Things that will not work - or will they?

The state is where the stuff is and theft is the only way to get it


On the subject of Africa, the world seems intrigued by the question whether 'it' will ever work. 'It' can be the economy, or the production, or the output from the various professions, but in most of the debates 'it' is the state. The state has to provide education and health care and such things, or police and justice protection for the raped women of the Congo. As the raped women of the Congo, the people without health care and the suffering matriculants of South Africa will testify, the state in Africa rarely does that properly, if at all.

Everybody already knows the answer to the question whether 'it' works (that's a no), but somehow many, especially in the development aid business, are keeping their hopes up that they can help make it work. If only people were more aware of their rights, or maybe if we attach still more good governance criteria to development aid, or, you know what, let's just do all these things that the African states do not do all by ourselves. Hence training and health projects, and community rape counselling projects.

These things are nice for those in Africa who get project stuff, of course. It's still no justice, or a proper future in society, but, hey, at least you got vaccinated or they made a booklet from the workshop where you spoke about how you were raped. Of course you still see the governing elite driving around in Mercedeses, eating development aid pie in infinitely bigger chunks than you ever will, and being utterly useless, and the police are still drunk and in cahoots with the criminals and rapists, but that is that, then. Useless fat governing elites is what Africa is all about after all, and since they are so utterly useless, all of us, taxpayers in north and south will just have to continue to help them get fatter. In Uganda, a health reporter wrote, there was 'fat aids' and 'thin aids'. You had Fat Aids if you were employed or subsidized by development aid in the field of Aids, and Thin Aids if you actually had Aids and were left to your own devices. There were more people with thin aids than with fat aids.

An article by Johny Steinberg in some time in Octobers' Sunday Times illustrates what the state and the governing elite in Liberia is all about. It's where most of the stuff is -ever Liberian, no matter how poor or illiterate, knows that. The villagers in the village where Steinberg spent some time, knew that. When Steinberg asked them why a son from almost every family in the village had joined the murderous hordes of Charles Taylor, when the latter waged his war on the then ruling elite, the answer was simple. They were going to the capital, Monrovia, to get some stuff. To go with Taylor was the way to get barbed wire, tools, a sugarcane press -which was what the villages' sons duly brought back. All of it is rusted by now.

Stuff hoarded by some people in the capital. To Steinberg's Liberian villagers, that was, and probably is, all the state was. In the absence of health, education, justice, infrastructure, communication, some sort of sense to the organisation of the country, the state is a place where some people sit with all the stuff. And all you can hope for is to get some, too.

This view of the state is most probably shared by many citizens in Africa, even in the continent's most developed country: South Africa. What else is the current South African run on state contracts, state jobs, state projects, than a race to 'get some' too? You can wait to get a decent clinic, a proper school, a policeman who actually defends you from criminals, but are you really going to do that when, in all likelihood, that is going to be a very long wait? 'Every day I get phone calls from relatives and friends of relatives. I must give them jobs', says a friend of mine, a manager in the SA Post Office. "A job or a contract. It's what I must do if I am a good sister, a good aunt. I try to explain that that would be corruption, but they just don't understand that. To them, they must get something because they have nothing and I am the only way they can get it."

The Forum for African Investigative Reporters, which I work for, has recently done an investigation into criminally driven development in Africa. FAIR has found economic activity and even schools being built (and sometimes run) by pirates, smugglers, corrupt local strongmen and prostitutes. If you compare amounts of money with developmental results, criminal or extra-legal syndicates seem to do a lot better than most states. The question would be why that is.

My non-scientific gut feel would be that it is because, at least, criminality is something that people come up with by themselves. Many observers have remarked on the originality and creativity of criminal plans worldwide, whether it's applied to 419 type scams or ATM plunder. I imagine that you think long and hard about what you can do with your skills, your environment, your fellow perpetrators and your hapless targets, if you are a criminal. That attitude, coming up with a  'business plan' so to speak, and carrying it out, must be very different from being an employee in a state machinery that you no more own than I own the English sweepstakes. 

