Daniel Akech Thiong: How To Build A Human

Though our heads may be pregnant with majestic ideas like the Cuban Marti’s and possess the grandiloquent oratory of that left-handed left-leaning American politician to be able to weave our ideas beautifully and emit them directly like rays of light to the hearts of potential philanthropists, but do not build coalition, we are no more than clanging cymbals.

One cannot stress enough how much can be achieved through a teamwork. In some disciplines in school, undergraduate students write joint essays and get uniform grades. This has some down side: someone can slip through without really doing a thing. But if we move away from this specialized circumstance, then collaboration has far too many advantages. When a field of study grows, it becomes too big and due to the fact that human beings do have a limited amount of time to live, to accomplish anything, say in mathematics, researchers break up into smaller groups to a point where the groups no longer understand each other. The good news is that a work done here and there when it is pulled together, the entire field is thrusted forward.

This stands true in almost every other endeavor. The not-for profit organizations can profit the intended beneficiaries if and only if they muster their forces together.  A number of Sudanese who left Sudan as children, grew up abroad, have tried to look back with love to their native country. A countably many of the young men and women I have met wanted to do something to change Sudan [South, East, West, or North]. But there seems to be one common problem that renders every effort ineffective: lack of collaboration or ignoring the importance of building coalition.

The help that a young person may take back to Sudan is in the form of some sort of aid. A typical project begins thus: either a kawaja has an idea and then she teams up with a Sudanese and they jointly work to raise fund or a Sudanese has an idea and she approaches a kawaja who then helps her to raise fund. The set of common ideas includes building a school, a clinic, an orphanage, a clean water facility, starting a farm, among others.

One of the most important questions anyone planning on building something in Africa ought to answer before buying an African bound plane ticket is how she is going to sustain it once it is erected?  Oh, but soon your project has already seen donation dropping in, you get far too excited and you want to erect the building [with a signboard ,on the wall, poking the sky, starring at the onlookers with your 501c’s logo] as soon as possible and no need to worry about the loopholes in risk analysis [the speed of this rush is increased by the extra excitement that comes from the thought of wowing one’s fellow villagers who have so much hope for their sons and daughters abroad].

So the project moves on. A structure is built and in some cases money may run out and donors may no longer have interest [perhaps you might have allowed some unacceptable practices to kill the interest of your donors] in continuing with the building. Consequently, the building would then be left unfinished. The effort and the money are thrown away and the starters of the project may grudgingly tell themselves that at least they have tried or in a better scenario, the building is finished but now there is no money to operate it or it started operating for a few months and then halted due to lack of funding. If the building was built in a particular village [which is usually the case – preferably in the old village of one of the originators of the project], then the odds of convincing those abroad from other villages to join and direct their supporters to help in sustaining the operation of the project built in a far away village from their relatives are not very high.

The sad end is that either the building is left for birds to occupy it or it is turned to the government to use it. Either way, the project dies of a curable disease just like those suffering masses in African refugee or displaced camps – one of the gloomiest stains in humanity’s progress. Who says ignorance doesn’t kill? A few project that avoids dying like this are those ones that have a deep source of support behind them [projects nibbling behind the heels of some stories that are scripted up in papers or are turned into movies] but still how long will they live on before their source of support dry up is something that should worry those who are running them [if they are the types that care about the approaching rainy day].

One important truth is that the current state of affairs in that part of the world means that there is no single village that is capable of sustaining what has been erected in their own village. Villagers do not have money and do not possess any means for generating money at least for the next few years this will remain to be the case. It is this problem that ought to be addressed by Sudanese. Hundreds of things have been erected by different groups in different villages but when you look at those a few years latter, you see no more than just a lifeless empty building readying herself for her grave and which sadly leaves no good memory behind and the village will once again looks just the way it was prior to the coming of the project.

Well, a discouraged philanthropist who had a high hope in a project of this nature may conclude that there is nothing that the outside world can do to light up Africa. But the philanthropist is being unfair. Africa is simply where the boat sank but the leakage began somewhere else. The leakage could have been mended had care been taken to address the question of how to sustain the project once it is started.

If you seek to build something in Africa, then consider either building a human [that is, invest in a walking building, educate a person or you can substitute any other creative ways of attaining the same result] or seek collaboration and nationalize your project so that enough funding will be garnered to prolong the lifespan of your project and that your project will not be localized to your village and that way people from other villages will direct their supporters in your direction [but then it has to be built somewhere – well you always have a bigger town somewhere or some compromise can be made in choosing a place].

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