At the end of May, a group of Africans representing national associations of non-governmental organizations met in Washington, DC. On May 31, Soren Ambrose and Njoki Njoroge Njehu of the 50 Years Is Enough Network interviewed Oduor Ong’wen, who is the Director of the Nairobi-based EcoNews Africa and Chair of the National Council of NGOs of Kenya. In the latter role, he sometimes engages in processes his own organization disavows, such as the IMF/World Bank Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) process. While in Washington, however, he and about half of the other African NGO council representatives boycotted a meeting with the World Bank.

Ong’wen talked about his recent involvement in the formulation of Kenya’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper(PRSP), the new vehicle devised by the World Bank and IMF to plot the course of structural development programs. Its chief innovation, in the eyes of the multilateral institutions, is its reliance on civil society participation, along with government officials and the institutions, in developing goals for national economic programs. A handful of countries have now gone through the PRS process; much criticism has been focused on the allegation that civil society organizations are invited to give their views on budgetary priorities and ways to gauge poverty, but continue to be excluded from the all-important determination of macroeconomic framework (trade liberalization, etc.). Kenya was in the unique position of entering into PRS negotiations after a long period of being barred from receiving IMF funds because of governmental corruption.

Finally, during his visit in Washington, Ong'wen agreed to become the newest member of the 50 Years Is Enough Network's South Council.

Q: Tell us what the response of both EcoNews and the Kenyan NGO Council was to the news that Kenya would be developing a PRSP.

Ong’wen: It is an interesting kind of balancing act when it comes to the PRSP. As EcoNews, we were hardly involved in the PRSP because of the kind of ideological position we have come to develop. We regard the World Bank and IMF as manifestations of a certain kind of thinking, so that whatever comes out of them we have to swallow with a pinch of salt. So when the IMF and World Bank announced in September 1999 that they had undergone a new baptism and they were now committed to fighting poverty, we were not convinced. We wanted to keep a strategic distance, so if we were proved wrong at the end we would be pleasantly surprised.

However, as the NGO Council, that is where you sometimes have to subordinate your personal and organizational interests to that of the collective. We have 1800 members, and the majority of these are organizations that are established to distribute blankets during disaster situations or to provide boreholes or seeds to farmers, so they hardly go beyond that to look at the policy framework that they do this in. When they announced that there would be a PRSP with a lot of participation, there was a lot of excitement because these organizations wanted to be consulted, they wanted to be at the table. So we didn’t stand in the way; we said let’s give it a chance. We did at least establish an NGO Working Group, which grew out of an already-existing "core group" dedicated to making World Bank programs more participatory. We transformed and expanded that into the Working Group on the PRSP. This group came up with benchmarks that we established beforehand to show what we would like to see done. We tried to engage using those benchmarks as our beacons.

We have to appreciate the fact that the organizations of civil society were able to engage with government bureaucrats in policy dialogue; this in itself was positive. So far that is the only thing we can credit the PRS process with. Apart from the zeal that many CSOs [civil society organizations] displayed in this, the end product did not reflect their input. I think that as some of the people who had been skeptical about this, we [EcoNews Africa] found this to be something of a confirmation, showing that the only thing that changed at the World Bank was rhetoric.

Q: In terms of this failure to deliver on the PRS process, who do you blame: the IMF and World Bank, the Kenyan government, or both?

Both, and actually we did point out as much. For the first step, the Interim PRSP, the bureaucrats at [the Kenyan] Treasury said they were in a hurry to resume relations with the institutions; they said they would be keener when we get to the full PRSP. We decided to give them a second chance. When they gave us a structure for consultations, we told them we didn’t believe in it, because it was using a focus on districts and then calling one or two vocal NGOs to pass that off as participation. So we came up with an alternative process, which they were convinced to accept. But given our experience with the PRSP, we knew that even if the poor themselves talked their hearts out and said what they wanted to say, at the end of the day, the PRSP secretariat (inside Treasury) would still put what they thought the World Bank wanted to hear. We decided the only way we could be sure these views would see the light of day was to have an NGO person working in the secretariat. The government said they couldn’t afford it, but we said we’d do it at our own expense. When the draft PRSP came out, it was the standard IMF line. We quickly called NGOs together to critique it. The government promised us the second draft would be much better. It came out about a month ago, but I haven’t seen it yet. The drafts have been circulated.

