Aeon has a very candid article by Ayisha Osori, a prominent Lawyer/journalist/activist from Nigeria who has also contested elections. She has expert, emic, knowledge of the 'third sector'- i.e. NGO activities- and its weaknesses and strengths.
Ayisha's article the rise of kidnapping, especially of students, not just by extremists but by criminal gangs. Families are having to pay large sums to get back their young sons and daughters. It appears, the Government offers little help.
When students of Greenfield University were kidnapped, Ayisha reveals that the ransom was paid by the families, not the Government.
On 29 May 2021, all the survivors of the Greenfield kidnapping were released after a ransom of 150 million naira (around $375,000) was paid, together with the delivery of eight new, fuelled motorbikes. Some parents, still in debt today, had to sell properties, crowdsource and borrow to make up their contributions to the ransom. Neither the Kaduna state government nor the federal government were involved in the negotiations or tried in any way to alleviate the financial burden on parents.
Nigerians are an attractive, articulate, dynamic people but the country is still young and has had difficulty integrating its diverse cultures and ethnicities. Since the people are resilient and self-reliant, there is the risk that they will just give up on the State and fend for themselves. The problem here is that this might also mean giving up on Society. Individualism is a good thing but there are collective action problems which require people to come together- sacrificing their own time and money- for the common good.
Ayisha writes-
Nigeria has an enormous number of NGOs – around 200,000 – but society is less organised. Typical donor funding for programmatic activities is unlikely to provide the critical requirement for successful organising: time.
One problem is 'pay for play'- people are paid to turn up for protests. This reduces the legitimacy of such activism more particularly if foreign Foundations are providing the money.
Some might say there is a dissonance in expecting grants to fund organising. If many Nigerians have given up on the idea that government owes them a duty of care, information alone cannot wake them up. Without an anchoring ideology or philosophy that provides values around which people identify and organise, appeals to enlightened self-interest and an assumption that ‘we all want to be secure’ will never be enough.
Ayisha notes that the fact that she is a Muslim caused Catholic organizations to view her with suspicion even though the causes she devotes herself to affect people of all faiths and ethnicities. I suppose, this is a generational problem. Young, highly educated people like Ayisha do not share the older prejudices or tradition of mistrust. The question is whether they need an ideology to come together and gain effective 'Voice' to change the system.
Ayisha, a Human Rights lawyer, is attracted to critiques of 'Neo-Liberalism'. Is there a way of mobilizing traditional 'embedded' values against the rampant greed and selfishness which is ruining Nigeria?
Anthea Lawson’s The Entangled Activist: Learning to Recognise the Master’s Tools (2021) and Issa Shivji’s Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa (2007) both explore and critique, in different ways, individual and organisational activism.
He who pays the piper calls the tune even if the funds come from a benevolent Foundation and the piper is a committed activist with no mercenary motive.
Shivji, a leading expert on law and development, identifies NGOs (non-governmental organisations) as handmaidens of neoliberalism who replace a degraded state that is no longer capable of providing social goods and welfare.
When did the state in Tanzania, where Shivji is from, provide 'social goods and welfare'? Poor countries don't have the money for any such thing. Aid may be available, but it comes with strings attached. It is easy to say 'let private enterprise create wealth. Once the economy 'takes off', then you can levy taxes and provide a welfare safety net.' The problem is that if some get a little money, they may become the target of criminal gangs. True, the billionaire can keep himself safe with his own private army. But what is to prevent him from using it to grab land and other resources for himself? Indeed, he may enter politics and make himself a kleptocratic Dictator.
NGOs pretend to be ‘pro-poor’ while maintaining the capitalist, globalised hegemony that creates so much poverty.
NGOs have no such power. Poor people need money. This means that many of them are forced to work. Others can beg or steal. But begging or stealing does not 'maintain' any type of hegemony. It is a nuisance merely.
Adopting some of Shivji’s criticisms of NGOs as a framework for assessing the Secure Our Lives campaign has been useful for processing my disquiet about NGOs and the state of organising in Nigeria today.
If the executives of foreign funded NGOs have elite lifestyles then though the organization they preside over may look good on paper, it will lack popular support. It would be the equivalent of a Multi National Corporation marketing Coca Cola or Cheeseburgers according to protocols formulated by Head Office.
