Who Are You and Why Are You Here?: Tales of International Development

By Jacques Claessens and Nigel Spencer

Every international development project looks good on paper until someone asks, “Who are you and why are you here?” In this case, it’s a man from northern Burkina Faso. His question reveals everything wrong with international development work today.

Jacques Claessens questions the real effects of development programs and agencies, NGOs, and multinational corporations on the economy and welfare of the global south—from a Kafkaesque well-drilling project in Udathen to the Chernobyl-like environmental devastation wrought by the Canadian-owned Essakane mine. Through tales of uneasy encounters between nomadic Tuaregs and Western engineers, well-meaning NGO staff and their incredibly self-serving bosses, UN bureaucrats, a greedy Canadian mining company, and Burkinabe villagers–all pursuing ostensibly noble goals, all barely listening to each other–we begin to understand the realities of international development.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771133043

Jacques Claessens

Jacques Claessens was born in Belgium and traveled and worked across Africa for over thirty years. Between 1980 and 2010 he assessed the impact of international development projects in Burkina Faso on behalf the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and eventually settled in Canada.

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Preface

The Abyss

I like this book for several reasons, but will limit myself to three.

I must warn you from the outset that it takes us into the abyss, not an easy task. Once we have decided to take the plunge, the vision is dizzying, and of course raises numerous extremely troubling questions. This must be why so many decline the challenge: some even deny its existence. Dare we look?

Jacques Claessens is our guide into this abyss, for he knows it well and is equipped to show it to us in all its singularities. He has gazed into it many times over the years as a consultant in international development, in Africa most of all. He, like many others, has seen it suddenly appear at his feet without warning, but he has also deliberately sought it out, contemplating it and the many terrible questions it calls forth for all of us.

We encounter it in Burkina Faso. The name (replacing Upper Volta in 1984) means country of people with integrity or land of the upright and he surely is one of these. Being so is a necessary condition for gazing into the abyss. A second is a love of Africa, and every page of this book is filled with it.

The narrative is built on three of his missions. The first took place on a water management project in the Sahel region of Burkina (semidesert just below the Sahara). Naturally, it involved drought, the nomadic tribes who had always lived and raised livestock on these arid lands, and of course, all the development workers who had come and gone, most of them wanting to make things better.

The second related to an exemplary forest management project concerning not only those who lived there, but also those passing through to cut and gather wood without restriction. Once again, it included development workers already there and those moved in from elsewhere to study, plan, calculate, and make decisions.

The third, financed by Jacques Claessens personally, was to ascertain what had happened after a considerable lapse of time to the projects he had previously evaluated. The first, unfortunately, was a resounding failure. The second, which had all the ingredients for success, also failed. And while revisiting this earlier project, Claessens discovered that a mining company had come in to determine how to best take over the land for gold mining, an operation consuming phenomenal quantities of another rare and precious commodity: water.

The abyss he draws us toward is that between the providers and the recipients of international development investment. There are myriad ways this can be deepened, and his beautiful and touching book has the extraordinary virtue of describing just such a reality without cynicism, bitterness, or despair, but as lucidly and objectively as possible.

Where exactly does this gulf originate? Human nature, whatever that means, surely plays a part in it. People being what they are, not surprisingly, some of Claessens’ characters are unforgettable, including lofty, self-absorbed western profiteers, even privateers of international cooperation, whose sole mission is to look out for Number One. Yet these are the exception, the rule being those who are truly generous and anxious to help.

There are other underlying and treacherous factors: cultural divides, ethnocentricity, mutual misunderstanding, simple error, bureaucracy, and other blind spots that contribute to personal advantage, hence a deepening of the chasm. He writes:

At the risk of caricature, let us just say that everyone plays the game: white people flaunt their knowledge and wealth, and so their power, while black people tolerate it in the hope that they may finally one day pick some fruit from this bright tree of riches. Whites throw themselves into the breach via international institutions or bilateral agreements. They invent needs, make plans, jostle for space, and build, forgetting they are strangers in a country that existed long before they got there. They are blown away when it all turns out to be as empty as the wind. They blame Africa, accusing it of massive indolence and lethargy. And what about black people? They have a vision too, but beyond words, in the context of survival, their boundaries are often fixed by the extended family, clan, tribe, and always the ancestors. This was the North-South contradiction in which I found myself.