Q: Were there parameters, in terms of who was represented and what was discussed? Here in the U.S., we sometimes find the institutions dividing civil society into "good" and "bad" NGOs.

There was an attempt at that, but that we couldn’t allow. Fortunately the NGO Council is very powerful, and that has helped us sometimes be able to push things that are not very pleasant to the establishment. Hardly a week or two goes by without [President] Moi saying he is going to ban the council. However, he doesn’t have the power to ban it, because the NGO Council was established by an act of Parliament.

What we did to ensure maximum participation was invite all the NGOs and map which NGOs were in which districts, and which ones wanted to be lead agencies. So you’ll find that in some districts it was NGOs who were conveners. There were consultations in each district. Originally it was a selection of 25 out of about 70 districts. But very quickly it was discovered that most of those selected were districts represented by opposition members in Parliament, so then there was agitation that every district should be consulted. The Treasury did the original selection, on a scientific basis, but obviously they left out one factor.

Q: Can you describe the meetings? Were they like workshops, as we’ve heard about from Tanzania?

I didn’t attend any district consultations, so I can only rely on the reports I got from those who participated. But I attended all the national ones and one of the regional ones. The feedback I got from the field was there were some districts where participation was very open and people were able to articulate their problems, their hopes, the challenges they see and so on. There were districts where the CSOs might not have been very strong. Or where district commissioners who took over the process, where it became a ritual with other actors being invited. There were some districts where it was NGOs who were conveners, so even the heads of departments, the District Commissioner, were asked to go. The only thing I cannot say right away is the percentage of districts where discussions were very free.

At the national level, it’s been fairly open. After we turned the structure on its head, they didn’t have much room for maneuver. But the devil is in the details: once people have been called and they have poured their hearts out, they think these things will be written by the bureaucrats. But these people have been given a very narrow framework in which to operate. Therefore you don’t see much difference between PRSPs in Philippines, Bolivia, Kenya. That disabuses everyone of the "homegrown" label.

Q: Were macroeconomic conditions part of the discussions?

At the discussion level, people raised all this. But when it comes to structuring the paper itself, you can tell that people already had decided what they wanted to do. They are identical with every other PRSP. The need for economic growth remains paramount. People talked about raising food for their own consumption before production for export, and the land issue — but that isn’t what you’re going to read.

Q: Do most of the Kenyan organizations have similar attitudes toward the PRS process and the outcome?

When we talk about inclusion and exclusion, it becomes a sticky point, particularly when you’re talking about civil society. NGOs have become very vocal and very particular in terms of pushing the agenda forward. You find that once they brought NGOs on board, they thought civil society was there. But the labor movement had hardly any input — not by design perhaps, but because no one thought about them. The religious organizations had very little input on national level. Academia played very little role in this. Parliament was largely excluded, and on that you can say that it was not so much that the government didn’t want to include them — there was an attempt — but that Parliament itself was cynical, not from our point of view, but simply because to them consultation was not necessary. They thought they knew poverty, and when they heard consultations were going to cost 140 million shillings ($1.75 million), they said why don’t you give everyone 20 shillings to reduce their poverty a little.

Q: Have you attended meetings with the World Bank during this visit to Washington? Does your position on such meetings (as chair of the NGO council) reflect an emerging position of African civil society toward the institutions? Do you see need for African civil society to lobby the U.S. government more?

