A Spirited Opposition

Late last week, I presented our chicken farming strategy to a gathering of Mozambican church leaders. We try to work through this group, encouraging them to take ownership of projects rather than doing them ourselves, empowering Mozambicans to help Mozambicans.

We try to "lead from the side," building their leadership capacity, hoping to work ourselves out of a job. If these leaders aren't willing to endorse our projects, we reason, then neither will they take sufficient responsibility over them to ensure their success.

Strangely enough, the prospect of facing these $1-a-day men caused my heart to beat a little harder than normal. It was reminiscent of the countless times that I've sat across a table from a committee of high-powered Cabinet ministers back home presenting recommendations for the direction of our province. In both cases, I must admit to a little anxiety.

And in both cases, the scrutiny was trying. The questions they asked were difficult, and they didn't always like my answers. I wished that I had've done a little more homework. There's always a little more to do.

On some level, I was glad for their combativeness. Had I expected to come riding in on a horse from stage right to save the poor Africans from their plight? They are still living, breathing, critically-thinking human beings.

For hours they asked questions. I tried to understand in Portuguese, and asked for translation when I needed to catch a nuance. I usually responded in English, because the translator had a better chance of accurately conveying my thoughts.

Maybe the translation was the problem. Not the words, but the barrier of suspicion that naturally divides people speaking through the help of an intermediary. I wished I had've spoken fluent Portuguese. Or Shangaan. At least the translator was an insider, known to the group and myself.

Their questions seemed to boil down to plain selfishness. We were presenting a proposal for franchised chicken farms to benefit the communities in which their churches are located. Not restricted to church members, and certainly not restricted to church leaders.

They wanted to redesign the program to deliver employment opportunities for themselves.

And they didn't want to take a loan from an arms-length micro-credit organization. Their reasons were numerous, many valid. The subtext was that they wanted us to provide the money, no interest required, and no risk required. We wouldn't force repayment because we're a Christian organization, they silently reasoned.

All of their criticisms were carefully addressed in a business plan that we had prepared for their input. Sure, micro-credit interest rates are high, for example, but the plan takes that into account and still shows a resonable profit for owner-workers.

Their counter-proposal, not so much spoken as implied, was that they would take our money, try their hands at raising chickens, and if they ever found themselves better off than us, they could give us our money back. They pressed for a handout.

* * * * *

Knowing that many of them wouldn't have had eaten yet that day, I brought a bag full of oranges and passed them around. The group then passed around a machete that they used to peel the oranges, and threw their peels into a plastic bucket in the centre of the ring of blue wooden benches that we were perched atop. (Ok, so there were some differences between this meeting and the Cabinet committee meetings back home!)

I brought one orange too few, so didn't take one myself. The man beside me, generous in spirit and seeing me as an equal, peeled his orange, broke it in two, and offered me half.

These are people with big hearts, but imbued with a strong survival instinct. After all, they are hungry and poor. In their situation, I can't say that I wouldn't press for a handout with an equal amount of zeal.

In fact, they probably interpret my unwillingness to capitulate and provide a gift as my own lack of a generous spirit.

To many, providing a handout may seem like a logical response to economic injustice in Africa, especially when poverty is viewed as a lack of resources. Isn't the best way to fight poverty to do so with money?

But handouts don't empower people to help themselves in the long-run. Worse, they're not even neutral, but sap the motivation to take necessary and healthy risks required to get ahead. Having received handouts in the past, they expect handouts to continue in the present. Anything less than a direct gift is rejected.

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, in his autobiography, "Banker to the Poor," makes the following statement about the applicability of micro-credit in contexts with a strong social safety net:

[M]y great nemesis is the tenacity of the social welfare system. Over and over, [micro-credit projects] have run into the same problem: recipients of a monthly handout from the government ... calculate the amount of welfare money and insurance coverage they would lose by becoming self-employed and conclude the risk is not worth the effort. (Yunus, pp 189-90).

In Mozambique, there is no government social safety net, but handouts from foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, including our own, have created the same mix of dependency, complacency and expectancy.

In the long-run, people will benefit from being empowered to help themselves. But the prospect of not receiving another handout is a bitter pill that they're being asked to swallow.

* * * * *

In a gesture to ensure that relationships were preserved in the face of the difficult meeting, one of the church leaders came up to me afterwards and apologized for the feisty spirit of the group. "But it was your own fault," he said. "Your oranges gave us energy."

And then, to make sure I knew he was joking he added, "Next time, bring ice cream."