The Hollowness Of The Very Idea...

I’d really like to visit a Millennium Village. I’d like to see what it looks like, experience its people and their ambitions. I’d like to feel it. I’d like also to visit those families 20 years from now, when today’s children are hypothetical university graduates. I’d like to see how this village, one whose success is defined by checking off a poverty list (the MDGs), is different to the villages that have bred the rest of us, surviving Africans.



There’s nothing particularly original about my perspective on aid or Jeffrey Sachs. To those for whom my perspective does not resonate, my views straddle the categories of conspiracy theory, pessimism and unsubstantiated cliché. That’s okay. Those who agree with me might see this as the incessant chant of an ongoing struggle- gaining momentum at times, waning at times, subject to the many forces that masquerade as power throughout history. This struggle is inevitably waged by those whose idealism leads them to believe that justice is worth the fight. So I merrily rant against Development, big ‘D’ development.



This is the development that believes it can operate on a large, dare I say, global scale without being political (this is an effect of the intention to mislead rather than naïveté). Big ‘D’ development claims to have only one constituency, the poor, and thus as a function of reducing the condition of poverty to a few indicators, believes a single (error-fraught) dimension of its constituency to be its only relevant dimension. Development relies on the assumption of a homogenous poor in much the same way as economics relies on homo-economicus to justify its prescriptions. Development is necessarily run by Westerners who make all their important decisions about the poor from the ‘developed’ world. They, Developers, have not experienced poverty first hand, but have spent significant chunks of their lives in ‘villages’. This means that unlike the educated African or the upper caste Indian and the rest of the ‘Southern Elite’, they know better what the interests of ‘the locals’ are. Big D development, knows and therefore truly cares about the meek, hungry and humble. Development is omniscient and if you live in a developing country you’ll agree that it’s omnipresent. Therefore if we’re to save ourselves the effort of further descriptors, we can conclude that big ‘D’ development is a self-styled god figure of our time. Sachs, Bono and Kofi Annan are the faces that feature most prominently in my head when I imagine Development. Needless to say, I shun Development and other claims to relevance preceded by capital letters.



Let me talk from my experience as an African who comes from a poor-ish country and a poor-ish family, let’s call it a ‘developing’ background. Neither of my parents went to university. Thanks to the abolition of one of the last remaining remnants of White hate, apartheid, I managed to find my way into higher education. As a result, I’m part of a global minority that has been able to capitalise on its education by finding commensurate work. Me and many of my cousins, alike. But let me tell you what else has happened to us in the interim. Between learning to speak English better than our parents; being more connected to the global, mainly American, world; working for corporations and thus making money (after all, isn’t that the ultimate marker of the non-poor?)- in the midst of all this, life has also happened. Some of us, despite our families’ values (laden with hypocrisy as is always the case), managed to become parents before our 21st birthdays. This wasn’t due to a lack of contraceptives in our ‘local’ clinics or the absence of sex education in schools. Despite all this, we still became curious adolescents and sh*t happened. Some of us experimented with marijuana and never made it back to the land of functional adults. Some of us, determined to wrench ourselves out of the misery of township life, opted to buy houses in suburbia and thanks to university loans, interest rate hikes and all manner of financial drama, we’re heavily indebted. Some of us have Aids because as Romeo and Juliet prove, love happens and inexplicable injustices lead to tragic endings. Life happens. Some of us, well-paid government bureaucrats and the like, can only afford to take our children to public schools. Given that roughly 16% of children who started school 12 years ago passed matric in 2009, we know how that cookie crumbles. Given that our lives are dominated by debt and the cost of funerals, basically, day to day stuff, we’re unable to give our parents the things that might have greater ‘developmental’ value: homes with running water, medical insurance etc. And as life happens, our media gives more and more airtime to girls in weaves bickering over sugar daddies. Newspapers, TV and radio, the easiest kinds of mental consumption, provide a diet that’s high in low self esteem and low in inspiration. These things happen, because life happens and as such, history unfolds.



In the South or the developing world or the third world, wherever we reside these days, life happens. Teenagers experiment. University graduates struggle to find employment. Systems fail hardworking parents. Debt is real and unlike the dream microfinance attempts to sell, it can amount to an elected form of prison for an income-earning person. This happens everywhere. And so even as less of our children die at birth and more of our homes are lit with electricity, we still struggle to ensure that other family members do not die of treatable diseases. And true to the nature of life, we don’t always win. And this is okay. It’s okay because we’re people, who are trying and failing, driven by a sense of both the past and the future. We’re human and the only thing that denies us our humanism is the notion of our states and ourselves as ‘developing’. Unlike the word and attendant industry suggest, we are not a people that will one day begin. We won’t begin when meet all HDI indicators. Our pasts won’t gain relevance once we’ve ‘overcome’ them. This is a construct of Development- a construct that leads to things like Millennium Villages and Africa’s Green Revolution. This development awaits a moment, ‘the end of poverty’. However, as our experiences make evident, getting out of the grip of oppression, injustice and inhumanness, is a process, one which I might argue, is life, everywhere and for everyone.