F.c.oweyegha- Afunaduula
7 January 2005
opinion
Kampala — Until President Museveni stated at the New Year Eve that he will not tolerate foreign interference in the way Uganda is governed (The Sunday Monitor 2nd January 2, 2005), it had become evident that the country was under the political governance of international corporations, principally the International Monetary Fund (IMF)and the World Bank. In fact Ugandan Ministers had become so fearful of the IMF and the World Bank that no fear was left for God.
This is perhaps true in many African countries, which have been coerced to accept the conditionalities of the IMF that require that in order to qualify for World Bank money, the client government accepts to privatise everything, remove all controls, remove all subsidies and let the market set prices and have free market exchange rates.
Here, ill-conceived projects have been forced upon hapless people, more for the money that can be made from implementing them than for their capacity to enhance the quality of life of the majority poor. Countries have, through their Governments, been completely opened up to the sterile techno-mechanistic forces that have left them exposed to worsening crises, including socio-political crises, food crises, energy crises, debt crises, and crises of economic management.
These crises are intricately and dynamically interacting with the worsening climatic and ecological crises resulting from persistent droughts, desertification and consequent crop failures and persistent, proliferating hunger.
All these crises, singly and collectively, may be said to be due to failed "African leadership" in modern times in all the dimensions of human welfare -cultural, economic, political, intellectual, social, et cetera, which has left a vacuum that has naturally had to be filled by foreigners applying their own models of development.
Yet as I have stated elsewhere, no foreigner ever helps another more than he or she helps himself or herself. No wonder, foreign forces, in their effort to de-socialise and mechanise development now want social security to be privatised fully and to see that pension becomes a myth rather than a reality in Africa. People, under this consummating neoliberalism, are being seen as nothing more than a market, thereby being denied human dignity.
The preferred approach to development, which today has become cancerous, is the "Project" approach. This spans for only a few years and tends to end abruptly with no emphasis on the futures dimension. It has more often than not subjugated the "Programme" approach, which can span for even 50 years and, therefore, is more futuristic than the project approach.
More often than not, the projects have failed but, somehow, more projects have continued to be conceived more or less in the same way and brought online for the same purpose: money. This has characterised virtually all World Bank projects, which nonetheless have been packaged nicely as humanitarian and charitable, yet as Graham Hankook (1989) wrote in his "Lords of Poverty", they are just critical elements in the international "aid" business, sustained and driven by the IMF-World Bank conspiracy to ensure Western dominance of the world through the proliferation of the culture of the money.
What, however, disturbs critical development analysts is that while the World Bank, either directly or indirectly, through government, has been doing everything possible to affix the minds of the victims of the project approach onto (illusionary) progress via the projects, most of which have, in fact, failed.
A study done in 2000 by the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress found a failure rate of 55-60% for all World Bank sponsored projects. According to the World Bank's "Global Development Finance: 2001-2003" and IMF's "World Economic Outlook:1996-03 the failure rate of externally financed projects in Africa is 73%. Such failed projects are better known as "white elephants".
Perhaps one of Uganda's most known white elephants today is the Owen Falls Extension Dam (Kiira Dam), once hyped as the country's new saviour from electricity shortages.
A great debate is raging about its role in bringing about the drop in the level of Lake Victoria at Owen Falls Dam by two metres. Government says it is drought but even when the rains have come and in heavy amounts, the lake has not responded by regaining its water level.
The question is: who should be blamed for the failure of World Bank sponsored projects: Government, World Bank or the people who remain docile when obviously wrong projects without a human face are conceived, designed and implemented?
I think all must be blamed and all must accept the blame. In Uganda, the political choice of individual merit approach to governance in all spheres of the economy has undermined the solidarity of Ugandan society and rendered it extremely vulnerable to the powerful techno-economic forces.
This has also left "individual meritists" bare and vulnerable whenever it comes to negotiating which projects to bring online. Quite often, greed and self-interest have been the prime factors in deciding which development projects. to approve. As a result, "political engineering" of projects has greatly reduced the "development value, development effectiveness or the overall quality of projects and, hence, their lifespan to the detriment of citizens of citizens.
One may not blame the poor citizens who are voiceless. But the educated political and intellectual elite cannot escape the blame. These have let down the citizens by choosing to be used as a tool in producing obviously perverted "scientific data" or policies to ensure that projects that would otherwise not be implemented actually get implemented.
They have either sacrificed intellectual power or patriotism to their country and chosen academic power or political power per se, thereby avoided wisdom, which would be critical in ensuring that only "added value" and "added development effectiveness" imparting projects" are implemented. This way they have turned themselves into a useless, irrelevant category of citizens in the eyes of the voiceless who struggled to educate them. Call them traitors if you want.
The World Bank, by behaving as if it is a Bank rather than as an Aid Agency, has in a way worked against the success of the projects it sponsors. 45% of all the $25 billion that it lends each year and which it calls help is dispatched directly to western transactional corporations rather than to actual development. Its invention of the so-called 10% commission, which it does not consider to be corruption, has done a lot to corrupt the development process.
A corrupted development process cannot be expected to produce viable projects, at least in the long-term. It is even likely that unfit human or other resources may be projected as the fit ones thereby undoing the projects. This makes Darwin's theory of "Survival of the Fittest" a myth, at least in current development dynamics. How many unsuitable human resources, for example, work in the World Bank or predominate in government departments and serve just to maintain the status quo?
Interestingly, while the World Bank has prided itself on its efforts to stump out corruption (from its projects), it has recently chosen to backslide on its safeguard policies, which were designed to enhance the relevance of projects in terms of environment, vulnerable human groups, quality of ecosystems, et cetera. It is now busy downgrading the effectiveness of these policies in favour of the so-called government performance indicators.
The World Bank is even "ashamed" of its transparency and accountability watch dog -the Inspection Panel -because it has been true to its mission: ensuring transparency and accountability in World Bank-sponsored projects. The ethics, the morality and the value of the projects that will be sponsored by the Bank in future are now likely to be questionable.
It is the marriage between politics and money that is likely to matter. No amount of civilising the projects with the creation of an NGO Section at the Bank will help to raise the legitimacy of the projects or policies other than making the Bank's sensitivity to human concerns symbolic. Symbolism in development is anti-development.
Oweyegha Afunaduula is a lecturer at Makerere University
afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk
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