The concept of development or poverty reduction remains allusive and insipid and yet the bite of hunger and disease is felt all over the vast expanse of our land.
Develop Me with Tapiwa Gomo
We know how it feels to be poor, hungry, sick or not to be at par with the rest in this fast changing world. But we are not clear on what development looks like. It just remains stuck in our mental zones of imagination and difficult to transpose into our real life.
With every dollar we expect comes the dream of changing lives, but once that dollar is earned it vanishes into the thick world of darkness.
For most developing countries, the challenges are many among which include escaping the trapping illusionary development imposed on us by the colonial and historical fundamentalism.
And secondly, once we escape of this snare, there is need to formulate new avenues to improve people’s lives without answering to the norms and allegiances of global powers or external norms.
These two are at the root of African poverty and therefore important. Most of our post-independence poverty reduction thinking has been characterised by development theory and practice of the 1960s which were fraught with errors, but quite effective in the service of their authors.
Such skewed ideas, with their inherent flaws, today form the basis upon which Africa dreams of unleashing its poor people out of poverty.
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We forget to recognise that we are at different levels of the same trajectory and that there is need to step outside and take a new direction.
For lack of that we have been reduced into followers of past ideologies. Among these the ideological views is that socialism in Africa is the answer to poverty even without industrialisation, that when we expose our people to foreign capitalism, their lives will organically improve or that industrialisation without State intervention gives the economy freedom to expand.
Poverty reduction is a political matter, but its management is technical. It is not just about providing the right resources to the right places and the right people, but it how politics of a society shapes both internal and external dynamics. Historical accounts of developed nations show that the journey to development is rarely holy. It was filled with human blood and abuse and exploitation of other societies.
Underneath the American and some Western economies lie the bones and blood of aggrieved slaves from other continents, but largely from Africa.
As their economies reached peak and ripe and capitalism as a form of management flourished, their people felt empowered and democracy flourished too and sanitised crimes of the past.
The success story of the Chinese economy cannot be adequately told without mentioning how they undercut labour cost and exercised power to direct their people’s energy towards boosting production for those who own the wherewithal’s of the economy.
The Chinese economy is fast uplifting the lives of those who will survive the vices of its autocracy out of poverty into realising self-esteem and actualisation.
The more people become economically empowered, the more they exercise that power and the gradual weakening of Chinese autocracy would be inevitable paving way for a new form of democracy.
Now here lies the African problem. We joined a global world that had undergone centuries of building economic bases from free labour and resources.
We joined a global village whose powerful societies had accumulated enough and their only worry is how to manage their economies.
We joined when their people were already flaunting freedom and democracy sustained by their economic bases.Instead of starting where others began, we delve deeper into modern day management theories and practices of economic growth and poverty reduction.
We did not set ourselves time to redefine our societies and identify ways of accumulating wealth for our people before adopting different management styles.
The concept of management is governed by rules and norms set by those who control the economic system and it rarely favours new entrants or those outside. This is why African leaders have been crying loud over unfair international trade relations.
Failure to understand the importance of reconfiguring political processes nationally and international and how these interact in shaping the economic stock of developing countries is at the root of Africa’s perpetual poverty.
Even as citizens, our view on these issues has been myopic, limiting our options to pressuring the state to deliver services, instead of pressuring them to identify ways of encourage the political interventions that establish an economic stock from which economic growth and poverty reduction strategies can be formulate.
And such a responsibility does not lie in the hands of technical experts, but politicians. It is a political decision that can potentially offend many both within and outside national borders.
But then when politics fails, it opens up spaces for external interests and configure our societies in their favour.
Tapiwa Gomo is a development consultant based in Pretoria, South Africa.
