The French

"The French come to the kenian farmers and tell them if they grow French peas the French company will buy up all the produce with one evil, nasty and vicious trick: the seeds, machinery and anything else needed to grow them have to be bought from this company at prices that leave the poor Kenyan with very little". Stories like this or variations of it ranging from the poorest small scale farmer to the even poorer Kenyan government are repeated over and over again roughly as often as the five songs that fill a 24 hour Kamba radio station. No matter how often one tries to explain why it is always brought up when the topic of talk is "how hard is the Kenyan life". Of course methods like that are unfair and now in widespread use exactly because the "giving" side actually receives more. The solution? Simply do not agree to the deal.
I do not know whether this attitude of "why is the world so cruel" is so widespread because the politicians have played the blame game so well (colonization is the favorite here even after 50 years of independence in which the Asian counterparts such as Malaysia increased their GDP per capita tenfold compared to that of Kenya in the same time span) or because the millions to billions of aid money rushing in are seen as something of a right now. Most other volunteers believe both.
I genuinely believe most of the aid money is well intentioned but it is not showing the results it should (how can it in an area of world preocupied with wars mostly due to borders that do not reflect the ethnicity and therefore act as another easy populist target for the blame game) and it certainly is not appreciated as a temporary thing but as another source of income like a VAT. The only way to end this is to have the political will to actually do something (e.g. Deny the foreign company the deal and try it yourself) or act responsibly and accept the conscequences (e.g. Agree to the deal but appreciate how others are doing things maybe do it better next time). Or combine the two like the Chinese and let the "western" companies in but under lots of conditions, which then savagely and so unfairly take advantage of the greed and arrogance of those companies that thought they can just take advantage of the cheap labour force and move on without conscequences. These conditions allowed China to first copy (well still copy) and now produce their own.
To get this political will the other volunteers suggested to take away what is dearest, the aid. This brings us back to China because if Europe and the US pull back the aid the first to knock at the door will be the Chinese and they do not care where the money ends up or which human right is abused on the way as ling as in return they get something more valuable like a nice copper mine or a contract for a pipeline through Uganda to Mombasa and from there to China.
I do not want to paint China as a new evil imperialist but they do not have the term politically correct and say what they think whether it is in Copenhagen, Davos or Nairobi. Somebody from the European Commission told me that when the Chinese win a contract or want to build a factory in Africa they arrive with Chinese experts, workers and material because they want to "get the job done on time and on budget", whch they deem impossible with, in this case, Namibians.
This vicious cycle can either be broken by the international community making development the global issue that it is or Africans finding that political will. The first is unlikely because Asia seems to be doing fine without the international community, south America doesn't want the community and who really cares about Africa enough to go through all that trouble what does it offer? For the latter I leave you with another story this time from Kenya. A delegation of Kenyan is invited to India. When the meetings come to the end the Kenyan delegate walks over to the Indian counterpart and asks: "how did you manage to get all this wealth?" the Indian walks him over to the windows points outside and replies: "see that bridge?" "yes" "10% of it went to me". The following year the same summit is held this time in Kenya. At the end the impressed Indian walks over to the Kenyan and asks "your not doing to bad yourself what did you do?" the Kenyan walks him over to the window and asks: "see that bridge over there?" "no" "100% of it went to me"



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