Silences in NGO Discourse The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa [Paperback]

One of the most articulate critics of the destructive effects of neoliberal policies in Africa, and in particular of the ways in which they have eroded the gains of independence, Issa Shivji shows in two extensive essays in this book that the role of NGOs in Africa cannot be understood without placing them in their political and historical context. As structural adjustment programs were imposed across Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the international financial institutions and development agencies began giving money to NGOs for programs to minimize the more glaring inequalities perpetuated by their policies. As a result, NGOs have flourished—and played an unwitting role in consolidating the neoliberal hegemony in Africa. Shivji argues that if social policy is to be determined by citizens rather than the donors, African NGOs must become catalysts for change rather than the catechists of aid that they are today.

The two brief essays that comprise this booklet are exemplary, both originally presented to gatherings of NGO (Non-Governmental Organizations) representatives in the author's native Tanzania. Together, they offer a coolly principled and empirically well-grounded 'wake-up call' to both countries of the global South and, especially, to activists in the NGO sector, both transnational (those coming principally from 'Northern' countries in the global capitalist center) and domestic (the focus of Shivji's greatest interest). Whether, given the nature of their present funding sources and the barren 'common-sense' of the contemporary 'development discourse' of global capital that too many of them have swallowed, the NGOs will permit themselves to so act is the question that Shivji eloquently forces them to ask themselves here.   —John S. Saul, professor emeritus of politics, York University, Toronto

Issa G. Shivjiis a former professor of law and is currently the Mwalimu Nyererel“Ô