Spare Struggling Nations from Executives Without Borders

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard
blood diamonds
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.
This entry was posted in Working Smarter. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to Spare Struggling Nations from Executives Without Borders

  1. Stephen Downes says:
    August 21, 2007 at 19:09

    The poor of the world have suffered enough at the hands of the executives without borders.If we live in a global society, then why do we depend on our borders to keep the poor people in their poor countries?Maybe it’s time to impose the borders on the executives and their free movement of goods and capital, and to let the people of the world travel freely.

  2. prad says:
    August 21, 2007 at 20:03

    the problem is that our act itself is intentionally filthy. it cannot be cleaned up … it needs to be terminated.

  3. Raging Bee says:
    August 21, 2007 at 22:14

    Your analysis blames nearly all of Africa’s problems on “affluent nations” and “corporations,” and says virtually nothing about the actions of the governments and other interest-groups of the African nations themselves. Given the well-documented experience of nutjobs like Idi Amin, Mengistu, Sgt. Doe and Muammar Ghaddafi, this omission is a glaring oversight that sinks your entire thesis.You accuse “affluent nations” of refusing to give the Africans what they need to build stable and prosperous societies; then you mention “debt forgiveness,” oblivious to the fact that that debt consists of loans that African governments could have used for their own benefit, but misused due to their own incompetence and/or corruption — that’s why they can’t pay the debts on schedule. They’re not suffering because the rich haven’t given them enough; they’re suffereing because their own governments, AFTER throwing off the colonialists’ yoke, misused what the rich gave them.If the windfall of indiscriminate loans didn’t help, what makes you think another windfall, in the form of indiscriminate debt forgiveness, will help?Furthermore, comparing business investment with the actions of religious missionaries is the silliest apples-to-oranges comparison I’ve heard in a long time.To believe that we have any more ‘solutions’ that will work for these people is the height of arrogance.So what does that say about the solutions you just offered?Cessation of the sale of arms and armiesI agree that the sale of weapons to the various parties in Africa’s various civil wars is an ugly and indefensible practice; but the people and groups who choose to buy them are the problem; and cutting off the supply of weapons won’t solve it (even if it could be done, which it can’t). The problem is demand, not supply.Giving them back their land and resources.They already have their land and resources. What do you expect them to do — stop selling what they have to outsiders? What will that do for their ability to support themselves?They have resources to sell us, which we want or need; and we have money to buy it, which they want or need. Do you want that to stop? If so, how would you stop it? Force all of Africa to have a separate economy? Encourage them to have “separate development” because “these people” just can’t seem to do business with the rest of us? A bunch of white guys in South Africa already tried that — it used to be called “apartheid.”

  4. Nathan says:
    August 22, 2007 at 04:50

    What I think you’re missing, Raging Bee, is that the governments of affluent nations have supported the corrupt governments in Africa by foreign aid, making sure these “leaders” can be leaned on to make things easy for multinationals.Simply pointing at African peoples in general and criticising them for misusing our “charitable” contributions is a bit shallow. Again, think about what Dave is saying about “the increasing disconnection between centralized governments and the people they supposedly represent”. It’s bad enough in the “developed” world, but many African leaders have next to no interest in the welfare of the people, they are probably mainly warlords elevated to despots by financial “aid” that makes them more effecient at opression.The really sinister thing is that the Banks like having despots to lend to so they can finance the means of opression which allows the interest to be paid.Ultimately the confusion comes about because it is assumed “globalisation” has something to do with “free trade”.

  5. andrew says:
    August 22, 2007 at 05:04

    Has anyone in this thread ever been and worked in Africa or SE Asia or directly supported people who do work with people face to face in these places?

  6. Raging Bee says:
    August 23, 2007 at 16:01

    What I think you’re missing, Raging Bee, is that the governments of affluent nations have supported the corrupt governments in Africa by foreign aid, making sure these “leaders” can be leaned on to make things easy for multinationals.How does supporting a corrupt and unreliable economic climate, where bribery and inconsistent laws increase the costs of doing business, “make things easy for multinationals?”Simply pointing at African peoples in general and criticising them for misusing our “charitable” contributions is a bit shallow.Not when there’s plenty of factual evidence to back up such a case. I’d respond by saying that blaming “multinationals,” without naming names or specifying which governments are in their pockets, is more than “a bit” shallow.…they are probably mainly warlords elevated to despots by financial “aid” that makes them more effecient at opression.“Probably?” You didn’t check before making your assertions here? Care to specify which despots you’re talking about, or how the aid-providers get to choose which governments take power? If you want to provide aid to a given group of people, you have to go through their government, and since they, not the aid-providers, have the guns, they pretty much get to choose how the aid is used. Remember all that food we donated to the Ethiopians in the ’80s? Most of it rotted on the docks because the Mengistu regime — whose peewee-league-Stalinist policies had caused the famine in the first place — had chosen to use food as a weapon to keep its people in line.The really sinister thing is that the Banks like having despots to lend to so they can finance the means of opression which allows the interest to be paid.Since when did banks get to choose who comes to power in any given state? Do foreign banks really have any significant influence over the tribal struggles and loyalties that drive the political struggles there? Of course not — they do business with whoever they get. (That’s our major complaint against the arms-dealers and diamond-merchants, remember?)

Comments are closed.