Silences in NGO Discourse

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The overall global picture Issa Shivji (a long-time lawyer, academic, author and activist in Tanzania) crisply and accurately outlines sets the stage for what is to follow. For he presents a world, clearly visible in the situation of a beleaguered Africa, in which the initial promise of a post-colonial development effort springing from a new state - one that would be expressive of the real interests of the mass of the population - has been lost. Indeed, in our present uni-polar world, “development-theorists” from the advanced capitalist countries have themselves come to abandon past discourses of state-sponsored and nationally-defined advance and instead to place increasing reliance on the unfettered activity of footloose capital and the so-called “free market” to offer such succour to Africa as market opportunity may allow. And the panoply of global enforcers – the IMF, the World Bank and the like – use debt and dictate (and the seduction of local elites) to ensure that Africans are offered no choice but to play the global market game.

As Shivji describes it, this game is not one that Africa, from a position of very real economic weakness, can compete within and the reversion to a kind of recolonization, with primary commodities and minerals still the only real stock in trade for their entry into the game, is especially graphic. Indeed, for Shivji, this is precisely where NGOs fit all too negatively into the picture, merely helping, in the main, to further undermine any genuine development prospect in Africa.

This negative impact is two-fold. First, the present western emphasis, one that tends to shape, in turn, NGO action, is on the impermissibility of the state’s intervening to inflect, in the interest of the impoverished many, the direction of market-driven (under)development. Second, this hollowing out of the state is, in turn, reinforced by the ubiquity of NGO activities that tend to be preemptive of alternative bottom-up popular initiatives across a wide spectrum of policy-relevant spheres. The NGOs are, by and large, reduced - despite, or perhaps because of, any “good works” they may achieve - to complementing rather than challenging the not so benign activities of the global market.

Of course, Shivji is not himself naïve about the bona fides of the African state. He sees that state as being mainly the domain of the subordinated and recolonized middle-class African beneficiaries of the present system. At best, the latter comprise an elite that can permit only a feeble and disempowering “democratic” show in a setting in which the elected and domestically-privileged can have no real clout vis-à-vis the global power-structure that has already dictated policy outcomes to them.  No, the real cost of NGO activity lies in their top-down practice and in their uncritical acceptance of the down-grading - something their own “charitable” activities actually serve to ensure - of the legitimacy of more genuinely “popular” voices of well-organized and insistent bodies of persons – trade unions, urban-based civics, peasant groups and other such class-defined protagonists  – who could make fresh demands and organize counter-hegemonic projects from the base.

From this perspective, the trajectory of by far the largest number of NGOs is piercingly described. Finding fresh space for growth and manouevre in the first flush of the neo-liberal offensive against the African state, the NGOs were sometimes championed, initially, by radical and/or 'well-intentioned” protagonists but were very soon drawn into careerist vortex of “the mainstream elite” – and under the financial and ideological sway of extremely suspect “donor funders” (USAID, the World Bank and the like). Technocratic, “issue-based” and “action-oriented,” they ignore the larger historical and sociological trends that shape Africa’s present, and instead were content, a-theoretically, with the premise that “globalization akin to neo-liberalism [is] inevitable and irreversible.” “Rich” and “poor” become “mere” dichotomies rather than the terms of much more profound class antagonisms. And with individualism rather than the claims of collective betterment and genuine equality now being championed in the names of “poverty reduction” and 'human rights,” NGOS become, principally, the “ideological foot soldiers” of the globally powerful.

In contrast to this malign pattern, Shivji is calling for two things from the NGOS. They must, on the one hand, be absolutely clear and much more vocal than they have been heretofore as to the negative import of the present global order for the poor of Africa and must see themselves as the conscious antagonists of such an order rather than, as they now tend to be, the  “objective” protagonists of it. And they must work, in a far more democratic manner than at present they do, to strengthen and empower the poorest of the poor who alone can bring about a lasting shift in the parasitic power-relations that currently exist, both domestically and globally, throughout the global South. Whether, given the nature of their present funding sources and the barren “common-sense” of the contemporary “development discourse” of global capital that too many of them have swallowed, the NGOs will permit themselves to so act is the question that Shivji eloquently forces them to ask themselves here.