NGOs; The Guise

So what are the factors that hinder the NGOs’ performance, when they were so organized and well-to-do? Well, the NGOs would have as many sets of answers to such questions as there are inquires. The NGOs allege that the ‘fundamentalists’ oppose them in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh; for Africa and India their answers are: strong affiliation to status-co, illiteracy, unsustainability, non-compliance of people to their instructions, shortage of funds and limitations of their projects.

These are actually non-excuses and indicate only the incomprehensiveness of the NGO program; it is equal to saying that ‘their poverty is hindering them from getting rich’ or that ‘their illiteracy is coming in the way of their literacy’.

Closer inspection tells us that the NGO projects are designed not to be sustainable, they focus on providing commodities or services but only under their own supervision. Once the NGO packs up from the place of its operation, the residents are unable to sustain the school, the medical center or the business that ran under the NGO. The micro-credit availed to the poor community is only enough to engage them in a bonding with the bank that has landed on their doorstep, and is designed in such ways that once you stop drawing from the bank, you cannot continue with whatever venture you engaged in.

All in all, what the NGO does sustain is ‘its presence’, and practically speaking, it sustains the economic misery of the people so as to ensure its prolonged presence.

Moreover, the NGOs have an inherent problem – though they have come to deliver people into a better, happier state, but since happiness cannot be measured as such, they are bound to measure happiness and human progress only in empirical terms, in terms of economic growth and technological change. Therefore, what goes into their reports is the number of tube-wells or schools constructed, number of children enrolled, number of pills distributed and not in terms of harmony, trust or positive change in the state of the heart or the mind; the NGO has no tools to measure humanity in human terms.

So! if the NGOs bring no practical change, not even in terms of monetary status, health or literacy indexes, malnutrition or famine reduction, then what happens with the billions of dollars they receive as funds? Are they the mere cost of maintaining this hefty machine of dysfunction as a burden of gratitude over the already bent shoulders of the miserable? No, but it does bring change; in terms of awareness, in terms of beliefs and in terms of political awakening.

As it has occurred, the NGOs, who proclaim to be non-political and tend to depoliticize any issue they are to take up, have ended up being a strong political agent advocating the beliefs of their donors as the ultimate dogma for progress (which are of course time-relative); and are able to depoliticize only the real-life concerns of the target populations. Therefore, according to Issa Shivji, in the African countries, the slogan of the NGOs was ‘structural adjustment programs’, which meant that ‘the African states’ bureaucracies were corrupt, incapable and unable to learn’, therefore, the NGOs were required as ‘globalized foreign advisors and consultants, now termed development practitioners, to mentor, monitor and oversee them’, so that ‘the chronically poor, the diseased, the disabled, the AIDS-infected, the ignorant, the marginalized’ were to be the constant ‘recipients of humanitarian aid provided by ‘true friends’, and the populace were to be labeled as cases for ‘right-based development’ rather than cases of ‘nation-based development’ in the ‘strategy papers, authored by consultants, and discussed at stakeholder workshops in which the ‘poor’ are represented by the NGOs’.

Right-based development meant projects that would ensure the very basic rights such as food and medics, in contrast to nation-based development meaning building infrastructure and multiplication of growth. Therefore, in Africa, the NGOs were able to marginalize the masses as the ‘poor/unaware wealth creators’ and not as ‘the producers/appropriators of wealth’ at the demise of their funders; these funders were to create the policies that the incapable machine of the state had now only to supervise, so that the NGOs, who were really driving all the processes, would function smoothly. Thus were most of the African countries robbed of their independence and sovereignty, just as they were being freed from the clutches of the colonists after WW2, and like that, the West could keep on ruling them in complete essence, as absentee.

In Bangladesh, according to the PhD paper of Ainoon Naher, the slogan of the NGOs has been ‘literacy’ and ‘empowerment of the women’ through microcredit. The allegations on them is that under the guise of providing literacy, their schools are converting the populace to Christianity, coupled with the microcredit program that specifically targets the women; this program not only binds the women in a discipline mentored by the ‘Sirs’ of the NGOs, but preaches in them the air of self-empowerment and independence from the rule of their husbands, thus damaging the cultural and religious norms of the society. According to one estimate, in the period between 1971 and 1991, the number of Christian converts in Bangladesh has risen from 200,000 to 400,000; therefore, the fundamentalists, in presence of the simple fact that the converted get preference in microcredits and school enrollment, have some weight in their fears when they say that the West wants to make Bangladesh their future New World Colony.

In the case of Pakistan, where the civil society is comparatively broader, the scope for advocacy-NGOs is larger; these can act in the domain of the Begum-culture as these types of NGOs are supposed to be more present in the media and to be putting pressure on the policy makers rather than to be in the field. Pakistani NGOs have entrenched themselves not only in the rural settings, but on account of their self-perceived higher moral, they are easily able to portray themselves as the voice of the poor, oppressed classes and to become the political voice of the depoliticized masses – a voice that can not only put civil pressure on the political structure of the country but slowly become the broadened bureaucratic state power. The domestic violence bill, floated in the parliament, is a perfect example, which will empower the NGOs with an extra-state policing authority that will not govern by the Constitution or the religion but only upon the good intention of the NGO.

The issues advocated by the NGOs in Pakistan are not very different; empowerment of women, her right upon her body, abolishment of child labor, literacy elevation, microcredit for women, family planning and infant health. The catchword for all these issues is ‘awareness’. These issues are cherry picked by the think-tanks behind the donors, treating them as the roots to all evil;, leaving untouched hundreds of other issues that may be devastating the human society in and outside the country, like the feudal down-casting of the peasants, like water-shortage caused by Indian dams affecting the poor farmers, like suppression of whole nations by imperialists, like the degeneration of morals through the Media, like the mass unemployment of men in the country; they have no empathy in such issues, their independent voices are limited to selected issues, they are not allowed to sway away.

So why the specific issues, why so much credit for the women when most men are unemployed too, why so much awareness for the wife and the mother and no awareness for the husband and the father? Why tell the woman she is being oppressed, when she is leisurely at home and all the economic stress is being taken by the man alone? Why so much against child labor, when the NGO manifesto in Bangladesh (16 decisions) preaches that the each child should work to pay for its own education? Is that not labor?