The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a saying
James Shikwati would easily clap to. But the clapping would not last
long, because he would soon realise that these words were spoken by a
Frenchman, St Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not that Shikwati has anything
against the French, his vexation is more complicated than that.
“Why
is it that we are quick to quote anything that is written by a
professor from Harvard or Oxford and not our own African sages?” he asks
as he adjusts his frame on his office chair.
Then
he leans forward and, pivoting himself on the desk using his elbows,
turns to face me before adding: “Even in the media, many of us seem to
find news from CNN and BBC more authoritative than our local channels.
You can see it in how we are quick to celebrate being mentioned in
international publications.”
It is at
this point, we guess, where we have to inform you — and apologise in
advance to Shikwati — that the self-taught economist and
founder-president of Inter-Region Economic Network (Iren) has had his
share of international media coverage. The New York Times did a
feature-length piece on his ideas in 2006, while Germany’s Der Spiegel
once published a two-page spread interview of the man.
His
byline has also appeared in The Times of London, The Guardian, The Wall
Street Journal and The Washington Post just to name a few. The New York Times
described him as a “free-market gospel” evangelist, while Der Spiegel
went with a verbatim headline for effect: “For God’s sake, please stop
the aid!”
Since then, he has appeared
in numerous other notable publications championing for an Africa that
“thinks for itself” and prides itself in solving its own problems.
At
first glance, one would be tempted to assume that James Shikwati is an
extreme African isolationist who wants nothing to do with the West.
Indeed, there is enough evidence to show that many seem to have
succumbed to this tempting conclusion.
For
instance, Jeffrey D Sachs, a Columbia University professor and a
leading aid advocate, calls Shikwati’s criticisms of foreign assistance
“shockingly misguided” and “amazingly wrong”.
FATALISTIC OVERREACTIONS
Shikwati’s passionate calls for the
West to stop aiding Africa have often been misconstrued for fatalistic
over-reactions. But a closer look reveals something more subtle is going
on, and I noticed it the moment I stepped into his office.
His
three-level wooden book-shelf is stocked with books by a wide array of
authors, most of them economists. There are books by Americans, Germans,
the Chinese, Italians, Indians… you name them. And the double-thread
that binds this multi-racial array of authorship is development and
geopolitics.
More than half of the
books have the word “Africa” somewhere in the title or sub-title, while
the rest have to do with wealth and poverty and the philosophies that
explain their dynamics.
This is not
the library of a man determined to shun the contribution of other
continents in the global pool of knowledge, and so it, in an
interesting, almost contradictory way, betrays a man willing to learn
from everyone, and in doing so, become more able to stand on his own.
The
world prefers to describe him as a “self-taught” economist — he holds a
Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Nairobi — but while
he appreciates the “self-taught” tag, he sees himself more as a student
of life and the world.
“Just because
I never stepped into an economics classroom and sat before a professor
does not mean I have not been taught by anyone,” he says, pointing to
his library.
But not everyone seems
to appreciate this. Most have chosen to see him as an ill-informed
contrarian, blindly opposing the well-meaning attempts by others to rid
Africa of the curse of hunger and poverty.
And
this is where Shikwati would respond with a reluctant reference to St
Bernard of Clairvaux: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
No
wonder many read the news with a quizzical look a few weeks ago when
the 45-year-old former high school teacher became the first African to
receive the Walter-Scheel Prize for his commitment to development
cooperation.
The award is named after
Walter Scheel, who once served as Germany’s Federal Minister for
Economic Development (1961 to 1966), Foreign Minister (1969 to 1974),
acting Chancellor of West Germany and finally President of the Federal
Republic of Germany.
But how, and
why, in the world would the West celebrate and award a man who is
seemingly set against them in his anti-aid rhetoric?
“It
is because people are not patient,” exlains Shikwati. “When they hear
me talking against foreign aid, many are too appalled to hear the rest
of the story.”
Jeffrey Sachs, the
pro-aid critic of Shikwati that we referred to earlier, once said of the
man’s anti-aid campaigns: “This happens to be a matter of life and
death for millions of people, so getting it wrong has huge
consequences.”
But Shikwati responds
to this by saying he has never called for a blind stoppage of aid: “The
best comeback is not ‘if you stop, people will die’ but ‘okay, what
alternatives do you suggest?’.”
