The Last Word — Many people are angry with President Donald Trump for canceling the visas of many students studying in the USA. This is bad for individual families and students. I have friends whose children have been denied visas to return to America to study. I feel their frustrations. However, for Africa, Trump has done the right thing. I hope it changes our attitudes.
African elites are outward-looking. They seek education opportunities and medical care for themselves and their families in rich countries, especially the West. This dilemma is best captured in Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States, a book by American scholar Albert Hirschman. He argues that customers of firms, people in organizations, or citizens in countries have two options when confronted with declining quality of services or goods: voice and exit. But to exercise any of these responses depends on context.
For instance, the quality of a service provided by a telecom company, e.g., MTN, can decline. If the market is liberalized, you choose the exit option, i.e., you migrate to another service provider, e.g., Airtel. But if the service provider is a monopolist, like UPTC used to be before privatization and liberalization, then the customer is stuck. Without an exit option, Hirschman argued, people are likely to exercise voice, i.e., agitate for change to improve the quality of the service.
How is all this related to Trump?
The quality of services in our hospitals, universities, and schools in both the public and private sectors in Uganda (and Africa) is very bad. Except for rare cases such as Rwanda, there is little effort to improve them. Why? The powerful people in government (to cause a change in the quality of public services), the richest people (who can invest in better private schools and hospitals), and the most articulate sections of our society, the intellectuals who can agitate for improvements in the quality of services, largely choose the exit option. So, they send their children to rich countries for education and go abroad for medical care.
This has led to a very specific pathology: the people who suffer the bad services in public and private education and medical services are the poor. They stay put, i.e., cannot exit, because they do not have the money to go abroad or even visit private clinics of good quality. But also, they don’t have a voice in large part because they do not host or appear on television and radio talk shows, they do not write in newspapers or sit in parliament and cabinet, boardrooms, and other powerful institutions where critical decisions about their well-being are made. The only time they can exercise their voice is during elections that happen only once in five years.
Uganda [and Africa generally] has found it difficult to improve the quality of public and even private goods and services. This is in large part because of the existence of the exit option for many of our elites. If the world could impose education and medical sanctions on our countries and citizens, we would begin to see investments in both private and public services in these sectors. This is what makes Trump a revolutionary global player. His subjective motivations–whether it is racism or ultranationalism, political populism or misguided beliefs–do not matter. The objective outcome of his actions is to force African elites to think differently.
Our everlasting dependence on the West is not good. For instance, our democracy is fought for by Western governments (remember my exchange with EU ambassadors in Gulu recently). Our stories are told by CNN and BBC. Our hungry are fed by the World Food Program. Our refugees are looked after by UNHCR. Our poverty is fought by Oxfam and ActionAid. Our human rights are defended by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Our economic policies are designed by the IMF and the World Bank. Our souls are saved by a European God. Our sick citizens are treated by Doctors Without Borders. Our fight against HIV/AIDS and malaria is led by the Global Fund. Our kids are educated abroad.
Consequently, a belief has penetrated the social consciousness of our people that to get anything done in Africa, we need the paternalistic hand of the white man. Again, the subjective motivations of those promoting these interventions are irrelevant. They may be well-intentioned. But the objective outcome of their actions is to undermine the incentives for Africans to do things for themselves. In fact, all too often, these self-righteous interventions undermine the very structural changes they seek to promote.
Take the example of democracy. Rich Western countries intervene by financing and encouraging opposition parties to promote democracy. They lecture, hector, and sometimes cut financial assistance or even sanction governments or individuals in governments accused of undermining democratic development. Seeing that they are backed by rich and powerful countries that have sway over their country, opposition politicians take extreme positions demanding reform. They refuse to negotiate and to compromise with the incumbent government on “values.” Yet negotiation and compromise are the very foundation of democratic politics.
This dynamic also applies to the so-called “civil society” in Africa, a motley group of NGOs promoting a multitude of agendas. The people that benefit from the work of these NGOs are not members of the NGOs. They do not elect its leadership. They cannot, therefore, hold it to account if it does not meet their needs by voting the leadership out. Hence, what they get from the NGO are not rights but charity. Instead, the NGO accounts to its financiers in London, Paris, Washington, and Brussels. But this is financial, not political, accountability. This undermines the democratic content of civil society and the wider nation.
The beauty of Donald Trump is the conviction that America does not know much about poor countries. The best way to help them is not to help them at all. He doesn’t believe America should interfere in their internal politics. In doing so, Trump is respecting international law that says countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, i.e., they should respect their sovereignty. But Trump is also achieving another important aim: to force elites in poor countries to look internally for solutions to their nations’ governance problems. By suspending most of the aid to NGOs, he may inadvertently force actual civil society that is membership-based and that seeks negotiation and compromise to emerge in Africa.
