Address by the Rev. Dr. Nzamujo Godfrey, Director of the Songhai Project, Benin

On the Occasion of Receiving the 1993 Africa Prize for Leadership, Tokyo

The ceremony we have been a part of today is very good for us in Africa at the grass roots. Most of the African villages, the African people, get the wrong feelings. All we get is bad news telling us we cannot do it. Therefore, the importance of this ceremony for us is difficult to overemphasize. I'm going back to Africa to tell people that they're not alone -- that their dreams are the dreams of people around the world. Thank you very much for telling us that we can do it.

The worsening living conditions of millions of people in Africa today should require that development strategies be examined, but unfortunately, in spite of the failure of most of the programmes advocated in the past three decades, we have yet to learn some valuable lessons.

Where do we start? I think the best place to start is to find out why we failed. We failed because it was wrongly assumed that development would be an automatic result of the injection of capital and Western know-how into the development process. Secondly, the measure of performance and the goals set in these programmes were based on criteria used in the developed world. Thirdly, in these programmes the designers failed to take into account some social-economic realities in the developing African countries. Development up to this moment has been an affair of a small elite. Therefore, the programmes were targeted to a small group of intellectuals, and the emphasis was laid on the transfer of technology to the detriment of the grass roots. Research into local materials, developing the local talents and potentials, was missing. These transferred technologies introduced skills that create an ongoing dependency on imports.

Most of the people involved in development in Africa do not share the risks of the failure of these programmes. It is surprising in our world of free economic markets that these people are still at their jobs. Development in Africa needs qualities of dedication, determination, honesty.

A majority of Africans today are fighting for survival. Our social-economic crisis has created a form of socialization that can be described as the survival of the fittest. This form embodies attitudes and behaviour patterns that are incompatible with modern day economic development.

How do we change this? This is not a moral question. Many have said that there is a lot of corruption in Africa, Africans are incapable. No! Any people involved in survival is going to develop this social attitude and disintegrating social forces. So the African behaviour cycle is not a moral one. It is a question of a vicious cycle. The crisis is a disabling condition that is making it impossible for Africans to create their world. We have been trying to graft the economic structures and methods of production of the West onto the realities of Africa.

Today, Japan is one of the strongest economies. Japan did not try to be Europe or America. Japan went into the depth of its spirit and discovered qualities and transformed them into economic values.

Our economic woes are only symptoms of a greater crisis. Ours is a social system that is not yet capable of internally generating the necessary social forces for its maintenance and survival. We have to start something radical. Let us stop white-washing the problem of development. Sustainable development will continue to be elusive if we do not start a comprehensive project for a new society -- a civil society that is capable of harnessing and using the materials that are still abundant in Africa today. And we must use this resourcefulness for effective social integration.

This project requires a two-front approach. We at the grass roots believe that an enabling environment must be provided by the government if any meaningful process is to take place. If a government is sensitive to its rural communities, and if the rural communities constitute a serious constituency for the government, that government will have to develop policies to empower these communities.

At the grass-roots level, it is necessary to focus on issues and policies and options in a longer-term perspective than is possible for most governments. Most governments in Africa are forced to spend a good portion of the nation's resources responding to the immediate concerns of an insufficiently informed constituency. Many intellectuals, those in the big cities, are wasting the resources and neglecting the grass roots -- those who are really carrying Africa.

There is another Africa today. This Africa is not yet known by the mass media. But there are a growing number of communities and non-governmental organizations that refuse to accept a gloomy picture of the future of Africa. They are no longer accepting the inhuman conditions as business as usual. A strong will to survive is becoming more and more evident on the continent. Take a look at the wave of democratic movements in Africa today.

It is the responsibility of the African leadership not only to recognize these new human energies, but to harness and manage them for the building of a new African society that is socially and economically viable. We have to start by creating the forum where we can articulate our problems and search for a deeper understanding of why we are poor. This will enable us to make sense out of the tangle of economic, social, technical, cultural and environmental problems. We have to tackle them, master them. We have to create human capabilities to face these problems.

We have no right to decry what is happening in Africa today and stop there. The only way to get out of our problems is to build another Africa -- our Africa, where we can be recognized as human beings, an Africa that can participate in world affairs on her own terms. A social order must be rooted in the particularities of the people, in its history and its conceptual framework. It must address the real problems of the community by helping to articulate them, and develop the moral and intellectual capacities for solving them. This process will guarantee the participation of the majority of the people and the development of skills and attitudes that are appropriate.

We must have the courage to move away from the production of technology packages. In their place, we must create projects that allow for collaborative efforts among African local communities, scientists and development agencies. The bottom line is that technologies must be developed by specific people living in specific places with their specific needs. While promoting this philosophy, we must not close our cultural or technical windows. Africans must be capable of going anywhere in the world, picking up building blocks, coming back home, recreating them, to solve our specific problems. We do not know what Africa will be like tomorrow, but we know that it is this process that will make a new Africa that is viable, that can participate in the world affairs of tomorrow.

Sustainability means that our production systems should be marked by material and non-material resources. Our production systems should be based on the comparative advantages of Africa: African heat, our biological life, culture, heritage, our conceptual framework. This is the only way that Africa can participate in the world market.

This philosophy is a reality at Songhai today. We have succeeded in making concrete economic results, and these results have reinforced the will to survive. At Songhai, we are committed to the establishment of an atmosphere where people can discover the ways to better themselves. People discover the reasons to believe in themselves, because Songhai is not merely a "how to do it" institution. We do not hand out recipes. It is first and foremost a "how to be" organization. "Being more" or wanting to "be more" is the source of creativity and inventiveness.