The assumption that there is nothing after “stop aid”, says Shikwati, is what is holding many Africans and his opponents back.
His
own life, it dawns on me as we digress into his childhood, is an
allegory of the Africa he dreams and speaks so passionately about.
At
just the age of nine, the young boy in Standard Two found himself
frustrated by the scarcity of stationery in his school, which impeded
his learning. “It was difficult to even come by a pencil, let alone a
pen. My parents couldn’t afford one.”
Being
a rural Kenyan neighbourhood in the late 1970s, the community depended a
lot on agriculture. Liquid cash was hard to come by.
“We
grew our food and never went hungry. Much of the material needed to
construct houses could be freely obtained from nature,” he says.
WEEDING FARMS
Money,
therefore, was not necessary to survive, or even thrive, but you still
needed it to buy things like books and pens and other stationery for
school. So Shikwati got 11 other boys from his school and together they
brainstormed on how to make some money to buy stationery.
“We
came up with the idea of weeding neighbourhood farms for a fee,
charging Sh3 per line. So if we weeded 36 lines per day, we would make
Sh108.”
They got the mother of one of
the boys to act as the treasurer and keep the money for them. She would
save the money until the end of the year when she would divide it among
the 12 boys.
This happened for the
years before the club, dubbed Elkaka Boys Association (EBA), evolved
into something more structured and complex.
“We
even had an Attorney General to handle disciplinary issues. For
instance, a person would be fined a few shillings for breaking a rule.
The fine would be deducted from their cut at the end of the year and the
money would remain in the kitty and carried on to the following year.”
Over
the years, as the boy grew into a man, a parallel change in the
complexity of his ideas about work and life was also taking place in his
mind.
“While in university I was
troubled by many questions. I would read stories about our nation’s
independence or the slavery that preceded it and I would ask myself:
‘How come, if we are all human beings, others could come and just treat
us like items?’”
But the more he
prodded, the more complex the answers to his questions turned out to be.
He recalls joining the Philosophical Students Association at the
University of Nairobi in the early ’90s, where they mainly focused “on
identity questions concerning Africa”.
“I
still have some of the publications that we came up with,” he says,
holding up a once-white brown copy of a college magazine. “If you look
at the topics covered in the publication, they are pretty much the same
issues that I tackle today. But people are in a hurry now, and they are
quick to judge you by your present while paying zero attention to the
past.”
He speaks highly of the book Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, saying the section on Africa is
particularly illuminating as it reveals some of the forces driven by
“well-meaning” aid and yet are bent on ensuring Africa will never become
self-reliant.
“The people
controlling the capital control everybody. Unfortunately, very few
Africans control their capital. That is why there will be a movement in
Kenya like Cord saying ‘we are the one who will bring change’, yet
Jubilee also said the same thing. Many of these people could even be
sincere. But once the guy who said he will bring change takes power,
people discover he is not any different. Why?
“If
you dig deeper, you will discover that it is not necessarily because
power got into someone’s head and they started going back on their
promises. It is because the ‘real owners’ of the country are making
phone-calls to remind the winner ‘you cannot do this and this.’”
OWNERS OF CAPITAL
This
is why Shikwati has dedicated his life to exposing these forces and
enlightening his countrymen on ways to see through the illusions of
“help” coming from the real “owners of capital”.
“Some
of the questions we often address include: ‘Why do they have capital
and we don’t? How have they accumulated capital?’ You will notice that
many have accumulated their capital using an instrument that keeps you
where you are.
“Look at Kenya, for
instance. The proliferation of supermarkets is not necessarily a sign of
development. Because when you go to the shelves, you realise the
products are not from Kenya.”
Through
initiatives such as the East Africa Thought Leaders Forum, Shikwati and
his team bring together professors from all over the continent to
inject new thought processes into the conversation on development
cooperation.
“We quote Harvard
professors all the time. We quote economists from outside Africa. This
forum is about putting pressure on those who call themselves
accomplished thinkers, why can’t you bring a theory that our students
can quote?” he asks.
The young
primary school boy who never allowed his age or circumstances to get in
the way of his dream is now a grown man fighting for the same attitude
in his homeland. Repulsed by the addictive culture of dependency that
was cultivated through an over-reliance on foreign aid, James Shikwati
wants Africa to realise that it has everything it needs.
