Africa should no longer be seen as a charity case requiring endless handouts from superior Western economies, the provincial of Jesuits in East Africa was to argue in a lecture.
Delivering the annual Pope Paul VI Memorial Lecture in London, Fr Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator suggests that a partnership is now required.
While he says that aid has helped Africa fight diseases, he said the world should move away “from treating Africa as an object of charity addicted to aid towards engaging the continent as a partner”.
Quoting journalist David Blair writing in The Tablet, he says: “The world may not have noticed, but most of Africa has spent this century gradually hauling itself out of poverty.”
In the lecture, due to be given yesterday, he was to argue: “I believe that Paul VI struck the right balance when he proposed the idea of holistic development. That is what Africa needs. Anybody who knows Africa understands that the essence of life is the vital connection between the individual, community, God and the environment. Development is not development if it merely turns people into interesting statistics and fails to comprise a joint effort for the development of the human race as a whole.”
He goes on: “First of all Pope Paul VI argues privileged nations must support the developmental goals of less privileged nations; secondly, economic relations must be founded on equity and justice; and, thirdly, we must practise a mutually beneficial global charity that empowers all partners to give and receive, and where the progress of some is not bought at the expense of others.”
He suggests a new set of principles to assist Africa’s transformation and development.
The first is solidarity, which requires rejecting an attitude that sees Africa as “an arriviste whose place at the gathering of the development of peoples is conferred as a favour rather than recognised as a right.”
Fr Orobator’s second principle is subsidiarity. “The life cycle of aid can be fickle, pegged explicitly as it is, not only on the circumstances and disposition of the givers, but also oftentimes implicitly on a mentality of noblesse oblige. Genuine belief in the development of Africa necessitates the empowerment of people to take charge of their future themselves in a manner that is dignified and sustainable,” he says, and he quotes US President Barack Obama on his first presidential visit to Africa: “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.”
His third principle is mutuality. He accepts that donors cannot claim an entirely altruistic motive for believing and engaging in Africa.
“Historically speaking, nothing could be farther from the truth. Those who seek to engage in the developmental process of Africa must assume the courage and conviction of critical self-interrogation, starting with a simple question: ‘What’s in it for me?’”
His final principle is relationality. “No matter how sophisticated and efficient the measures applied to engage Africa in a process of development, the truth remains: development is about people – their dignity, their humanity, their rights, their values, their gifts.”
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