One critique is that activists try to change the world without understanding it: ‘how can you make poverty history without understanding the “history of poverty”?’ Shivji asks.
These guys can't make poverty history. The history of poverty is known to everybody. When poor people have lots of babies, almost all those babies are bound to grow up to be very poor unless they die of hunger or disease first.
Indeed, how could we successfully demand that the government secure our lives without
paying lots in taxes to the government?
understanding the nature of the state
it uses tax revenue to provide public goods like 'Law & Order'.
and the sources of insecurity?
For many African countries this has to do with volatile commodity prices.
Investigating the roots of insecurity in Nigeria aligns with Shivji’s observation about the NGO space that geopolitical realities are all too often ignored.
They are irrelevant.
For our campaign, the geopolitical realities were highly complex, with the politics of West Africa and the Sahel largely stemming from the Cold War,
which ended 25 years ago. In any case, the Soviets supported Gowon & helped the Federal Government in the Biafran War.
foreign military bases and their implications for sovereignty, the proliferation of illegal arms, a decades-long conflict with jihadists in northeast Nigeria, and the impact of global warming on traditional economic activity.
Nigeria seems to be doing worse than some of its neighbours. Perhaps this has to do with its greater diversity and higher income.
All of this needed to be taken into account but, in 2021, we were reacting to an immediate emergency.
The brazen kidnapping of College students. There were 5 such incidents during that period. Nigerians were furious. The whole world sympathized.
We did not have time to build the necessary theoretical knowledge about the extractive, neoliberal nature of the Nigerian state and the influence of geopolitics.
That 'theoretical knowledge' is garbage. Why not just say 'Money is the root of all evil!' or 'Whitey be bebil!' ?
On the other hand, it must be noted that my fellow organisers and I live these geopolitical realities.
i.e. they live in a fantasy world. Still, they are bright and articulate and get paid very decently. Ayisha herself will end up in a high position with a plush office and a chauffer driven limousine- unless she already has these things.
And, as university graduates and activists working on gender equality, governance and social justice, we are
useless. Why not work on abolishing death or gravity.
already grounded in the relevant theory and prepared to build our organising framework on our knowledge. But that is not always the case for many organisers. Courses on critical thinking were stripped from university curriculums in Nigeria in 1986
Nonsense! The students rioted over the issue of men being allowed to visit the women's dormitories. There was a police firing in which some students were killed. Other campuses joined the protests.
at the height of the president Ibrahim Babangida’s struggle with student unions, who were protesting the conditions of the ruinous Structural Adjustment Programmes (a number of neoliberal economic reforms forced, by the Bretton Woods institutions, down the throats of developing countries in the Global South as the magic tonic for development).
Evil IMF bastards were preventing men visiting the women's dormitory. Neo-liberalism is preventing people with penises from entering structures containing people with vaginas. Fuck you, IMF! Fuck you very much!
It was in 1989 that students led protests against Structural Adjustment. The Government was forced to call elections.
This reality is arguably mitigated by the fact that philanthropies are increasingly led by people with doctorate degrees
in worthless shite
and the NGO world has a healthy supply of intellectuals.
with shit for brains.
The questions remain: is Shivji right to claim that intellectual curiosity and theoretical frameworks are missing from activism?
He is a cretin from Tanzania which is way poorer than Nigeria.
Whose theorising is required to demand a better society?
No theorising is needed to demand money, sex, or even the abolition of death.
These questions are connected to the silence of the people in the communities that our campaign intended to help.
Why are they not demanding the Government abolish death? It is only the IMF which requires poor countries to permit the activities of the Grim Reaper.
Shivji’s argument is that the voices of the majority are neglected in elite approaches to development, advocacy and organising.
But the majority is as stupid as shit. It won't even demand the abolition of death.
Local wisdom and knowledge are too often sidelined.
e.g. the local wisdom of Boko Haram.
Although it might have been a novel position in the 2000s when Shivji made this observation, it is conventional now that movement-building and social justice advocacy need to be bottom-up and organic.
That's how they started. What changed in the Sixties and Seventies was a tsunami of money from Governments and private Foundations which created the modern NGO/Aid industry.
In other words, those versed in ‘foundationese’, as the social commentator Dwight MacDonald termed it in 1956, are today implored to get out of the way.
So that others can take over their fancy offices.
The legitimacy of campaigns requires grassroots representatives to be part of the conversation.
