FOCUS: For Africa, Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

In the two weeks leading up to the London bombings this summer, Africa captured the world’s attention. With the hope of pressuring the G8 leaders to seriously address African poverty at the Gleneagales summit, the “Make Poverty History” campaign and its U.S. counterpart, “ONE,” launched a multi-million-dollar international publicity blitz of commercials, concerts, and wristbands designed to raise awareness—not money—for the poor of Africa. As Tom Hanks said at the end of the ONE television spot, “We're not asking for your money. We're asking for your voice.”

Although our voices of concern are very nice, and sometimes even effective in changing our governments’ policies, solving the problems of poverty in Africa requires a lot more than just our voices. You asked for my voice, Mr. Hanks, and here it is: As a concerned African, I am asking for your voice, but I’m also asking for your mind and your money.

I’m asking for your mind because your thinking about Africa has to change before you can help Africans. The recent outpouring of humanitarian concern for Africa has been touching, but also a bit disturbing. As Nigerian playwright Biyi Bandele wrote, “All too often, Africans see themselves mirrored in the eyes of the West—of those rich former colonial powers who like to regard Africans only as victims. And, all too often, Africans become the distorted images reflected in these mirrors.”

If you want to stop the victimization of Africans, first stop thinking of us as victims. Even the most well-intentioned can fall into this superficially benevolent trap, as Christian Aid’s head of policy demonstrated by remarking that “Africa is not a scar, it is a gaping wound.” We all need to stop thinking of Africa as a gash that can be stitched up by so-called “developed nations” and their aid agencies, and start thinking of Africa as a continent of people who have the potential and desire to solve their own problems and deserve a fair chance of doing so. Still, people outside of Africa need to change more than their thinking if Africans are ever to get a decent shot at healing the many wounds of the continent.

I’m asking for your money because these wounds are many, and many of them are getting worse. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world that has become poorer in the last generation. Half of Africa's population lives on less than $1 per day, and half of sub-Saharan Africans are under-nourished, making the region “worse off nutritionally today than it was 30 years ago,” according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. These Africans cannot survive the illusion that the affluent lifestyles of people in the so-called “developed world” have no connections to the extreme hunger and poverty that have become part of their everyday lives.

The world’s resources are not a Malthusian pie, but they are absurdly distributed. Consider the following: Europeans spend $11 billion per year on ice cream—$2 billion more than it would cost to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population. Moreover, Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion per year on pet food—$4 billion more than the additional amount needed annually to provide basic health and nutrition to the whole world.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you (like me) are part of the richest fifth of the world’s people who consume 86 percent of the world’s goods and services. (The poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent.) Our current lifestyle is simply not compatible with African development. To paraphrase Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen, who is also a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the problem of poverty is not one of resources, but of their allocation. There needs to be a reallocation and prioritization of the world’s resources­—including the resources that you and I control. Every dollar we spend on pet food, clothes, DVDs, and the like could be spent on food, medicine, or peacekeeping operations. We privileged few with full stomachs and extra money have hard decisions to make about how we’re going to spend the extra cash that the global economic structures have bestowed on us. Poor Africans are not victims, but they are victimized by our indifference.

Needless to say, this implies a serious rethinking of the global economies of power and capital that create African poverty. If Americans and Europeans started buying only what they really need our whole post-industrial economy would collapse. Moreover, aid from the “developed world” does not deal with the causes of African poverty and often creates new problems. Aid is needed for acute crises such as famines, AIDS, and the basic needs of the resulting orphans, but aid cannot deal with the economic and political roots of these crises.

Africa’s poverty problems will only be solved when African economies are restructured. Since colonization, these economies have been set up to extract resources from the continent, minimizing both the cost to foreign governments and corporations and the compensation for Africans from whose land comes the minerals, oil, diamonds, and other valuable products. The only real solution to African poverty is to divert the resources of the continent and the wealth they generate back to the people of the continent. This is where our voices are needed.

Unfair trade and debt policies have been siphoning away Africa’s wealth for decades. Now that the G8 (perhaps in response to our voices) has promised to cancel some of Africa’s debt, we need the same kind of intense vocal pressure to call for new trade policies that allow African nations, companies, and people to fairly negotiate and trade on the global markets. This is the only path out of poverty I can see for Africa, and it will be nearly impossible to achieve without the voices of concerned people in countries with the power to allow Africa to develop herself.

Our voices can help dismantle the political and economic structures that facilitate Africa’s exploitation. As citizens of democracies, it’s our responsibility to use our voices and our actions to show our leaders what they ought to do. Let’s first recognize that Africans are people with the potential to solve their own problems, then let’s put our money where our mouth is and prioritize African lives. Most importantly, let us pressure our leaders to change the unfair trade and debt policies that sap Africa of its wealth. Given how badly political leaders on all continents have messed up when it comes to Africa, it’s now up to us to start leading them by example.

Oludamini D. Ogunnaike ’07 is a psychology concentrator in Lowell House.