I had dinner last night with my hosts a couple of doctors that have been here over thirty years.
It’s a remarkable group of people that tend to assemble when expatriates throw dinner parties in the foreign countries they’ve made their shared home. A third-generation South African of Indian descent talked about being “black” during apartheid (which surprised me, because in Sierra Leone even if you’re black but American, you’re still “white”), and Elizabeth, the former head of pediatrics in Malawi, is the Indian-born offspring of British and American parents, who raised her largely in Congo (before it was DRC AND before it was Zaire… back when it was Belgian Congo). The host is Dutch but raised his family in a whole variety of developing countries.
Talking “development” with these people who have been on the ground as development theory has changed over the decades left me feeling a little … little. The theories change but the practices rarely do (with the exception of structural adjustment*), I’m told – money is thrown at “Africa” but never reaches the people to a meaningful extent. The way our host told it, my work is a throwback to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the theory was that globalization and business would save Africa.
I never paint my work that way – I just think that transnational businesses are often more efficient than most governments, and that by being beholden to shareholders and activists and the western public/press, they are a position to care about the wellbeing of people (and human rights) where their operations are located.
These people all work in a hospital where two-year-olds die daily. If the uranium mine up north improves human conditions for northerners, here in Blantyre that change will be invisible. People have joked with my host that if he really wants to see improvement in mental health care in Malawi he needs to run for the Malawian presidency in the May elections. Problems are so sweeping, vast and entrenched that on the ground (and in the hospital halls and on the village roads) it’s impossible to make a broad enough impact.
It pains me to think that my confidence in a socially responsible private sector might just be a pretty theory. I might get to see it become more than that with this Kayelekera uranium mine, though. More on that later.
*structural adjustment, oversimplified, was a Reagan-era development policy adopted by international financial institutions that theorized that low-income countries would only generate economic growth by balancing their budgets. To qualify for aid, countries had to reduce their debt. To reduce their debt, they eliminated social programs. That meant that road and electrical infrastructure, education, health care, policing, etc all fell by the wayside so that governments could get foreign aid… with which they could do /did nothing productive (from a social welfare standpoint).
