Feb 1, 2009 A

PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan For Aids Relief, is Bush’s billion-dollar attempt to buy approval in the third world. It donates money to local NGO’s (nongovernmental organizations)which like to work with PLWHAs (people living with HIV/AIDS), OVCs (orphans and vulnerable children) and of course society at large. Other organizations doling out money are UNAID and UNESCO (two branches of the UN), USAID (America’s foreign aid program), JICA (Japan’s foreign aid program), KICA (Korea’s foreign aid program), DED (Germany’s foreign aid program), VSO (Volunteer Service Organization, a sort of British Peace Corps), and an endless list of faith-based initiatives, development programs and university exchange programs. Bureaucracies love acronyms; my Kiswahili instructors were not called to as teachers but LCFs, “language and culture facilitators.” As a result of the prolific number of bureaucracies here educated Tanzanians have learned “burea-speak” and English-language newspapers are almost incomprehensible.
Tanzania is a country of peace, a country free of ethnic or religious strife, and this attracts aid organizations. Aid organizations are also attracted by Kilimanjaro, elephants and beaches; I would guess Tanzania, which positioned itself comfortably between the two superpowers during the cold war, has received more non-military foreign aid than any other country on the planet. The result has not been development but dependency; educated Tanzanians do frightfully little work, the “jobs” that pay are the endless number of conferences they attend on subjects ranging from girls’ soccer leagues to dental hygiene. The best and the brightest become desk officers at some NGO or another, where they organize conferences on girls’ soccer leagues and dental hygiene; talented people are snatched up by foreign aid organizations and local societies must make do with the rest. This is a catastrophe for health and education; there aren’t many doctors to begin with in Tanzania, and those who aren’t sitting behind a desk are usually attending conferences. The result is a weird, inverted society in which jobs in commerce or industry or farming, jobs that create wealth, are despised. In America the money is in business or finance; people become teachers or social workers because they want to benefit society somehow. Here business and agriculture are frustrated by government hostility. People become teachers or nurses because they can go missing for months and still draw a regular salary, the best jobs are in foreign development organizations which benefit nobody.