Of course the lack of a 'business drive' goes for civil servants everywhere. Images of thumb-twiddling civil servants who don't care about the public are of all times and places. But I believe that the situation is worse in Africa, because state machineries there are even more alien to the average citizen than they are just about anywhere else. "This is a machine that the whites put on us after they stole our computers", says my friend, Prudence Mbewu, the ZAM columnist.

Prudence Mbewu once wrote this sentence in a column (in another publication), only to see it  deleted from the final article when it was published. An intelligent editor had caught the 'mistake' Mbewu had made. Of course Africans never had computers before the whites came. Silly Prudence! Luckily she had him to protect her from embarrassing herself, or so he must have thought.

It never occurred to this editor, whose name shall remain a secret, that Prudence Mbewu had not meant it literally. She had merely meant to say that colonialism had disturbed the clock, the chronology, of Africa's organic development. What would Africa be if whites had never come? Would Africans have developed TV, Facebook, protein shakes and Richard Branson? Would they have come up with different things? We will never know. We only know that the whites did come, that they came with steel and gunpowder and governance, and that that is that. A strange machine was placed over what was essentially a rural context, and most Africans were excluded from it until a few dozen years ago. (Interestingly, in his new book, Dennis Goldberg refers to a remark made by none other than Nelson Mandela about this phenomenon, in 1964, during the Rivonia trial. I don't have the book with me, so I paraphrase from memory:  'Don't think you can use your marxist concepts here the way you do in Europe', Goldberg recalls Mandela telling him.  'You guys went through hundreds of years of different economic and industrial stages. We had our society and then came colonialism.')

In the West, states grew organically from what once were agricultural tribes and later regional strongmen who, still later, started defining themselves as 'nobles'. Nobles became regents and regents became party leaders. Industrialisation came, then parliamentary democracy, and the modern state. It took some time, all of it happened where the Netherlands are now, and most of it was done by fellow Dutch people. To a child grown up in the Netherlands, you can explain that there is some kind of logic to what is now the government. That you had William I, II, III, then Queen Wilhelmina, then evil conquerors (Nazis), then our heroic resistance (we like to leave out the less heroic parts), then our democracy. We feel good about all that. Or at least we feel that we have a place, a meaning, a kind of joint project going on, to which -even if we all have different viewpoints and heated arguments between ourselves- we all contribute.

To Liberians, however, the state is the current administrators in Monrovia who sit with all the stuff. And judging by what my friend the post office manager says, even the current administrators in Pretoria think of themselves as simply lucky in that way, and try to get some for their friends.

And are they mistaken to see it it in that way? Maybe not as much as we would like. Maybe they see what so many well-meaning development helpers don't see: that it's impossible to make the state machinery here work in the way they would so desire, that is, just like in the West.

Let's look at the state machines in Africa. It was 'given to us without a manual', again, in the words of my friend Prudence Mbewu, but that is not all. It also has to work in circumstances that it was never even designed for. This is a machine that (because of pressure from donors who are concerned about the environment) reserves large tracts of land for nature reserves, so that farmers can't farm there. There are large numbers of farming 'squatters' in nature reserves in Ivory Coast. These farmers are seen as 'problems' rather than agricultural entrepreneurs who are developing the country.

This observation goes some way to answering the question why successful entrepreneurs in Africa seem to operate largely outside state frameworks, i.e. extralegally or illegally. The state structures simply do not encourage people to start doing their own thing and make a living. Some countries tax farmers so heavily (with the tax going into the pockets of the governing elite) that many of them now rather grow the illegal marihuana (at least this can be sold outside state frameworks) than the traditional crops. Under pressure of donors, the state in Mozambique prohibited the use of DDT,  with as a result tens of thousands more deaths from malaria (Just as a comparison: Holland is too cold for mosquitoes, and we did use plenty DDT when we needed it). African states pay lip service to modern ideas about child labour, in countries where entire families only stay alive because every family member of whatever age works. African states are complex, unwieldy burocracies, totally unsuited to serve people in their particular context. This is a machinery that often just stands in people's way. It's a machine that jars and grinds everywhere.

