As a tiny corporate member of Business Action for Africa (BAA) actually working in the field as an investor and holistic developer in an isolated part of Zambia where some 5,000 or so people live on about 25 cents a day - in a country where Government over the last 20 years only spent 16% of its national expenditure on agriculture, health, education and local government, and where corruption is kept alive by the very process of donor aid, any effort to encourage corporates on the Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) front is laudable (I am trying to recruit corporates to invest in conservancies, based on a trust structure, where they can get involved on the ground). However, not much is being done to support us and the 25 centers in the field, all the endless talking, thumb-shakes and cocktails being swilled in London far from the front. Corruption is a case in point. BAA makes much of its anti-corruption stance, even reporting to the G8 on what a fine job it has done in Zambia, yet I see nothing of them here, nor do they bother to reply to my letters asking what it is they actually do here – let alone for their own members, one of whom is the subject of surveillance and harassment by the state security and immigration apparatus simply because he stands up for the poor and opposes illegal land alienations. But are they listening?
The donors and the multi-nationals, the quangos and international organizations are simply in bed with the Government, massaging the slumbers of the poor. These be the waPajero, a new species. What to do?
