Conflict and division is not conducive to unity and co-operation. A long time missionary in Africa, Jim Harries identifies what KZ FILES has noted again and again. Outside resource only produces apathy and antagonism. Find more by Jim at http://www.jim-mission.org.uk/articles/ or email him at jharries@africaonline.co.ke
Jim writes:
The ownership of resources plus the moral right to their use are carefully defined in societies around the world. That which someone has acquired through their own sweat and toil is legitimately theirs. The same applies to something that is acquired or inherited through acceptable traditional avenues. Things quickly become unclear when resources come as 'aid' for 'development'!
Legitimate ownership of aid-funds is much less easy to define. Suspicions quickly arise that a beneficiary of large amounts of foreign money has used immoral means of acquisition, for example that he indicated that the aid he receives should be for the whole group, but then intends to consume a large part of it alone.
Most often, access to aid money is enabled by a close association with white people. Those with a good knowledge of foreign tongues and the ability to be at ease with and socialise with whites are particularly good at this art. Such access, being the key to unlocking the floodgates, is itself greatly coveted and even fought over. People will go to great efforts to protect their 'white-man' to ensure that funds they anticipate do not end up going in the 'wrong' direction - i.e. to someone else. Little may a new visitor from the West realise just how coveted a prize he is. Conflicts over privileged access to his benevolence easily results in the destruction of what may have been along happy relationships, now replaced by extended feuds.
The patron-client system, in which many people come to be under the rule and guidance of he who has resources, continues to be very common in African. The difference today is the questionable legitimacy of the way wealth is acquired. Division quickly results, should someone who has been a follower get his own funds (e.g. his own link to the West). It is very likely that he will quickly pull out 'his' people, cease to respect the authority of his previous patron and become a law unto himself.
Those who realise that this is what happens, and just how much damage is done to relationships through contact with the west, try to minimise the number of people who gain access to Westerners. Hence the move to try and ensure that education can as far as possible be accessed outside of the West. One effect of this reluctance to send 'good men' to visit the West is that those who do make the trip be they 'good' or 'bad', because of their scarcity, get a heroes welcome and an enormous slice of the cake thus further substantiating the view that the West is really only about money. This is hardly an influence to morality.