Date: April 11, 2016
Contact: Eron Henry
Media Relations Coordinator
Unleashed Marketing Team
NGOs undermining African countries
Alexandria, VA–Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have played a role in the underdevelopment of Africa, said American-based, Nigerian-born businessman, John Akhile.
In his book, Unleashed, Akhile said NGOs “contributed to the stagnation of economic ideas and innovation” on the continent and that “a top-to-bottom review of what exactly they are doing is long overdue.”
African countries need to join “forces as one uniform entity to deal with the nonprofits and NGOs,” he wrote.
Akhile is puzzled as to why NGOs and nonprofits are allowed to play such an outsized role throughout the continent, which is blessed with abundant natural resources.
He asserted that African leaders need to ask themselves some hard questions. “Why is a foreign entity providing medical services in their country? Digging wells for running water? Feeding their people?”
The work and actions of NGOs is nothing less than recolonization. “These groups depend on African countries being subjugated and exploited to maintain their relevance. The relationship between NGOs, nonprofits and African nations is a diabolical marriage made in hell.”
Proliferation of these bodies in Africa, which number in the hundreds, “is a cancer eating away the entrepreneurial vitality of Africa.” They are “a hive of nonprofit ‘bees’ buzzing over Africa’s landscape and intruding in the lives of its people.”
Though they may claim otherwise, international NGOs sponsored by private entities “are not driven by the host country’s needs.”
They exercise “unusual influence” and “support and implement programs that are not necessarily in the best interest of communities they claim to serve,” shutting “off the tap to FDI for infrastructure, manufacturing and processing businesses.”
These entities “have no constituency, no apparent accountability structure except to their own survival and no scruples about how they perpetuate that survival on the back of the misery index of the African people they are supposed to be helping.”
Describing international NGOs with presence in Africa as big businesses that control more than US$70 billion in resources, he said “their incestuous relationship with Western mass media…have infinitely damaged Brand Africa for generations.”
“It is high time African nations look at ways to limit NGO activities and their effect on Africa’s image,” Akhile said.
Unleashed is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
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