I had quite a week: One of those when personal encounters and events provoke intense reflections.

I attended a meeting somewhere in Europe and had an encounter with someone, one of those people you meet, who give you plenty of pause for thought by the things they say about things you believed you knew well.

The meeting took place in a West European country. It brought together various experts on a subject that preoccupies millions of international civil servants in development agencies; smart academics and researchers from some of the world’s most prestigious universities and think-tanks; and activists from local and international non-governmental organisations and advocacy groups, big and small, well known and obscure.

It is a subject that stirs strong emotions. And it has been at the centre of much discussion and theory building for ages. Whole campaigns bringing together armies of actors and costing lots of money have been built around it and even named after it.

There are so many people in the world seeking to reduce it; eradicate it, or at least alleviate it. If by now you have not yet guessed what it is, here: Poverty.

There is poverty everywhere, but poverty in Africa seems to be particularly interesting to discuss in terms of strategies for combatting it.

I first encountered serious and lengthy discussions about poverty in Africa 26 years ago as a graduate student at a non-African university. Poverty in Africa, I realised, had spawned a whole industry outside the continent, on how to combat it. Armies of “aid workers” were being dispatched to Africa to work for NGOs and help pull African communities out of destitution.

There was a certain belief at the time that NGOs, not weak African governments and their feckless leaders and bureaucrats, were what was needed to get the work of poverty alleviation or reduction or eradication done.

The claim was hardly questioned. And the likes of me were there to learn “development” and the techniques of doing it. We would then come back to Africa and join the efforts to develop it, preferably as employees of NGOs whose alleged ability to deliver was said to lie in being immune to infection by corruption and other vices associated with government bureaucracies.

Fast forward to today. No one says NGOs are what is needed to eradicate poverty on a massive scale. The whole idea had been misconceived. It became popular only because those who were promoting it had too many advantages on their side, which they used to foist it on everybody.

And today no one buys the idea that poverty reduction or eradication is simply a matter of applying the right techniques planted in the minds of anti-poverty activists through lectures and seminars in Western universities.

Current thinking points at politics and how it is organised and practised in any country as the foundation that can facilitate or block the building of effective anti-poverty action on a grand scale.

And so the question arises: What kind of politics carries the greatest promise of facilitating the production of durable results?

There is a certain consensus that it is ideas-driven politics that promotes collaboration, rather than destructive competition among potentially rival political elites.
Collaboration guarantees nothing. However, it can facilitate collective thinking and engender stability.

Stability can ensure that policies that work, are maintained, consistently implemented and, where necessary, adjusted or fine-tuned. Experts agree that where poverty has been overcome, success sprang from getting politics right at every stage of social evolution.

For Africans who are still grappling with how to overcome it, there is a catch.

We don’t know how to go about getting politics right. It is far easier with conventional multiparty competition. All that is required are political groupings calling themselves parties, which we know how to organise; and elections, which we are pretty good at staging.

As we know, however, the resulting contests usually endanger stability, consensus-driven collective thinking, and all the good things that have historically facilitated the rise of prosperity and durable declines in poverty elsewhere.

That there is no mass movement advocating for some kind of change from this costly but failed approach bewilders me. Which takes me to my encounter with a talkative and entertaining son of the soil.

Whenever I travel, I simply cannot resist talking with African taxi drivers about their take on politics in their countries of origin.

On my last trip, I engaged an Eritrean driver in Europe. He was refugee, who later became a citizen of his adopted country. One would imagine he is happy to have left Eritrea and to be living in Europe. Not quite.

His love for Eritrea knows no bounds. His attitude to the new country, though, is highly conflicted. He visits Eritrea every now and then, bought a house there recently and wants to retire there.

President Isaias Afwerki is his hero because he has transformed the country, made the people proud. He had many photos of him in his phone. But Western and some African media say that Eritrea is a terrible place, Afwerki, something of a monster. Someone is exaggerating. This year I want to go there, listen, watch and see for myself.

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]