How surprising is it that such a machine is often not properly used?


This is the question I would like answers to from the development aid bobo's, the IMF and World Bank people and all others involved in 'promoting good governance' in Africa. How does one adapt an alien, unwieldy and cumbersome machine so that it can work here? How do we not only get the driving and management skills, but get the alignment right between what needs to be delivered (health, education, etc etc) and the system that is supposed to deliver it?

Supporting professionals and entrepreneurs, professional associations and quality practice at grassroots level (not from two-men-and-a-computer-type NGO's, but real people doing real work) would probably in the long run work better than continuing to prop up state structures that don't work. In the process, state structures and functions that are needed to serve these grassroots activities, will become clearer defined. Then these functions, rather than looters on top, can be supported.In the process, maybe a pirate or two will abandon their plundering game and become active in 'normal' businesses that can accompany these processes.

Supporting investigative journalism in local African media, with a view to the information needs of African audiences and not only to NGO hobby horse subjects that change all the time (today its environment, tomorrow its gender, last week it was education), would also help.

But there I go talking about FAIR again.

Puritanic morality kills babies and girls

In September 1983, in Mexico City, 17 year old Hortensia Aguilar gave birth to twins in secret and alone. Having hidden the pregnancy from her catholic family -who never educated her about sex-, with no support from a fly-by-night boyfriend and living in extreme poverty, she buried the newborns alive in the same field where she had agonized in labour during the night. The crime was discovered. 'Baby murderer' screamed the headlines the following day, showing pictures of a crying brown girl being led away to prison in handcuffs. Knowing Mexico's prison system, that, like many prisons, punishes desperately poor and powerless people far more than it punishes real criminals, she may still be there.

At the time I thought that traditions that forbid girls to have sex, but not help them to avoid pregnancies, would maybe persist for another few years, but would then finally give way to a more humane environment for girls.

I was wrong.

In October 2010, twentyseven years later -the same period spent in jail by Nelson Mandela for having defended human rights- Evelyn Lesabane, 18, ate rat poison and died after having been humiliated at school for being in possession of a condom.

Never mind all the safe sex campaigns and the aids awareness workshops and the fact that the school, in Alexandra township, probably officially espouses all the right NGO-type messages, girls are still not supposed to have sex.

This is what girls know: if you have sex, you die. You die either in septic childbirth, through unsafe abortion, or you die in jail because you tried to cover up your shame and despair through infanticide or child abandonment. You die because your mother/father/reverend/local nurse will shout and shame and embarrass you so much that you will kill yourself.

My 16 year old daughter and her class were told, by a white female teacher in Pretoria, that an abortion 'often' results in shock and death. In the lesson and study sheet, no difference was made between unsafe septic and hospital abortions. The next message on the study sheet was that a girl, if she survived the abortion, was surely to commit suicide after realising what she had done.

If only it was easy to not have sex. If only girls had no hormones, boyfriends, pressures to deal with, if only they felt no misery, loneliness and need for hugs, if only they were made of titanium. I suppose then one could avoid sex altogether. (But, actually, we all know that you can't.)

So you try to prevent pregnancy. Then you get embarrassed by a teacher or a clinic sister or your own family, or your boyfriend.  Evelyn Lesabane was so humiliated by the office lady at school who shook her, shouted at her, took her to the principal and had her suspended, that she ate rat poison. My daughters' class was shown a movie showing the most frightful pictures of venereal diseases and scenes of ruined lives. The cause of all that misery? Sex. Not one mention of safe sex, or how to avoid STD's. The only acceptable way of life is total abstinence.

Dozens of teenagers tell stories -only to those who want to listen- that they tried to obtain and carry condoms, only to be lectured and punished. So after that, they didn't. And got pregnant. And ended up dead or in jail. In 2010, dead babies are discovered daily on rubbish heaps, in long drop toilets and along the road. Hortensia Aguilar a million times over.

I still see George W. Bush grinning when he made that speech about abstinence on TV. 'It's a sure thing, it works every time', he said.

