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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.

"...Many African states have been addicted to Western aid for decades. Unfortunately, Africa as a whole has stagnated and some African countries are poorer today then they were in the 1960s. In recent years, advocates of foreign aid have called for making aid more efficient, but that may be easier said than done. The problem, some critics argue, is that aid supports predatory governments and perpetuates institutions that are alien to Africa...[continue reading]" -Cato Institute
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G. Pascal Zachary on the 'The Oracle of Africa'

While Achebe criticizes Western thinkers on Africa, he also sets himself apart from other African intellectuals by his complex stance toward the Christianization of his people. The Igbo are among the most fervent Catholics in Africa, and evangelical Christianity is also strong among them. Achebe’s own father was enlisted by Anglican missionaries to convert other “natives,” and Achebe himself benefited from the schools established by foreigners. Yet he remains alive to the damage done by Christianity and relishes how traditional spiritual beliefs persist among Igbo and other Africans.

The critiques of the colonial and the Christian legacies in Africa come together in Achebe’s powerful indictment against Western do-gooders who, he asserts, demean and diminish Africans in their pursuit of helping them. “Lurid and degrading stereotypes,” he writes, are invoked by aid workers, humanitarians and missionaries in order to drum sympathy for African causes. Yet by “dehumanizing the sufferer,” advocates of assistance for Africa, abetted by international media and Hollywood, promote corrosive stereotypes that drown out authentic African voices.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:

Africa has seen all kinds of development paradigms that have never fully factored in her rich values and experiences, unlike places like Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Why should Africa be made to go through all these non-African-created development paradigms? Because the Western world thought that Africans are not developed, or more appropriately, not "civilized," and that they could replicate their values and experiences in Africa in their self-imposed "civilizing mission." They did this without factoring in Africa's values and experiences because they wanted to play God by re-creating Africans in their development image...Still, in terms of Africa's development progress, almost all the foreign development paradigms are not bad. The problems have been how to mix Africa's environment with these development paradigms so as to facilitate a better sustainable development, as advocates of the modernization theory say. This inability of African elites to creatively mix their values and experiences with their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global development values, have not only seen Western governments continue largely with the modernization theory but also international development agencies' programs that come in the form of foreign development aid.