They seek to reap where they never sowed

In absolute terms, France is twice as populous as Kenya. Even relatively – in terms of the number of people in a square kilometre – France is twice Kenya’s size.

How, then, can our custodians of governance explain the fact that Kenya’s number of MPs gets exponentially larger than France’s?

Nay, more. Although France is far richer than Kenya, Kenya can afford to pay each MP twice as much as France pays its own. That is the difference in mentality between development and underdevelopment. Only in a situation of abysmal mental backwardness can an elite of consumers demand to be paid the whole Witwatersrand in a country where hoi polloi is starving.

It is morally and intellectually agonising that a penurious country like Kenya fritters away all its hard-earned and extremely meagre income into the maws of human grubs, maggots, chrysalises and piranhas – an exceedingly voracious species which, however, has never produced even a single commodity or idea.

But, given these facts, isn’t Kenya what should be giving “development aid” to France? Why is it that, from one Western capital to another, Kenya’s officials hop from first class jet compartments to the most expensive European hotels – in the most abject begging for “aid” to “projects”?

Why is Europe perennially willing to dish out what it cynically calls “development assistance”? Surely, there must be a catch in it. Even the “aid fatigue” rumbling one is beginning to hear from Euro-American treasuries aims only to draw attention away from this cynicism and assuage a nagging subconscience of guilt.

One thing is certain. It is not Kisuma that takes our ravens to Europe. For no humble mendicant ever travels so astronomically to the very country which supposedly sympathises with his people’s penury – there, lodging, dining, wining, wenching and shopping in the most lavish manner.

Kisuma was a Luo tradition in which a truly desperate woman suddenly arrived, an empty atonga in hand, to plead for a little grain from far-away relatives. No, the embarrassing behaviour in Europe by potbellied modern African officials is not the genuine entreaty of a starving destitute.

The official Westerner knows it very well because he is the one who invented the global scandal called “foreign aid” as a means of bribing the leaders of a world newly emerging from European colonialism so as to maintain that world in the Western orbit against the coevally emerging Soviet challenger.

From human beings, its cynicism and cruelty is mind-boggling. The official West knows that practically none of its “aid” ever goes into development. It is immediately channelled into the bank accounts of political Naboths: presidents, premiers, ministers, civil servants, parliamentarians.

The reason it does not rattle the official Westerner is that it performs the very function for which that same Westerner devised the “aid” mechanism – to buy the co-operation of Third World’s leaders in order for the “outgoing” colonial regimes to continue fleecing Africa.

As Walter Rodney points out (in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), this is the same mechanism that ensures that Africa’s increasingly dwindling incomes from its lopsided trade with the same Westerner goes either directly into consumption or right back to the West to fetch cosmetics, spirits, tobaccos, cars, textiles and other luxuries for consumption by the same elite.

The luxuries go to that class, not because it produces anything, but only because, as members themselves claim, they are “servants of the people”. Thus what is merely a service “industry” – bureaucrats, lawyers, priests, policemen, politicians, soldiers – runs away with 99 per cent of our national income. The real producers – diggers of the soil, hewers of the wood and turners of the lathe – must writhe in excruciating hunger and disease because all their products have been gobbled up by MPs and others who seek to reap where they never sowed.

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