Sadly, grassroots representatives of Ayisha's community may want that conversation to further the cause of Boko Haram.
Inclusion strengthens planning. However, the reality is that in a neoliberal, extractive state,
anti-neoliberal extractive organizations like Boko Haram exist
where the majority earn a daily wage, participating in civic engagement is a luxury. This is why civil society often pays people to participate and protest.
There may be foreign funding for this.
Maybe the challenge is not so much that the elite are doing much of the organising but that they are trying to organise without clear ideological values.
Ayisha, by her personal qualities, education and wide experience, is certainly a highly deserving member of the elite. But the ideological values of the elite don't matter. What matters is figuring out better solutions to collective action problems or, if that is too difficult, just imitating what has worked in similar contexts. Just saying 'Boo to Neo-Liberalism' doesn't help anybody.
With remarkable candour, Ayisha reveals the dirty little secret of activism funded by Soros type foundations.
On the politics of aid, Shivji points out that funding and aid create dependencies within civil society and make it harder for people and institutions to collaborate.
China built the Tanzam railway. It was useless. Zambia had to go back to using the Rhodesian railway.
This was our experience. Once it was known that the campaign had funding, there was an expectation that we would distribute funds to mobilise women in the typical fashion: pay to protest. But that was precisely what we did not want. This caused a few organisations to withdraw from the campaign.
Those organizations would cease to exist if they stopped getting money. This is the fault of Neo-Liberalism.
Because, in the civil society space, people always follow the money, our plans for Secure Our Lives became politically fraught by virtue of funding and focus. As the feminist activist Almut Rochowanski writes: ‘Money is never “just money” … it is power incarnate.’
No. Power incarnate is the Army or guys with guns.
By deciding not to spend on mobilising citizens to join campaign activities with transport or lunch allowances, we partly sealed the failure of the campaign. But we were not going to follow industry norms and organise people by paying them. Instead, we wanted an organic campaign – like Bring Back Our Girls, launched in response to the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok in 2014, where people went to rallies and sit-outs (the movement’s term for sit-ins) because of shared humanity and experience, not because they had been promised the standard 1,000 naira ($2.50).
We share humanity and experience with bandits. They need money and so do we. If protesting earns us money- fine. If it is useless and we don't get paid- why do it? One advantage religious organizations have is that the faithful believe they can get to Heaven by doing what the Bishop or the Imam or the Mahatma tells them to.
Strategy sessions at Secure Our Lives became battles about representation and identity.
Why are disabled Jewish transgender people under-represented in the Lagos chapter of 'Secure our Lives'? Is it because Neo-Liberalism is very evil? I suppose so.
The pathologies of organising in a traumatised country, where power is exercised through bribery, spying and the weaponisation of identity – no matter if you’re running the government or a civil society organisation – soon became evident.
So the problem is with the people, not the type of government or the economic regime.
We experienced subterfuge, competition for visibility and recognition, co-option and infiltration.
Sadly, the Institute of Socioproctology faces no such problem. The neighbour's cat used to drop around but, after it was appointed Treasurer and asked to supply snacks, it boycotted our meetings. I suspect it may have set up a rival Institute.
In this, Shivji is right that NGOs too often disregard the existing power structures around which societies are organised.
Which is fine if you still get paid.
In hindsight, our attempt at drawing in the Catholic Women Organization (CWO) and the Federation of Muslim Women Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) was misplaced and mishandled.
because you showed them your dick? That's the reason the Women's Institute refused to amalmagate with the Institute of Socioproctology.
Misplaced because religious organisations in Nigeria tend to defend the status quo and eschew anything radical.
e.g. the demand that the Pope undergo gender reassignment surgery
I might have botched our chances of signing up CWO by leading that engagement.
Even though she didn't show them her dick.
As a Muslim from Middle-Belt Nigeria, I was probably not the best person to build an alliance with Catholic women. Then again, I was not successful with FOMWAN, so being of the same religion did not help either.
FOWMAN believes that 'the implementation of Sharia is the greatest weapon against male domination'. I don't suppose that is a viewpoint Aisha shares. Still, she did her best to get them on side. Who knows? If people like her persist, they may prevail. Nigeria has a bright future. The second half of this century will see Africa as the 'locomotive' of global economic growth.
No comments:
Post a Comment