In principle we are not opposed to dialogue with anybody, as long as that dialogue can help us clarify positions or can help produce some fruit. Talking on a personal level, I do appreciate that a spider is very good at making its web. I think that it’s one of the most beautiful works of art. But the difference between a human being and a spider is that the spider has been doing the web in the same way for millennia, but the human becomes more creative, they will always try to do things in a better way. This is the second time I’ve come for this kind of program [of African NGO councils]. When I came last year I found that people who had come before had already made presentations to the Bank on same same same issues, and they had been getting same same same response. I felt it was like dancing to a gramophone that was stuck. It was like a ritual: raising same same issues and getting same same response. When you ask about tangible progress, you don’t see it. I felt it was necessary to send a strong message to the Bank, to say "no, we will not go through this again." It was unfortunate that some decided to go and some decided to remain behind, so perhaps the message wasn’t as strong. I felt it would be about satisfying the Bank’s public relations purposes — presenting myself there when I know nothing is going to come out of it. I’m not just an individual, I came here in the name of 1800 Kenyan organizations, and tomorrow it would be on the website that they had consulted with them through me. It would have allowed them to say that they are consulting with Kenya about the "good work" they are doing in Africa when in fact the situation is completely different.

Q: Do you think your position is one that is shared by others in Africa: were your reasons for not going to the meeting the same reasons given by other NGO representatives who didn’t go?

Yes, I think those of us who didn’t go are quite united in the perception of the Bank and the experience of consultation, at whatever level. Those who boycotted included representatives from Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and several others.

Q: Have you arrived at an assessment of the PRS process: might it be a vehicle of cooptation? Does it have good and bad sides?

In fact nobody could have described it better than the quote here in your [July 2000] newsletter: "The PRSP is a compulsory process wherein the people with the money tell the people without the money what to do to get the money" [John Page of the World Bank, quoted by Nancy Alexander and Charles Abugre]. I think it’s become obvious that the PRSP is just structural adjustment by another name. But we should also appreciate that even in terms of earthquakes, at least coffee makers celebrate. There are those who are saying the PRSP process is the greatest thing that has ever happened — and they have their own reasons, and it would be important to get it from them. I don’t want to risk naming names.

The conclusion I’ve come up with is that either our leaders in Africa don’t understand poverty and therefore they think that by putting wealth in the hands of a few people they are fighting poverty, or they know that they’re interested in the continuation of poverty and therefore continue with some of these poverty-multiplying initiatives like what is churned out of the World Bank every ten years. It is like a cycle of ten years: they repackage their medicine as something new.

Even those who pretend to be concerned, or maybe they are genuinely concerned, I think they don’t understand poverty. In my view it is not a matter of living on less than a dollar a day, because a Maasai [nomadic herdsman in Kenya/Tanzania] doesn’t even know what a dollar is about. People have failed to recognize poverty as a manifestation of power relationships. It is about rights and accessing certain entitlements. Until we look at it that way I don’t think we’ll be able to tackle it; once we recognize it as a political issue we won’t be able to come up with alternative packagings. They can plug a hole here and there, but unless we completely rethink the wholea political, economic, and social relations we are not going to tackle poverty. That is my first observation.

The second one is that actually even the majority of us as civil society do benefit from the status quo, and therefore would like to not rock the boat. I would compare the role we in civil society, the NGOs, play, to the role the churches played, if you see this as a recolonization — just as missionaries were agents of colonization, so the majority of NGOs are midwifing re-colonization.

Q: Do you say this of both national and international NGOs?

Yes, both. It is a sad reality, but the majority of our NGOs are created in the mirror image of international NGOs.

Q: What would you ask or require of groups in the U.S. for solidarity with Kenyans’ struggles for social, economic, & political justice?

It’s related to what I’ve said: we must understand what poverty really is, both in the North and in the South. For my part, what I would ask of Northern NGOs is to know that whatever they do in terms of solidarity with the poor, or those who are trying to work with the poor, it is not charity, because it affects them as it affects those on the ground. They shouldn’t see it as something removed from them, they should see it as their struggle just as we in the South see it as part of our struggle.