Blame the natives

Probably the most daring of Calderisi's recommendations is his most wrongheaded. He wants foreigners to run Africa's elections, schools and public health programs. How this would happen, he does not say. He also is unpersuasive in making the case for why Africans would receive better services at the hands of foreigners than those of their own people. Running elections is extremely difficult, even in places like the United States, which has witnessed two disputed presidential elections in a row. But Calderisi is enamored of the notion of recolonizing Africa, the idea that through their own persistent incompetence, Africans have abdicated their rights to self-governance. He does concede, however, that it is politically impossible for outsiders to take over the running of African governments. So he is left instead with the less appealing option of invoking offbeat mechanisms such as sanctions against African governments that jail even a single journalist. Why he is partial to journalists yet does not threaten a similar cutoff for, say, jailing protesting farmers, he does not say.

I suspect part of Calderisi's lack of imagination stems from years of serving as part of Africa's aid elite. Having spent his entire adult life dispensing plums to Africans -- first for the Canadian government, then for the World Bank and now as a private advisor -- he has a vested interest in defending aid programs. He repeatedly describes them as well-designed, failing only because of sabotage by or stupidity of Africans themselves. He sees aid officials as personally talented, well-intended and highly motivated. He fails to recognize that fat-cat aid officials are as much (and probably more) to blame for aid failures than the character-flawed Africans he repeatedly encounters.

It is a testimony to the strength of the African character that, despite awful governments and ill-conceived and wasteful foreign aid programs, African societies, in every part of the sub-Saharan region, are experiencing notable gains. Calderisi ignores completely the positive role of technology in improving the quality of African life. Cellphones are revolutionizing Africa, giving vast numbers of people an easy and relatively inexpensive way of reaching relatives and gaining essential information. An explosion in radio stations has given voice to voiceless Africans in virtually every African country, changing the balance of political power and providing new sources of hope for even the poor. Finally, the spread of electronic money transfer services has meant that even those living in remote villages can receive remittances from their lucky relatives living in the U.S., Europe or the Middle East. These remittances, unlike aid, are transfers within extended African families and possess an authenticity that mere charity lacks.

Africans remain burdened by awful problems. That many of these problems are at least partly of their own making cannot be denied. African leaders must take more responsibility for solving their own problems, and ordinary Africans must invest in their own societies in a way they have not done for a very long time. But to urge Africans to stand on their own feet, and to stop blaming others for their problems, does not require us to pin most of the blame for Africas problems on Africans themselves. Those of us who are rooting for Africans to succeed in their own lands -- and I include myself and Calderisi among these people -- surely do not need to construct a phantom African character on which to project our brittle notions of what constitutes authentic African values, personalities, aspirations and even delusions. Images and assumptions about African talents and capabilities have been proved wrong in the past. History has mocked those who once saw limits and shortcomings in Africans that Africans did not see in themselves. Nothing about the current crisis in African affairs, however frustrating, should force us to revive old notions of African inferiority. Those who do surely will once more be mocked by future historians.

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