{UAH} How NGOs sing us lullabies & drive away in golden Uncle Tom wagons
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2:20 PM |
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The story of Uncle Tom is well-known in American slavery trade abolitionist literature.
While the story was originally about Uncle Tom sacrificing his freedom for other slaves, readers of the mid-1800s novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, came to associate "Uncle Tom" with servility to white enslavers to the point of even naively supporting own enslavement.
A case of a 'house negro' who is made to believe their life was better than a 'field negro.' Colonialism had its Uncle Toms. Ngugi wa Thiong'o describes them famously as "compradors."
But since Mzungu exploitation did not end with the arrival of Uhuru, so have the Uncle Toms and house negros. But these nowadays cut a different, deftly disguised, almost likeable, and more sophisticated hue.
I must confess early that I have many friends in the NGO industry. Over the years, these friends have been generous to me, often inviting me for talking engagements, which, in all fairness, pay really well. The broke life of an academic is so miserable without our NGO brethren.
The money is sweet and addictive – and there lies the magic wand with which Mzungu continues to steal from Africa. Let me retell the rather too familiar creation story. There is no local history for institutionalised office-run non-government or civil society work across sub-Saharan Africa.
These bourgeois institutions are as recent as structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). And to understand this rather ugly history, one has to begin from, perhaps the most understudied and unappreciated act of colonialist aggression, the SAPs themselves.
In a recently published book, Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, economic anthropologist, Jason Hickel tells the story of structural adjustment in precise details: after independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Hickel writes, newly independent governments rolled out progressive policies to rebuild their economies.
They used taxes and subsidies "to protect their domestic industries, improve labour standards and raising workers' wages. They also invested in public health and education."
Hickel continues that "all of this was meant to reverse the extractive policies of colonialism and improve human welfare – and it was working."
The effect of this, Hickel notes, was that "average incomes in the global South grew at 3.2 per cent per year in the 1960s and 1970s," which in effect improved the quality of life in these countries.
As this happened, our friends in the West were not pleased at all. It meant, Hickel notes, "losing access to cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets that they had enjoyed under colonialism." They had to intervene.
Using their control over the World Bank and the IMF, they imposed structural adjustment programmes across Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia.
Forcefully, SAPs "liberalised the economies of the global South, tearing down protective tariffs and capital controls, cutting wages and environmental laws, slashing social spending and privatising public goods – all to break open profitable new frontiers for foreign capital and restore access to cheap labour and resources," Hickel concludes.
Over these ruins, former colonisers rolled back in business. In Uganda, they found an all too greedy leadership of former hunters and gatherers with 'small-dreams and small pleasures' who folks simply gifted them the entire economy.
As I write, all major sectors of the economy including banking, telecom, and mining are controlled by European, or South African Mzungus. Even coffee trade [Bugisu is painfully holding on], electricity generation and distribution, and road construction are all monopolised by our former colonisers or local brokers masquerading as owners.
Enter the NGO and CSO: the ruins of structural adjustment became visible not less than five years after imposition. These new colonisers had ways of dealing with the potential violent outcomes of the mess before it was too late.
They had to anaesthetise natives for pillage to continue uninterrupted. They started by intensifying aid to governments. But the elite who were not in government started complaining about how aid was being 'eaten' by only those in government.
Mzungu, then, had to find ways of throwing some at them too. The NGO was born. This is the ugly life-story of close to one million elite Ugandans employed by over 80,000 NGOs and CSOs. They were born not to transform, but to silence selves, while also shock-absorbing for both the government and Mzungu co-conspirators.
Our former colonisers nowadays endlessly throw some doughnuts at our famished and colonial-educated elite, which enables them comfortable lifestyles as they dupe themselves and their compatriots.
As these elite brothers with swanky offices in upscale Kampala drive past us in their posh automobiles, they sing us lullabies. They are online tweeting as they enjoy delicious meals at posh hotels. They do not feel the pain of the malnourished wananchi.
Indeed, recently, it had to take one of us, a simple entertainer from the dingies of Kampala, Bobi Wine, and before a nobler former soldier, Rtd Col. Kizza Besigye, to try and awaken an anaesthetised public.
Is it not telling that despite the innumerable NGOs and CSOs busying themselves in public health, democracy, human rights, or economic emancipation, for over three decades now, our governance is diabolical, our human rights appalling, and public health is the gutters?
Ugandans are poorer than ever. One then asks: what has been the contribution of these NGOs and CSOs? The answer is in their founding.
And against this, I cannot understand why Museveni is brawling his Uncle Toms, folks whose entire careers—by a long and deftly hidden route—facilitate his hold onto power.
By rendering them jobless, they will not only leave him exposed, but will try to challenge him. As an ordinary Ugandan, I just wish Museveni actually closed all of them.
The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University.
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