Last month the African Development Bank president Dr. Donald Kaberuka was at the United Nations and so naturally New York University's Africa House took the grand opportunity to invite him to have an evening with a rather mixed audience at NYU.He gave a well prepared talk about what he thought Africa's challenges were with respect to development and underdevelopment and the general role of the African Development Bank.he talked about the Bank aiming to finance the infrastructure and other good things that Africa needs. He also weaved through how far they as the Bank had gone in terms of milestones. However when the time for Question and answer came, I was very dissappointed at the way the questions were addressed. Alot of questions that were raised by the diaspora Africans remained largely unanswered. So it was in short a public relations serving events that you end up attending all the time. This is not to discredit Dr. Donald Kaberuka . I have a lot of respect for his great work, as chief the architect of the successful rebuilding of Rwanda post the genocide .
One of the questions that impressed me was one brought up by the chairman of an organization called Extelecoms Africa and he posed the vital question of – What if the diagnosis of the problem of the underlying causes of underdevelopment was wrong in the first place ? He went on to build his argument by saying that because the problem was diagnosed by people/experts ( mostly non- Africans ) who were not aware of living the harsh realities of African suffering in the first place or the insights that come with growing up in the continent. He also criticized the view of that some of the overarching frameworks such as the Millennium Development Goals that have been used to both define African problems as well as find the solutions may be at fault .This observation was interesting to me because when Kenya broke out on violence after the post election crisis, I tried to keep myself as informed as I could. This resulted in my reading of news from over 20 sources to find an unbiased view and the diversity of the analysis of the causes was strak. Going back to Dr. Kaberuka, his answers were largely banal and he talked in passing about the need to find solutions that worked for Africans etc etc etc.
What also astounded me was when the ADB president went on emphasis on the role of the Bank as one was mainly on focusing on regional economic reintegration and not on political issues leaving the latter to UNDP. This left me wondering how one could dutifully achieve this so called Economic integration without first seeking to understand political governance in these countries because anywhere in the world , economic development issues are intimately tied to the Government. One need not be an International development student to understand that interwoveness of Governments and corporations with respect to regulation and oversight. to simply say that they had a singular focus on regional intergration for me seemed naive.
Other questions that I felt went unanswered was the role that Africans in the Diaspora can play in the development process.There are millions of young Africans working in industries as diverse as Investment banking to local government to the science industries that are part of the brain drain . A lot of them meet together to discuss what needs to be done to bring the continent back to its feet but never get an institutional forum or support in projects that are African centered and what they can do . It always seems like there is little room for Africans to be experts on Africa . Albeit the fact that some of the professionals in question have schooled in the same classes with the ‘experts’ and share the same knowledge skills and even insight. So these are the issues that I felt went largely unanswered . The role of Africans, the role of external equity , the framework for the definition of our problems amongst others .
Well I was not suggesting that Donald Kaberuka offer all the answers to these delicate questions but in my mind when I went to the talk I thought that we would have a constructive engagement with the president and if the ADB claims that it is the transformational Institutions that it is . It should at least try to do business differently in Africa. This paradigm shift is what I think is needed to ask the necessary critical questions and create forums where they can be addressed as well as greater opportunities for Africans to be involved in the development of Africa, otherwise we will always form the engaged audience in Western capitals for a long time to come
