Development: An Intricate Dance of Words

It is a rainy Friday morning in East Africa. The weekend looms, promising and cheery, despite the online news forecast of disparaging doom, the pungent smell of which seems to fill my office in seconds. My reading is an attempt to keep up with the world, to judge shrewdly where today’s power lies, and to work with the knowledge of this influence grounding my efforts to channel some of that power, and the fruits of it, towards my organisation. We advocate government pro-poor policy through what is most definitely not a non-governmental organisation. What is an NGO, other than a contradiction in terms? Development is politically, financially and socially organised, controlled and manipulated by governments, whatever the title claims. Always and everywhere. It is a power game of sorts, an intricate dance of words, a duel of meaning and suggestion; a competition of eloquence. It is not what you know that counts, but whether you know how to say it. And the prize is the money. As clichés and quotes have always predicted, it is the money that buys the soul out of everything, and there is big money in poverty. Today, I think, the game is fun. Tomorrow, perhaps not so much.