AFRICAN SELF-RELIANCE

I attended a workshop in Kinshasa this week and each morning en route to the workshop venue I passed a billboard that is like many one finds in the city. It features a picture of shiny new infrastructure, in this case, a mall of sorts. The caption under the photograph is a bold declaration in French – “this is the response to your expectations!”

Wow! Are bricks, mortar and concrete what the average Congolese citizen wants? That’s not what people tell me when I ask them. I posed that very question to one young woman today at my office. What people want, she said, are jobs and opportunities but those aspirations are thwarted at every turn.

What I find most remarkable is the inability of these same citizens to appreciate when they themselves are shooting themselves in the foot, unwittingly aiding and abetting the leaders they criticize in their own disempowerment. Another conversation I had was with colleagues just after we entered a locally owned restaurant – the only place in Kinshasa to find a delicious Congolese meal for only 5 dollars. The furniture in the restaurant had all the hallmarks of Chinese import. So I asked my colleagues to speculate as to the furniture’s origin. And sure enough, they agreed that China was indeed the likely source. I then asked what is wrong with furniture made right here in Kinshasa? “We can’t make furniture.” they responded. Then they were shocked to learn that every piece of furniture I have in my Kinshasa apartment is in fact made IN KINSHASA! And many other foreigners support local furniture makers.

I told them the story of how impressed I was when I first traveled to Ghana where every time I listened to the radio, the former President, Jerry Rawlings’ booming voice rang out exhorting his compatriots to buy Ghana goods. He understood the principle that Africans will never advance if they don’t support themselves. I have said in more than one speech given on this continent – “Who will respect Africans if they do not respect each other?

This reasoning lies in direct contrast to the prevailing mentality in DRC where this week the employees of my husband, Richard’s American-owned mining company, TFM became indignant when the company refused their demands to be paid $30 a piece to march in THEIR OWN Independence Day Parade. What an absolute extraordinary display of total commitment to perpetual dependency. TFM’s predecessor on this copper mining concession was a DRC parastatal, Gécamines that literally went bankrupt, in part because of corruption but also precisely because of its excessively paternalistic relationship with its employees.

Participating in a planning retreat that my organization held this week was a young man that we recently hired to head one of our field offices. He recently returned to DRC after 6 years in South Africa. After 3 days of listening attentively to the planning discussion, he expressed his profound disbelief at the extent to which the groups we target as key stakeholders in good governance like civil society organizations, provincial and national government officials and legislators needed to be given everything from transport, computers, meals and even pens and pads. He commented that in Johannesburg, when the Zimbabwean community wants to meet they pool their resources together and organize a bus. But when the Congolese community wants to meet, they go to a funder to beg for the “moyen” (the means in French) to meet with each other. He likened this practice to children begging from their parents. And in that arrangement, when parents pay, they get to dictate the terms. And so it is with the relationship between Africans like the sycophantic Congolese as opposed to the resourceful Zimbabweans or the positively interdependent Ghanaians. The Congolese, despite their bounty of limitless resources right under their noses, persist in handing the power to define and determine their own destiny to outsiders. If Gécamines, had managed itself properly, rather than “taking care of its employees” it would have empowered them by helping them to be responsible for their own destiny. The company would have also have empowered itself in the process! When you do for yourself and for others you have power. When you beg, you will always beg and you will never have power.

When I participated in a leadership course at the United Nations University Leadership Academy in Jordan whose first ever program brought together 160 people from 60 different countries, I decided to join the African group when regional meetings were held with the Rector who came from UNU headquarters in Tokyo specially to meet with us. I was shocked when a Nigerian woman got up and asked if the Rector would sponsor one of us to return to the course the following year. I was so incensed by this unabashed act of beggary by someone who showed up to each day of a month-long course in a different fancy outfit that I visited her room that night. I asked her pointedly, how will Africans win respect through begging? Beggars have no leverage, no power in the world.

After the young Congolese returnee to Congo after 6 years in South Africa was openly ridiculed by his colleagues for not understanding the reality in DRC, I came to his aid by telling a story about how Africans are routinely humiliated abroad because of the perception that they themselves constantly reinforce of being weak and undeserving of respect. I told the story of how while on the immigration line in London after just coming off a flight from Nigeria, all of the non-black people were taken out of the line and ushered quickly through the immigration process. I was the only one who complained loudly. Quite frankly I would rather NOT have $30 to march in a parade if it means that I will be treated with dignity and respect anywhere I go in the world.

The outrageous behavior of the Nigerian woman at the course in Jordan inspired me to offer the Academy a donation (out of my own pocket) to a scholarship fund for a deserving student with a profile like mine (a minority from a developed country) to attend the course the following year. The Academy’s director was so impressed by that gesture that he invited me to be on the board of the Academy and then I eventually became the Academy’s director for two years. That one act of generosity gave me the power, the leverage and the opportunity that acts of beggary deny. I did in fact appeal to my Nigerian colleague, Florence to contrast her request with an offer to pool funds from the Africans who attended the course in that first year for sponsoring an African to attend the course the next year and to ponder the consequences of those two contrasting acts. She just didn’t seem to get it. But the predictable consequences of the two acts have come to pass. She faded into obscurity and I created opportunities, not just for myself but for others as well.

The US was literally founded on the principle of self-reliance. That self-reliance is, in large measure, one of the greatest sources of our success in terms of global economic and political dominance.

Africa can simply not move forward without a healthy infusion of that same self-reliance with generous amounts of self and mutual respect thrown in!