Discussion Forum

Africa Needs a Hand Up, Not a Handout: How Best to Save African Children

A letter to the Edmonton Journal newspaper by Chukwuemeka Obiajunwa,
published November 30, 2007

These days we very often hear of celebrities, humanitarian organizations, and ordinary people in the West marching into one African country or the other to “rescue” African children purported to be in “imminent danger”.

A little while ago, Madonna reportedly paid $3 million to the Malawian authorities so that they could bend their rules and let her “adopt” a child.

Recently, Zoë’s Ark, a European humanitarian organization conspired to spirit 103 children — most of them not even orphans — out of the African country of Chad and was caught and charged with kidnapping. Apparently, they did not “grease the palms” of the Chadian authorities. It was however reported that 300 families in Europe had “donated” about $800,000 to defray the cost of their mission, including $240,000 to rent a jet to airlift the children.

Saving the children of Africa seems to be the battle cry for all the humanists trooping into Africa in droves on humanitarian missions. We are daily bombarded on television and in print media with the images of flies-infested, diseases-riddled children; and solicited to donate a dollar a day to feed, clothe, medicate and educate them.

The fact is that the African children are hardly the problem with Africa as we know and see that continent today. The children are simply the thick bellowing black smoke reaching sky-high to the heavens. And the so-called humanists and do-gooders are busy chasing and fanning at this smoke while the infernal conflagration rages underneath below. The fire below the smoke, the real problem, is the parents of these children who from year to year have not earned a dollar for lack of job opportunities, and thus are not able to take care of their children.

In every country in Africa there are armies of able-bodied, well-educated men and women who for many years have not been engaged in any form of gainful productive economic activities because the jobs are not there. Invariably, unemployment in the continent is close to 80 percent.

If hunger, starvation, and disease is the plight of parents and children; hopelessness, helplessness, and powerlessness are the bedfellows to the youths and the college graduates of Africa.

Therein lies the answer as to how best to “save” African children.

Madonna’s adoptive child was not even an orphan, but a child whose jobless father had no means of caring for him after his mother had died from complications of childbirth one month after he was born. It has been widely suggested, and I completely concur, that Madonna could have done a greater good with the $3 million (she paid out to heaven knows whom) to benefit not only little David Banda’s father, but thousands more of Malawian parents to enable them take care of their own children.

The noblest ideal and the ultimate good would have been for Madonna to set up a “microcredit” loan system in Malawi with the $3 million, after the example of Mohammad Junus, the 2007 Nobel Prize Peace laureate who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that is much talked about these days, but sparsely emulated.

In the impoverished countries of Africa, it takes as little as $200 to start up a business or a cottage industry.

But alas, Madonna was motivated purely by self interest and aggrandizement. According to the Daily Mail, “Madonna has revealed she’s ‘never been happier’ after an emotional trip to Malawi to adopt a 13-month old baby”. She further said that her trip to that country was “so worth it. He’s just the best little boy ever”.

I wonder what would make anyone happy about a trip to Malawi with over one million “orphans” in a country of only 12 million people mostly ravaged by famine, drought, poverty, and diseases including HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and hepatitis.

By the same token, if Zoë’s Ark had not been acting purely on the behest of the 300 European families who had bankrolled their botched escapade they could have done likewise in Chad to empower the parents of the 103 children. The $800,000 in their “rescue” chest would have set up thousands of Chadian parents with “microcredit” loans that would have restored their basic human dignity and enabled them take care of their own children.

In the name of “saving” African children from “imminent danger, death, and starvation” does it really make sense to spirit them away to adoptive families in Europe, or elsewhere, for that matter?

They may be “saved” for now, but what kind of future awaits them in these foreign lands? Are the do-gooders paving the way for another generation of black Africans to be enslaved, marginalized, oppressed, discriminated against, and made second-class citizens, as is currently taking place in many European countries to children of migrant black and Arab Africans brought in to work there many years ago?

As an African who is fully immersed in the issues and problems of Africa today, I know that Africa needs opportunity, not charity. No African parent would want to give up the right to raise their own children.