Stop sunshine journalism now

For the rest, something should urgently be done about development reporting, gender reporting, HIV/Aids reporting, and all those other boring categories of reporting that we have been forced to attend workshops about.

Examples I was given range from 'a disabled woman got a house' to 'children didn't have a school and now they have a school'.  The newsroom doesn't dare to protest, my spokesperson says, because they are announced as 'development' stories and therefore they are good and indispensable. Like cod liver oil maybe. Who reads 'development supplements' in newspapers? If you don't, why would you expect anyone else to? African online media and those horrible, horrible, horrible community radio stations, all paid by well-meaning but clueless donors bore everybody in their reach to death with such stories. It should stop.

The above should convince that my earlier tirade against an exaggerated anti-corruption focus is not intended as a plea for sunshine journalism. No! Rather ten Jackie Selebi stories (at least they have the mafia in them) than one 'Let's all use malaria nets now, now there's a good people' story. And the next person who assaults me with a story about yet another strong black woman who invariably labours 22 hours per day to bring up a few dozen children (all through high school) on a domestic workers' salary, never slept a full night in her life, is always hungry because every crumb from her mouth goes to the poor little sods, does extra work for 'the community' on weekends, never ever has any fun, and is always so admired by the narrator (keep up the good work, Dora, I know you can continue to do it for another century!), is going to get it in the neck. Really.

Sunshine developmental journalism is patronizing and racist. It invariably buys in to the old stereotypes of the good hearted primitive who means well and just has to be educated a bit, with a radio programme that repeats the same message through the year (because he doesn't quite get it if you tell him once, the poor dear). Has no idea that malaria comes from mosquitoes or why his children keep dying. When he uses the malaria net to cover the kids, we will take a picture and show it proudly on our developmental page. See? See? He's got it, it's working. Next thing there's no food and the guy sells the net (because, hey, you need food). Then we are so disappointed. We go somewhere else and build a school, and we dedicate a developmental supplement to that.

The problems of course remain, because nobody has asked any questions. In particular, nobody has bothered to find out why we can't fight some damn mosquitoes, or why, when a school is built, it quickly falls into disrepair. Has anybody ever interviewed those drunk and abusive teachers we all blame for the bad state South African education is in? When are we going to ask questions? Not just about which minister is responsible for something bad and needs to be criticised, but real questions about how things are and what people do, say and think. What is it that informs the crippled South African discourse? I want to understand this society, but precious little I read in the papers helps me there.

Give me stories about domestic workers who party and get drunk: I want to know what they say at such occasions. (Actually, I just wrote a book about that, so I know and you don't, because it's in Dutch). Give me stories about people who come to workshops for the buffet lunch and the hotel, and secretly make fun of the facilitator. About pirates, prostitutes, smugglers and girls who bury their newborn babies, or die in childbirth,  because nobody at the clinic wanted to give them condoms or, later, a hygienic abortion. Give me an interview with a police commissioner that is not an exercise into the obvious ('You are incapable, are you not?' 'No I am not'), nor a PR exercise ('police commissioner announces new white paper on improving police performance'). We live in a society that is traumatized, complex, desperate, dysfunctional and full of questions. Let's face the questions for a change, instead of writing up what we think we know.

Writing African corruption: the looters, the sourpusses, the idiots and the decent people in between

On the South African draft Protection of Information Bill, the prospective Media Appeals Tribunal, and all the protests

The current war in South Africa between media and state is not a war between plundering dictators and brave freedom-of-speech fighters. It is also not a war between a patriotic nation-building movement and counterrevolutionary agents.

But it is a war. The vocabulary includes words like attacks, threats, tribunal, state secrets, clampdown, jackboot, agenda, sinister, lies. It includes, most worryingly, broad stereotyping. ‘The media’ have an ‘agenda’ and are ‘un-South African’.  The government and the ANC have morphed into a would-be dictatorship, and are engaging in a new ‘apartheid’ clampdown, no less.