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Second, my love of this book has to do with the literary form it has adopted.

With such a wealth of experience, there is no doubt that Claessens could have written a fine non-fiction book of considerable quality, knowledgeable and filled with statistics, technical jargon, abstract concepts, and theories of international cooperation. Instead, he has opted to tell us a first-person story, a choice for which I have only the highest praise.

In his telling of it, we meet actual people, share their meals and their daily lives, visit where they live, overhear their conversations, feel their emotions, love whom they love, learn their history, and meet historical figures: a world he has lived in, the surest and most natural way to approach the abyss. An economist may tell us what money is, but only a novelist and poet or teller of tales can show us greed. Long treatises will tell us much about international development, but this creative non-fiction is the best, perhaps indispensable, method of bringing home complex human realities.

I am fond of this literary format for personal reasons as well. I spent seven years of my childhood in Africa, my parents being among the very first development workers sent abroad by CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency). My personal Africa is indelibly that of legends and the storytellers that perpetuate them, an Africa where truly an elder who dies takes a library away with him. I can still picture being with my white and black friends listening to them, rapt in wonder, then going away racking our brains for answers to the questions they raised. If Claessens chose this way, I think it was to urge us to our own questions, but without forcing a definitive answer on us.

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This brings me to the third reason this book appeals to me: those partial answers that Claessens does dare to suggest. Is international development aid a good thing? If so, is it possible – and under what conditions?

Some may think that international aid is so structured by the economic and political imbalance of power between North and South that this imbalance is inevitably perpetuated, despite the good intentions of those working in the field. The abominable situation involving Canadian gold mining companies seems to confirm that all types of aid are too frequently just one more arm of colonialism, that there is only a humanitarian veneer hiding the truth about imperialism in its latest disguise.

If we agree with this verdict, what can the conclusion be? Should all forms of aid be dumped in favour of working toward a radical political and social transformation? Taking refuge behind ideological purity, overriding suffering that can be assuaged now, and depriving ourselves of the encounter with otherness is not the choice of many. Claessens invites us rather to ask if foreign aid could be better thought out and applied. The numerous paths he lays out deserve to be considered seriously, and some paths, possibly naïve, I would promote with the excuse that I am a neophyte.

It is hardly surprising that the large institutions engaged in foreign aid have the defaults of any bureaucracy: the priority given to their own growth over the very goals for which they were created, partly a result of their heavy administrative sclerosis. Yet these drawbacks are not insoluble: might not some ethical sense and courage among those involved in the system have possible beneficial effects?

How is it that projects of such importance and expense are not systematically subjected to evaluations that would allow us to know if objectives have been met to guarantee their continuation? Claessens also suggests something still deeper and more important: there is very little actual cooperation. This word, without a doubt, best sums up Claessens’ lucid, generous, and humanistic thinking. He designates truly concerted actions in which individuals are attentive to one another, in which they take the time to understand and be understood, an action taking into account that people who have survived for millennia are not obliged to change their way of living based on the promises of some white people who will soon return home. Claessens thus suggests an enduring and loving patience that we perhaps once had, but may not have any longer.

Still, it would be better to let him speak for himself on such matters. In a key passage on the failure of a forestry project that seemed to have everything going for it:

What is more, a much overused and abused term can truly be put into service here – international cooperation, not quasi-unilateral operations invented by so-called development organizations and parachuted into the country from outside, but a fortiori home grown. Allow me to explain briefly what permits us to use the word cooperation here. One has to observe the village chiefs retrieving their customary, ancestral rights and assuming the attendant responsibilities. One has to observe the villagers adhering to the numerous demands made by this project because they understand that their wealth depends on it, and can be sustained. One has to talk with truckers to understand the financial stakes in the production and sale of 50,000 cubic metres of firewood to be transported to Ouagadougou and which should expand to 90,000 cubic metres in a few years.

To be able to call this project that extreme rarity, international cooperation, one has to see Mr. Flandez from Chile work hand in hand with Mr. Ouedraogo from Burkina, both forestry engineers, both researchers in their respective universities, both putting their knowledge and their aspirations into this work!

Filling the gulf that Claessens reveals to us is only possible through the long, patient, and generous labour of genuine cooperation. The proposal is inglorious, time-consuming and by no means assured of success. It just might be the one and only way to avoid cruel new dead ends.

