 An article in this month's S+B by Economist writer Jon Ledgard
suggests that business executives in the affluent nations should be spreading the gospel
of globalization, 'free' trade and the 'market' economy in Africa to
save it "from total collapse".
I hope struggling nations will have the good sense to say "no
thanks, you've 'helped' us enough already". It's bad enough that so
many in affluent nations have been caught up in the cult of leadership and
the wildly inflated sense of executives' and consultants' value and
infallibility. We don't want to export our myths to countries where it
can do real damage. The missionaries we've sent in past have wrecked
enough lives.
There is no question that the economies of most struggling nations
are in ruins. This has been caused by a combination of interrelated
factors:
- The near-total destruction of soil, water, forest and other
resources, due to pillaging by corporations from affluent nations, the
loss of connection and respect for the land, overuse, wars supported by
affluent nations' weaponry, and horrific poverty thanks largely to
overpopulation (when the only 'asset' you can ever hope to own is
children for labour, you tend to have a lot of them)
- The loss of knowledge of how to make a comfortable,
sustainable living locally in each unique ecosystem, thanks to social
disintegration and massive dislocation and migration to the cities
- The scourge of diseases due to overcrowding
- Government and corporate corruption, thanks to the increasing
disconnection between centralized governments and the people they
supposedly represent, and between business owners and workers
- Attempts to impose affluent nations' political, social, economic,
legal, technological, educational and other systems on struggling
nations where they simply don't work
The answer is not to export more affluent nation 'answers' to
struggling nations in the person of well-meaning 'executives'. The
proponents of such ideas would be well advised to learn from the
horrible example of the religious missionary groups, who continue to
send well-intentioned born-again volunteers to build schools and
churches and hospitals for (instead of with) the people of struggling nations, and then wonder why
the locals are disinclined to maintain them when the volunteers go back
to their comfy homes.
What is needed instead are efforts to help the people of struggling nations undo the damage that we have caused:
- Giving them the resources they need to relocalize their economies
and relearn lost skills and knowledge that produced healthy, self-sufficient communities for millennia before
we disrupted them
- Giving them back their land and resources
- Offering (not imposing) innovations like microlending and permaculture and pharmaceuticals, at no charge
- Forgiving indebtedness that was mostly incurred to enrich despots, not the people
- Cessation of the sale of arms and armies
To believe that we have any more 'solutions' that will work for these people
is the height of arrogance. Rather than 'executives', the
businesspeople who might have some value to the people of struggling
nations are entrepreneurs in small, sustainable businesses -- Natural
Enterprises. Entrepreneurs have learned how to work around problems
instead of paving them over. They know how to scrounge. They know how
to live within their means. They know the value and skill of resilience and
improvisation. This is knowledge the people of struggling nations could
get some value from. And the learning and value would definitely be
reciprocal. In fact if we were to be fair, we should probably pay the
people of struggling nations for the experience, since the value we
receive will almost certainly exceed what we have to offer them.
So, please, spare the struggling nations the scourge of
self-important, deluded, well-meaning executive missionaries. We have
done more than enough harm already. It's time to give back what we
stole, and realize that our flawed, devastating, ruthless and
unsustainable big-business models work badly enough here, and have no place
in nations whose people have forgotten more than we have ever learned.
We need to clean up our own act before we presume to take it on the road.
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MADE IN CANADA
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