There has never been a war where I found it so embarrassing to be on the side where I am. Of course I have to be with ‘the media’ –I am part of it. And, having been an investigative journalist all my life, I can’t be with a bunch of governing party looters; I can’t be in favour of a bill that allows almost every civil servant to sit on ‘state secrets’, and I can’t be for a tribunal that may be at the beck and call of a lot of incompetent ‘nephews-of’, who know very well how useless and greedy they are and will use any tool  at their disposal to attack those who verbalize these identities.

So ‘with the media’ I am. I am with the bunch of sourpusses who keep writing about potholes, when every bloody road has potholes (potholes? Really? Who tipped you off, everybody?), and do not notice the newsworthiness of a road that is being successfully maintained. Those who, instead of recognizing the astonishing news of an African health minister who sends his child to an African state hospital, start nagging about how he may have gotten ‘preferential treatment’ there.

I am with the idiots who described (thank you, Nic Dawes of Mail & Guardian, for this example) a village rondavel as a ‘holiday home’; those who scream blue murder if a minister is found to live in a R 3 million Rand house (that is 300 000 Euro’s folks, my neighbours in Centurion have a house like that), or has a Mercedes, or a R 700,- dinner.

With hypocritical idiots, too, who are perfectly OK with abuse of power (the old example of that South African FBI, the Scorpions, manipulating leaks to journalists to slander their targets, will serve here) if it victimizes other people, and only wake up when said abuse might limit their own self-satisfied existence. (Before a tribunal? Moi?)

Of course I have often been such an idiot myself. I have written stories that hurt people without justification, and I have felt self-satisfied about that. Maybe I have to live through this as a punishment.

Strangely, I can only see this war-like scenario, where politicians feel scared that someone might take a picture of their car, and journalists are scared of a prospective media tribunal, happening in South Africa, and maybe to a certain extent also in the rest of Africa and the developing world.

I don’t know it from my original country, Holland, or even from the UK or France. French politicians have gone before court and one was jailed briefly, I believe, in the Angolagate scandal that journalists revealed. Mark Thatcher got a slap on the wrist for his arms- and mercenary deals. But these incidents never gave rise to a war, or even to feelings of animosity, between ‘government’ and ‘media’. I am no historian or an expert in the development of the industrialised world, but I venture this may have something to do with the fact that these countries have been industrialised, crystallised out their class divisions and democratised a very long time ago indeed.

If their elites are corrupt (and they are), they know how to hide it and be classy about it. Even if something goes wrong and you have to be in jail for a few weeks, some arrangement will be worked out. You are still a classy guy. You’ll quote Oscar Wilde or something, write your memoirs. Go live in the country manor.

The western elites are only bothered by media revelations sporadically, because they have already arrived. They don’t need to acquire lots of ostentatious wealth in a relatively short time, like our nouveaux riches. They had all the freedom in the world to go about that when they started. And the beauty of it was that nobody scrutinized them then. They owned the factories, the banks, the resources, and the media. (They still do).

If there had been an outside media, outside political elite control, like is now the case in South Africa, history would have been very different. Just think what the Rockefellers in the US, at the time when they amassed their initial wealth, would have done to a press that would behave like we do vis à vis our new elite now.  If they would have written about the shenanigans within the Rockefeller family, the dodgy deals, the palaces, the chandeliers, the feuds, the secret bastard children, the empire-building. Imagine that these media would have worked with an FBI that was not loyal to the elite, imagine that they would actually have presented a very real danger of jail to the plunderers-of-then. I think we would have seen scores of journalists murdered, and not a soul to be very appalled about such things (human rights and press freedom and watchdog press ethics are all very recent).

Sometimes I pity our new elite, for having started so late, and having to deal with these media that come from another class, another world, another universe. To have to deal with NGO’s and worldwide anti-corruption institutions and all that. Shame. How are you ever going to amount to anything, like that? The Greek civilisation was built by a looting, plundering, enslaving elite, and we as their European descendents are grateful and proud. How is Africa going to emulate that, with all of us standing in the way of primitive organic accumulation, capitalist-style, when it is finally happening here?

The west was allowed to have slaves, pesticides, child labour, and, for a long time, no democracy.  That’s how it industrialised, advanced, enslaved others.

