My Beauty Best Teacher

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes "...Today the authority and legitimacy of public officials in Africa must be negotiated with a rich texture of regional, communal and social associations; rapid progress in communications technology is providing Africans with new opportunities for networking and enterprise; and, perhaps above all, increasing numbers of Africans in the diaspora are reconnecting to their home countries in imaginative new ways involving creative “peer-to-peer” development strategies.All these transformations are fuelling changes in the ways Africans nurture the relationships of accountability – embodying practices of obligation, respect, responsibility and mutuality – that underpin their connection to each other...With the rise and rise of remittance flows over the last few years, Africans in the diaspora are Africa’s biggest aid donors and investors. They are, in effect, Africa’s biggest taxpayers, hit by a double whammy. First, they contribute to the overseas aid budget through their tax contributions to their new home government. Second, they make direct contributions via their individual and collective remittances(PDF). The latter far outstrip the former in terms of absolute volumes...African governments are far more accountable and responsive to their bilateral and multilateral aid donors than they are to African taxpayers at home or abroad...Africans have developed fairly sophisticated strategies for avoiding a state that seems hell-bent on obstructing their lives. Income from informal economic activity and remittances; healthcare and education provided by modern-day missionaries (as well as many new Pentecostal churches and their charismatic pastors); law provided by sharia courts and imams; protection provided by vigilante groups and their magic potions. All this and more happens with little state involvement. Africans weave together the fabric of their lives far from the state’s purview..."
Via OpenDemocracy

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie critiques Make Poverty History "...making Africans invisible objects and recipients of the campaign – to be wheeled onstage to give a brief smile and a wave when the time is right – defeats the object of helping people liberate themselves from misery. When people see themselves represented only as helpless objects, they lose the power to determine their own future, the will to take responsibility for their own destiny..."
via OpenDemocracy

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes:

So, here we are again. Two years on from the July 2005 gathering at Gleneagles, Scotland, the acceptable face of African leadership is preparing to assemble on the steps of the Group of Eight (G8) summit at Heiligendamm, Germany for a photo-opportunity amid more heartfelt pleas to increase aid to Africa...Africans themselves - from the grassroots to the more enlightened governments - have similarly argued that their principal route out of poverty lies in the creation of more jobs, something the aid industry is largely silent about. Gordon Brown has been conducting his own, lower-level but evidently affecting, love-affair with Africa. We can only hope that, as Tony Blair strides off-stage to leave him the limelight, he will lay aside the temptations of celebrity to apply some of the medicine that has been good enough for Britain in the last decade.

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie writes "...The western aid industry is a trap that locks Africans in the chains of dependency. Africans’ initiative, symbolised by diaspora remittance flows, is the key to liberation...The increasing aid flows to Africa that this industry advocates will, at least, “make northern-NGO poverty history”. Who else, after all, will implement all the new projects that will come? This conflict of interest, in which those arguing most loudly for increased aid flows are the aid’s biggest beneficiaries is inherently corrupt and corrupting. We disallow it in other areas of public life; so we should when it comes to the aid industry. The aid industry is helplessly dependent upon seeing an Africa that is incapable, lacking in agency, in permanent need of external direction. If all the flies photographed around those emaciated babies had demanded royalties for their appearances in northern media, Africa would have the richest flies in the world...",Opendemocracy.