In this three-part series (we post Part Three today), Cilas Kemedjio takes on the ongoing crusade to spread neoliberal dogma and “western values.” Part One addresses the “virgin fallacy,” while Part Two moves on to William Easterly’s call to governments and aid agencies to be “guardians of virtue.”
by Cilas Kemedjio
Jeffrey Sachs, in his early incarnation, rose to prominence as an expert in the implementation of the drastic economic reforms advocated if not imposed by the global financial cartel. Nina Munk, in The Idealist. Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, tells the story of how Sachs has mutated into a “selfless genius driven to improve the world” (218). Sachs contends that “if foreign aid has failed to produce obvious and long-lasting results, it is because we haven’t spent enough money to get those results” (31). The crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa is like a forest fire: “the only logical conclusion to draw from a fire that’s out of control is simple: you don’t have enough firefighters” (32). Sachs’s humanitarian approach takes the form of the Millennium Villages Project.
Bolivia, July 1985. The economy is in chaos with an annual rate of inflation of 25,000%. Jeffrey Sachs designed a plan that was later called “shock therapy.” Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, pensions, and dignity. The new machine of manufacturing poverty, a combination of strict fiscal and monetary discipline, deregulation, and privatization was hailed as a success. Bolivia became the laboratory of the shock therapy that free market fundamentalists later imposed, first in Latin America, then in countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and later in Africa. Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2008) forcefully argues that these fundamentalists seize on situations of extreme crisis to advance their agenda. Bolivia enshrined Sachs’s reputation as an international star in restructuring desperate economies. His interventions in Russia resulted in disaster, but it did not matter because Sachs was up against a massively inflated and corrupt bureaucracy.
In 1995, during his first trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, Jeffrey Sachs has a brutal encounter with misery: “You might call it a spiritual conversion, a change of heart” (19). To his credit, he managed to transform anger into a humanitarian program. Sachs does not see any conflict between his “new humanitarian persona” and his previous work in distressed economies: “One way or another, he is an emergency physician—a “clinical economist” is how he puts it—and Africa is the patient in cardiac arrest. In essence, using shock therapy to resuscitate a nation’s economy, and prescribing humanitarian interventions to save someone’s life, depend on the same model of thought” (34). African countries, after more than two decades of structural adjustment plans, are totally devastated. The social infrastructure has been wiped out. Privatization has taken hold. Poverty has been industrialized. Sachs’s former colleagues from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were in Africa before him. If forests were burning, they could not be totally ruled out among the possible pyromaniacs.
Sachs, unlike emergency humanitarians, did his homework. He drafted a road map that took the form of a massive collective research project undertaken for the World Health Organization: Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Heath for Economic Development. The main conclusions recommend the transformation of the healthcare disaster into a business proposition that could potentially offer significant returns to investors: “With an annual investment of $66 billion, we can save eight million lives a year and generate economic benefits worth $360 billion a year” (30). Sachs appropriates the language of business, with investments yielding dividends, to frame humanitarian ventures in Africa. Sachs was able to enlist mega-stars such as Bono and Angelina Jolie. He also recruited deep-pocket philanthropists such as H. Fitzgerald Gerry Lenfest, who made his fortune in the TV Cable industry. The United Nations, the World Bank, and African governments were also on board. In 2006, George Soros wrote a $50 million check, claiming that it was a good investment as humanitarian action. In 2005, Sachs declared Sauri, a farming community in western Kenya, a success. This instant triumphalism resonates well within the mediatic logic of emergency interventions, where donors are clamoring for accountability. The logic of spectacularization, as the documentary filmed for MTV with Angelina Jolie testifies, demands instant success to keep distant donors feeling that their investment is indeed making a difference. What is left unaddressed is how the beneficiaries view the project.
Ruhüra, in southwestern Ugandan, is a typical Millennium Village with no electricity, running water, or paved roads: “It was a place of lack, of deprivation” (56).This representation of Africa as devoid of material resources and of any meaningful agency becomes another iteration of the unequal power dynamics that are manifest in the humanitarian exchange. It sets the stage for the “long monologue from New York—orders given to be executed” by the personnel on the ground in Africa (203). The good people of Ruhüra, the wretched place soon to be redeemed, sing the praises of the “good man from America.” Fueled by the expression of gratitude, he charges on: “Tomorrow we will be in Kampala meeting with your president, and we will tell him what remarkable progress you have made here” (61). Museveni emerges as the caricature of corrupt and predatory elites with narcissistic grandiose dreams. He has just spent $30 million on a presidential jet and engineered a change in the Constitution to perpetuate his grip on the presidency. The people of Ruhüra do not have access to their President. Sachs, like many humanitarians, becomes the advocate of the voiceless.
The Millennium Village Project, in its first stage, follows the classic humanitarian model. Resources are raised in the global Western humanitarian market and distributed to communities in need. The second phase is a hybrid model that combines philanthropy with productive investments. Assisted communities engage in activities that will eventually lead them out of extreme poverty. This is definitively a “step in making the beneficiaries agents in their own right” (Michael Barnett and Thomas Weiss, eds. Humanitarianism in question: Politics, Power, Ethics, 2008 47). However, communities targeted for humanitarian intervention were laboratories for testing theories designed by academics and experts; the goal being to persuade policy makers to revamp their approach to economic development. It was less about reworking the modalities of humanitarian intervention and more about shaking up the establishment. This model combines free enterprise with philanthropy, the productive potential of grassroots communities with a systematic lobbying strategy on states and transnational agents.
Munk recounts a meeting she had with a young Ugandan physician with whom she shared a beer:
“He’d never been to the United States (in fact, he’d never been outside Uganda), but from what he’d read and heard from travelers, it seemed unimaginably beautiful. ‘In America,’ he said wistfully, ‘you are living in heaven on earth” (234).
The Millennium Villages Project intends to bring some shade of the American paradise to the wretched of the earth, thanks to Sachs and his deep pockets philanthropist boosters. The imagined paradise, be it born from the imagination of the young physician or from humanitarianism, is hard to come by. The limits of Sachs’s approach derive from an Eurocentric view of modernization that begins with the premise that the Western path to economic growth is the only model. These theories are manufactured in Western laboratories and do not account for the complexities of African communities. The inability to learn from failures and successes that are written into the long history of fighting poverty in Africa calls into question this experiment that inevitably resurrects the tabula rasa mindset.
Cilas Kemedjio is Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester and co-editor of the CIHA Blog.