Poor Africa, where the new elites have to behave.

Not only do they have to behave, they are also watched very closely when it comes to job performance. Can they govern? Can’t they? Is there wastage? Budgets not spent? I can just imagine the despair of the MEC who is found guilty of baby deaths, because she did not manage to ensure the delivery of sufficient hand soap and towels to the hospitals in the province. Of course she should have ensured just that, but how? She hasn’t been in state management for decennia, like the Sir Humphreys (we must all watch ‘Yes Minister’ again) of the established bureaucracies. She is only just from political activism and speech-making. The nice civil servants, who came to power with her, -also very recently-, fumble. The old ones, the Sir Humphreys, who know the people in soap and towel procurement, who know the delivery people, who know how to work the lists and the schedules, left for a job in the private sector.

Or they were not very good at all the above either, and stayed.

We have a rusty and inefficient state machinery run by looters, incompetents and a few well meaning people, some of whom may actually be doing a good job. The designers and former drivers of the machinery now stand outside, ignore what works (miraculously) and harp on what doesn’t. They laugh and ridicule. The desperate MEC from the above example might, in this scenario, well end up taking an offer from an Italian, Indian or Russian company, to do the soap-and-towel-thing for her. In exchange for the nice tender of course. Hey presto, now the MEC is corrupt, too. Let’s put her in jail.

Can we even begin to understand how hated we must be? Even by decent people, whom we have alienated with our cameras, our harping on ‘holiday homes’, our self-satisfied watchdog behaviour, where we are always right (and courageous), and they are always wrong?

Add to this mix 300 years of racial inferiority, with ‘you are stupid, you can’t do this’ refrains in every new leaders’ head, and a press that doesn’t say it, but daily confirms that it actually thinks that? A press that is all to happy cosying up to that privileged Madam in the Cape, who is somehow now the embodiment of all the right values in South Africa?

A press that, after yet another year of nagging, suspecting, calling names, teasing and rubbing it in, when the minister finally prepares to go on holiday, sends him off with a final humiliation in the form of a report card? (Adriaan Basson, 29, gave you a C-Minus.)

Shouldn’t we all take a deep breath and concede it would be a miracle indeed if a new elite would, a), not enrich itself, b) be perfectly able to drive an old bureaucracy that was only built to keep people down, c) be able to not only drive it but also transform it, d) be totally magnanimous about being watched and harped on and hurt, often unfairly, and on a daily basis?

Isn’t it time that we conceded that we do indeed understand, and very well, that we are perceived to be nasty?

And racist, that too?

At the moment, I think I simply want to be with the decent people. On both ends of the divide. I want to work with the Health MEC,  report on the new initiatives taken to prevent more baby deaths, and see how that goes. I want to write that article about the arms deal and the possibility that the murder of Chris Hani had to do with that, for the 17 year old ANC Youth League girl who asked why that information was kept from her. I want to nail the looters just as much as that girl does, and I want her to read me and think of me as her ally. I want to ask myself everyday who my public is, and if I am actually living up to my own claims that I am working for that public.

I want to work with Gabriella of the South African History Archives, who is a thoughtful part of this debate, and who talks of engagement with the community at large, and taking public interest seriously.

Maybe I am naïve, but I hope that if we as journalists stop behaving like God’s gift to democracy and start looking at what we really do and what we really are (and not glibly, like in ‘of course we need to have self regulation’); if we start taking South Africa and its citizens, including the well meaning new politicians –even if they fumble- seriously, we may end up not being hated by all.

Of course, if we end up being hated by the looters, that is fine. If there is anything we can learn from the ANC, in the best traditions of Tambo and Mandela, it is this: talk and work with all well-meaning people: people who want to do the right things; people who know they can’t build Rome in a day, who are willing to learn and take criticism. Let’s not be foolish in our demands and expectations: the ANC, after all, never demanded of whites that they should join MK in their droves. Avoid going for individual players, try  to see where the ball is going. In the process, the buggers who are actually bad will become isolated. We’ll end up with the majority.