This is the advice of a man of integrity – and a storyteller.

—Normand Baillargeon: Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu,

August 3 and 4, 2013

Prologue

Speaking before the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in 1984, Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s youthful president, encouraged Africa to do without the aid which helped it. In his view, policies of assistance to countries of the Southern Hemisphere contributed to their disorganization, made them subservient and failed to make them responsible for their own economic, political, and cultural space: refusing to exist in ‘survival mode,’ reducing external pressures, opening minds to a universe of collective responsibility, and daring to invent the future are what is needed.¹

Sankara was convinced that people can bring about whatever they can imagine, and he wanted all who shared his vision to reach for the horizon. He did not reckon on someone deciding to smother this vision by assassination. Perhaps he expected too much imagination from some.²

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Burkina Faso means land of the upright people. It is a small country by African standards, barely bigger than Tunisia and half the size of France. On paper and to a foreign eye, it is a single country, but in the actual day to day life of agreements, discussions, births, and deaths, the holder of a Burkina passport (a recent invention) is first and foremost a member of a family, clan, and an ethnic group, mostly Mossi, Gourmanche, Bobo, Fula, or Tuareg, each one being a piece of the vast puzzle totalling nearly sixty ethnicities, each with a language of its own.

According to such indicators as GDP, average income, level of education, and HIV or mortality rates, Burkina Faso is among the poorest of African countries. Within its borders, the population has sufficient and nourishing food, not identical to the West, of course, for that would be apples to oranges, as it were. While savings accounts are rare, the familial and social structures form a vast network of protection against life’s contingencies. So, can we call such a country poor? Well, yes, because safe drinking water and basic health care are scarce, priced out of reach in the cities, and nonexistent or inaccessible in the countryside.

Black and white landscape photograph of the Oursi marsh. Most of the frame includes sky and water, with land and a dock in the bottom third.

The Oursi marsh, supplying twelve villages, was the sole reliable source of water for the Oudalan region. In the dryseason, heat caused it to drop more than two metres.

Burkina Faso has swallowed some of its pride to become another in the cohort of countries receiving international assistance. This is where North meets South, white meets black, rich meets poor, and penny meets outstretched palm – just another memory in the long history of colonization, just another dream of independence come true but turned into a new order of dependency, decried even as it is being imposed more and more.

At the risk of caricature, let us just say that everyone plays the game: white people flaunt their knowledge and wealth, and so their power, while black people tolerate it in the hope that they may finally one day pick some fruit from this bright tree of riches. Whites throw themselves into the breach via international institutions or bilateral agreements. They invent needs, make plans, jostle for space, and build, forgetting they are strangers in a country that existed long before they got there. They are blown away when it all turns out to be as empty as the wind. They blame Africa, accusing it of massive indolence and lethargy. And what about black people? They have a vision too, but beyond words, in the context of survival, their boundaries are often fixed by the extended family, clan, tribe, and always the ancestors.

This was the North-South contradiction in which I found myself as a white North American mandated by the United Nations to evaluate development projects in Burkina Faso: Where was the money going? What needed to be done to allow these investments a chance of leaving some lasting trace? I went back fifteen years later in a purely personal role. What, if anything, remained of these projects?

This book relates three case histories and their impact on development. It does not present a complete, definitive, or irrefutable picture, but rather supplies a source for suggestions based on carefully considered intuition. Though not an autobiographer, I am at the forefront of this narrative. These events did occur, though the names of individuals have been altered, and the narrative filled out with context and reasonable presumption. This book is material for thought from a free and wandering spirit.³

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The first of these projects occurred between 1983 and 1990, during the turbulent and tragic years of a country under construction. It was financed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the northern part of Burkina called the Oudalan, hemmed in by the curve of the Niger River. It is one of three provinces in the country’s portion of the Sahel south of the Sahara.

To speak of Oudalan is to talk of the nomads living there. And the little that sedentary people know of the nomads boils down to this: yes, they exist, and no, don’t marry one. Oudalan means a thermometer that reaches 50 degrees Celsius in the shade from March to September. It means drought, hunger, thirst, and the struggle for survival by herds during months of misery. It also means ongoing harmony and negotiations between clans whose families and livestock must share the few pastures and sources of water that exist. In such an extreme context, how can foreign intervention be justified, and in the name of what?

