Dear Ms Moyo,
I do hope you read this mail and I hope very much that you, and not your staff, will respond to it.
I am on page 54 of Dead Aid and for over two months have been unable to read on. The rage in me is suffocating.
I have not yet read what your thoughts are on how the issues in African can be solved however after what I have read so far and having lived on this continent pretty much all my life I am loathe to say that
change is happening far too slow and my concern is that perhaps Africa will never change.
And this Ms Moyo I am ashamed to say has raised a hatred for our continent I have never been able to admit to until now.
We’re a joke the rest of the planet cannot get over. Africans and their inability. My fear is that even we, the people of this continent, believe that.
I conversed with a man the other day and bemoaned the state of our roads – and black as he was he said “Well that’s what happens when you put a black man in office!”
So Ms Moyo while I have become perhaps one of your biggest fans - for I cannot stop talking about you – I wonder whether change will come from policy makers and our governors or whether it will, again as it has in the past, come from us the people?
I think of my children and my fear is I don’t know what to tell them about pride in who they are when they see their own govern and act in such deplorable ways.
So often I’m told that the democracies we now covet took centuries to establish. We do not have centuries Ms Moyo – our children are lost now.
I believe very strongly that it is the people who create the system that should govern them and then hold their governments to the principles of that system.
I don’t mean to sound weak but I think you may share this sentiment –how does a hungry man fight for a system when all he can think of is the next meal for his family? How can a woman demand justice, such as is the case for the women who are continuously raped in the DRC and elsewhere, when all she can think of is how she will survive the very moment she is living in?
I cannot believe, in fact refuse to believe, that this world does not have what is needed to protect this women. For me Ms Moyo, my sentiment is that no outside help is coming for Africa. We have to do this ourselves. I feel the world is too busy laughing at us to take as seriously – we have taught them that.
I hear of al these shifts that appear to elevate our beggary status – but I see the people of this continent every day – those changes are not reaching them.
So I want to say to all those policy makers, in places like Davos who want a pat on the back for doing so much good for Africa, that they should just wait a while on the applause – I was in Zambia just a few months ago and I can attest to the fact that change has not reached the townships of Lusaka – children are dying of malaria as their mothers wait in queues to be attended to – in places like Mansa malnutrition has built a home – no Ms Moyo, they should not applaud just yet – the rot here has not even begun to clear up just yet.
I read an African.com interview with Mr. Shantayanan Devarajan, of the World Bank’s Africa region.
And when asked for his thoughts on your book, he is reported to have responded: “She’s asking if aid has helped or hurt Africa and says aid should be replaced with private capital flows (PCF). Though I sympathize with her, the book’s publishing was imperfectly timed, right before PCFs dwindled. PCF is preferable to aid, but it isn’t available. Less aid may be needed, but African governments also lose revenue by not charging full price for utilities. For example, some governments subsidize electricity but if the government can’t pay the subsidies, electricity cutoffs occur.”
As learned as Mr. Devarajan may be his attitude annoyed me. Your book came at a perfect time in fact I wish it had come decades ago. And yet I do believe that things happen as they should.
I was born in Zambia and have lived in South Africa for the past 19 years. There are times I wished I could go back home but the economics are such a dreadful deterrent I’m ashamed to speak of them to the South Africans who consider people like me a bane on their existence.
While I do not see your book and the adoption of your thinking as Africa’s only savior – my hope is that African people will adopt it as a life-jacket. I hope more Africans will come up with solutions. I fear these solutions will hardly come from our so called leaders. For it appears to me, even from what I’ve read from your book so far, that the status quo suits our leaders perfectly.
I am not as hopeful as you may be or the many people that keep on chanting that it’s Africa’s time to shine. We are sinking in a cesspool of madness, greed and disorganization.
The African child has so little to look up to and is raised in an environment that tells them that they cannot be great – and it is not their fault – they are African who can blame their inability?
I say this because living on this continent this is my observation.
I was living in Europe when Ms Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. I tell you after reading of her achievement I felt ten feet taller.
I feel the same about your achievements and yet your book presents to me a hopelessness that I cannot shake.
But of course it is unfair of me to say this until I have read your book completely.
I thought to share these thoughts because they have been nagging at me and I thought to speak to you about them.
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