of today are supposed to be granted sovereignty only good enough to allow uninterrupted Western investment and profiteering through local resources.

Those who grant themselves sovereignty beyond these boundaries are “on the wrong side of history” as President Obama has inspired many to say these days.
Africans today aspire for happiness and status as a democratic people. Unfortunately that aspiration is driven by a misguided belief that we must become less and less African through the attainment of Western democratic credentials as laid down by the benchmarks such as the ones Prime Minister Tsvangirai was assigned to deliver to our primitive selves.

Just like the colonial era African had to adopt the European religion, master his language, acquire a knowledge of the rivers and mountains, kings and queens of Europe; the modern day African is supposed to adopt Western democratic values, master the language of Western Parliaments, acquire a knowledge of the political heroes of European history and support Western ventures in the Middle East and other areas.

The acquisition of African knowledge is today irrelevant to the acquisition of status. Yet even those who do acquire Western knowledge cannot escape the second class syndrome where they are supposed to acknowledge as a blessing the endorsement of Westerners.

It is like the “boy-girl syndrome” of the colonial era where even adult and professional Africans were reduced to an infantile status of being described as “boys” or “girls” even by the children of the colonisers.

The educator of the colonial era committed himself to teach that the law was neutral and sacred, but in its application, the African soon realised that there was a double standard in that the same offences committed by Africans and Europeans were judged differently. Rape of a European woman by an African man was frequently a capital offence, but rarely the same when roles were reversed.

Likewise, the NGOs of today are committed to teach Africa about international law and the relevance of such enforcement institutions like the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute. However, the ICC has, in its eight years in existence indicted a total of 13 people and they are all from Africa.

This writer will quickly point out that the international tribunals that were set up to try Saddam Hussein, Milosevic and Pinochet all had nothing to with the Rome Statute or the ICC. They were just international tribunals.

This means that the world has to disregard the war crimes of Israel in Gaza and the US’ murderous misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they must define war crimes, aggression and crimes against humanity by limiting the scope to Africans.

In fact it is unthinkable that we can drag that American warlord by the name George W. Bush to The Hague but we are supposed to abide by the thinking that Al-Barshir of Sudan must be handed over to the ICC on the basis of evidence provided by the all-important Western NGOs.

Only Africans breached the Rome Statute in the first eight years of its existence; so we are told and so must we believe. How inspiring!

We hear you Prime Minister Tsvangirai when you say we have a part to play in meeting Western benchmarks but we will listen to you as Africans coming out of slavery and colonisation. We will listen as victims of imperialism and we will act as vigilant sons of the soil.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome! It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on Wafawarova *** yahoo.co.uk or reason *** rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com