The second project occurred from 1988 to 1992 and was located in the forest region of southern Burkina. Forests mean natural resources, hence wealth. A long way from the Sahel.

The inhabitants of Ouagadougou, when they are blessed, enjoy a warm meal in the evening, thanks to rare and costly oil or, above all, to firewood, threatened by deforestation due to a population burgeoning in widening circles around the capital. The brush that once was cut just next door has now retreated 150 kilometres back into the southern forests. Heavy transport is needed to bring wood to those who need it in the city – and the mark-up is high.

A project was thus conceived to protect these forests. Better management would allow all those concerned (villagers, foresters, transporters, and merchants) to benefit more from this resource. All the ingredients were there for a genuine cooperation and development project. Yet it still fell apart. Why? What happened?

The third belonged to the Canadian mining company Iamgold, present and prospecting for gold in the sandy Sahel landscape since 2008. Two worlds cohabited this space: That of organization and the blind forces of pumps, extractors, crushers, mountains of slag, and dormitories directly fronting on tailings, and the other world sitting on its edge, of the living space of the gourbi and the donkey and the camel. This population had been expropriated, masses of water had been wrestled from a region with so little to begin with, and the soil had been contaminated for an indefinite future, all in exchange for economic investment in such a very poor country. Is development then just smoke and mirrors?

Part I

The Sahel in Burkina

This is the story of a development project financed by UNDP to last four years at a cost of 3.5 million dollars, but which lasted seven years and costthree times the original figure.

1

Country under Construction (1983)

Klaus Meyer, resident representative (Res Rep) for UNDP in Ouagadougou got home one evening and settled down on the patio with a cold Flag beer in a dripping wet bottle. This was how he liked it. The radio on as usual, listening to Sankara, the new president. Sankara was gifted at this, sincere and passionate, nothing like his predecessor Zerbo. This new man spoke proudly and heart to heart with the people of his country, but not about himself, and this made Meyer wonder if he was becoming an icon like Ghana’s Nkrumah, the Congo’s Lumumba, or Cuba’s Guevara.

Sankara had been one of the cohort of officers back from training in Madagascar in 1976, and then commander of the National Commando Training Centre (Centre national d’entrainement des commandos – CNEC). With Blaise Compaoré and other classmates, he had formed the Communist Officers’ Group (Rassemblement des officiers communistes – ROC).

Meanwhile, President Saye Zerbo would begin each day with a long look in the mirror, seeing himself seated in the shade of a baobab tree in the huge village that was Upper Volta. He was its chief. His blood, personal fibre, and everything about him was profoundly African. For him, a chief was a chief, unchallenged till the day he died, surrounded by his ministers, heads of family and forerunners, a man who listens to and weighs all he hears, while sages scour distant villages and city neighbourhoods, sing, dance, and loosen tongues, so that Zerbo could know all that was happening and weed out his enemies.

Black and white photograph of the Oursi marsh full of cows drinking from the shallow water.

At the end of the dry season, the Oursi marsh drew thousands of nomadic Tuaregs and Songhai villagers, as well as over 45,000 head of cattle, which trampled everything in their path, a cycle that gave rise to tensions.

This president made this new officer-graduate and gifted orator, Sankara, his secretary of state for information, thinking to keep control of him. But for the younger man, it was not just a hollow title. Sankara addressed the population on the radio and TV whenever he had the chance, calling on them and galvanizing them, also loosening the collective tongue. Too late Zerbo understood that, though this recruit listened to his elder, he paid no attention to what he considered this wall of ancient traditions that carried the past forward into the present and consecrated their chief as The Chief. One day right there in the National Assembly, the young officer got up and declared he was muzzled, he then announced his resignation, and walked out, yelling, Woe to whoever silences the people.

On November 7, 1982, a coup d’état brought Commander and Doctor Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo to power, and in a day, Zerbo went from being chief to being bereft of all. Fleeing to Libya, he found refuge with his friend Gaddafi.

Ouedraogo knew he could never have taken power without his friend Sankara, whom he named prime minister in January 1983. Sankara quickly took to the radio, knowing it was listened to in taxis from morning to night, and he spoke on television. The enraptured public stayed glued to their radios and community televisions, listening to him. The prime minister with the winning ways denounced and ridiculed the stodginess of the former regime. He knew what needed to be changed, and how to do it.