One
of the books jutting out among the hundreds in his office library is
Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms. The title seems to aptly describe
his heart’s desire, that Africa will one day say goodbye to foreign aid.
The
world seems to be listening and considering what he has to say, if the
Walter-Scheel award is anything to go by. This is not someone who is
just obsessed with chanting good riddance to foreign aid, but one who is
committed to finding solutions that work for the true benefit of all.
____________
THINK TANK
‘A distinguished economist’
James
Shikwati’s conversion to capitalism started with a rejection letter. As
a 27-year-old teacher in a rural high school, he applied to dozens of
American graduate schools and gained admittance to none. But one
rejection came with a book, The Law, by Frédéric Bastiat.
A
19th-century, French, pamphlet-length attack on the state, The Law
enjoys something close to a cult following among some libertarians. It
describes taxes and regulation as “legal plunder,” and sees tyranny at
work in laws that force citizens to support public schools. “Try
liberty,” it demands.
“The Law just
spun me around,” said Shikwati, who flirted with socialism at the
University of Nairobi and made the book’s translation into Kiswahili one
of his group’s first projects. “It showed me I was believing in the
wrong things.”
Shikwati wrote to the
book’s nonprofit publisher and received a journal with a column by
Lawrence Reed, a Michigan economist. Many busy people would have ignored
the letter that soon landed on Reed’s desk. (“Exactly what does the
Mackinac Centre for Public Policy do for the citizenship of the world?”
Shikwati asked, referring to Reed’s group.)
But
Reed, 53, runs a conservative “think-tank school” that twice a year
draws allies from across the globe. In answering, he began a four-year
correspondence. “This is how the movement grows,” he said.
By
2001, with Reed’s help, Shikwati landed two grants totaling about
$9,500 (about Sh1 million) a year, one from Atlas and one from a related
British group, the International Policy Network. Iren now has a budget
of $300,000 (about Sh31 million) and seven full-time employees.
With
no academic credentials, Shikwati made a mark as an author of opinion
articles. He defended McDonald’s against critics of globalisation and
drug companies against charges of price gouging. He called for the
legalisation of the ivory trade, which he argues would protect elephant
herds. Above all, he called for an end to foreign aid, saying it hurt
local markets, corrupted governments and promoted dependency.
His
iconoclasm and his authenticity as an African made Shikwati attractive
to the Western press, despite his lack of prominence at home. His views
quickly travelled the globe, appearing in places as diverse as The
Sydney Morning Herald, The Jerusalem Post, The Times of London, Forbes
and The Washington Post.
Echoing his
calls to end foreign aid, Suzanne Fields of The Washington Times lauded
Shikwati, who has a bachelor’s degree in education and no economics
training, as nothing less than “a distinguished Kenyan economist.” (New
York Times excerpt, Nov 18, 2006).
********
MEMORABLE QUOTES
Quotable Shikwati (From his Daily Nation columns)
Poverty
in sub-Sahara Africa is a man-made phenomenon driven by internal warped
policies and international trade systems. August 12, 2012
*************
External
actors coming to Africa have successfully clothed their intentions
using the global village mentality. Having surrendered the task of
addressing the continent’s challenges to outsiders, the creative
intellectual capabilities of Africans have been submerged. To reverse
this state of affairs, Africa must domesticate the processes used to
identify its leaders. August 3, 2014.
*************
Africans
have not mastered the art of converting relationships with global
partners into channels to meet the continent’s core interests as the
Europeans, Indians, Japanese and Chinese did. August 3, 2014.
*************
Africa
is undergoing a crisis of ideas and institutions. Having put little or
no investment in indigenous thought leadership, the continent risks
becoming a battleground for competing global ideological interests once
more. March 25, 2013
*************
The
culture of seeking refuge in new systems without trying to evolve
Africa’s own is what has made the continent an underdog for centuries.
This is not the time for Africans to play East and West; it is time to
invest in skills and navigation tools to tap from both. March 25, 2013
*************
For
Kenya and Africa to succeed, they too have to learn how to manage and
navigate strategic partnerships as opposed to the attitude of shunning
the rest of the world. November 25, 2014
*************
African
leaders proclaim “one Africa” for the prestige it affords them at
international forums, but they are not keen to grow a unified economic
dream for the benefit of the continent’s people. May 4, 2015
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