In the corridors of power and in the streets, people held their breath. Sankara was everywhere. His wife Mariam tried to reason with him: Thomas, you are still young. It’s time to listen and learn. They won’t like you mouthing off at them. To which he replied, Mariam, things have got to change. We can’t go on like this. Someone’s got to say it loud and clear.

An exasperated President Ouedraogo called in his troublesome young friend, saying, Thomas, you’ve got to realize you’re not alone in this. Now, get back in line or be fired. Yet Sankara would listen to no one, and the people continued to applaud him each evening on TV, as he denounced colonial France, source of all evil. Also calling his neighbours, in the Ivory Coast and Mali, France’s vassals.

No one was expecting the military plane from Paris that landed one fine afternoon in May 1983. A man in suit and tie disembarked, shaking hands left and right, saying he had been sent by President François Mitterrand. As affable as could be, Guy Penne, requested a tête-à-tête with President Ouedraogo: This is enough, too much in fact, Mr. President. You must do something. This Sankara’s outbursts must be calmed down – thank you Mr. President. The conversation lasted barely half an hour, and the plane returned to Paris the same evening.

Next day, at 5:00 in the morning, a handful of para-commandos brusquely banged on Sankara’s door and summarily sat him in the back of their jeep. The speech-maker found himself in pyjamas at the Ouahigouya military base with only the dark dungeon walls to address. Still, from moped to moped and taxi to taxi, the news spread across Ouagadougou like wildfire. By 10:00 a.m., everyone knew about it: Sankara had disappeared and would not be on-air any more.

Consternation gripped the National Assembly. President Ouedraogo took to the floor, but his words produced no effect. Barely had he finished his opening speech when Compaoré, Zongo, Kaboré and Lingani, co-founders of ROC and old friends of Sankara, exchanged glances, got up as one, and left the chamber. In leaden silence, the other members did likewise, including the journalist-pamphleteer Somé and a Fula named Alpha – though young, the uncontested strongman of the northern provinces.

Things continued this way for two months. Seats remained empty in the National Assembly, while Sankara rotted in prison. But one day, having previously agreed to co-chair the recently formed Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Ethiopia, President Ouedraogo took off for Addis Ababa in first class with a veritable geisha of the skies as his personal flight attendant – the little bubbles of the widow Clicquot sparkled in his glass.

Serious Lapse of Memory

Out of sight, the problems in Ouagadougou were far from the president’s mind. Did he forget that Compaoré, Sankara’s loyal friend, ran the military barracks at Ouahayiguya? So, while Jean-Baptiste nibbled a drumstick of chicken marinated in sherry, a metal door swung open to reveal Sankara, smiling and free. He, who the day before had been restricted to plain rice and to bribing a guard for a cigarette, was the next day, served by his wife, Mariam, tau and gumbo sauce while he sat laughing in the lap of luxury.

When the young officer walked into the Assembly, he got a standing ovation and was immediately acclaimed president with a show of hands. Considering this turn of events as fair pay-back, his parliamentary friends latched onto all the best ministries. This fresh coup was celebrated by crowds in a mood to party. New blood at last, and free speech! Within a few days, Sankara was behind the microphone, surrounded by his cabinet, and delivering his first political orientation speech, a two-hour Castro-style tirade. Its range was wide.

Upper Volta had been created as part of the defunct AOF (Afrique de l’ouest française: French West Africa), a non-country with its own history of invasions, first by imperialist France, then by the Ivory Coast, Mali, and the Niger Republic. It once again ceased to exist as such. Sankara declared it was to be now known as Burkina Faso, land of the upright people.¹

With this new beginning, also corruption and oppression of the people were abolished. And what about tradition? Yes, of course it continued to exist, but with a few devastating sentences, power was effectively taken out of the hands of those traditional chiefs, even as they listened. And women? Are they not our mothers and the mothers of our children? Are they not the real backbone of the nation? And equal to men.² Henceforth they too had the right to schooling. Soon they too sat in the National Assembly and occupied other important positions in the state apparatus.

The neocolonial powers have held us in the grip of commerce and hunger. Together, we will throw off this yoke, because freedom is ours, and tomorrow, every Burkinabe worthy of the name will wear the same cotton we now produce for others.³

Sankara announced that all