By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

More by this Author

There is some good, if belated, news out of the World Bank and its affiliated organs that seems to confirm what some of us have been saying for a very long time, and that is that investment in the human person is the most viable investment any country can make.

It should be clear to anyone who thinks about it that development is about people, that there cannot be any sensible development in the true sense of the word unless it is about the welfare and progress of the human person.

I have been trying to search my mind to find out if it is possible to develop other things outside the human person, and I have caught myself saying, yes, but you can. You can surely develop a road network that beats the best in the developed world with spaghetti junctions creating a labyrinth of turnoffs going off to a thousand directions.

You could develop a railway system that criss-crosses the length and breadth of a country hauling heavy cargo at the same time as it provides luxurious travelling for the well-heeled.

You could link up the roads and the railway systems with fine harbours and beautiful airports, all linked to glittering cities with uninterrupted electric power, safe and clean running water surrounded by luxuriant gardens to beat the one we are told was named Eden.

Yes, you could have all these things and more, and yet they would all be pointless, in fact nonsensical, unless smack at the very centre of everything sat Man. And Woman.

Just think about it. What good would all the roads and railways be unless they served human beings and contributed to human progress in material term as well uplifting the human spirit?

Sometime in the 1980s, the Breton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, told our rulers they were wasting time and good money on developing their people, that areas such as education and health should not be invested in because they were “unproductive.” And our rulers listened to such fiddlesticks and did as they were told.

To be fair to some of those rulers, they often had no choice. Having allowed their natural resources to be despoiled and externalised to benefit our former colonial masters, and squandered the remainder on white elephants that yielded no sustainable results, they had no alternative now but to swallow the bitter pill that came their way courtesy of the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes, from which we have not fully recovered to date.

The whole situation was aided by the dynamics of a neo-colonialist political economy, whereby the departing masters were not departing in any way other than that they now did not have to account for their former wards when disasters such as famine or disease struck, because we were “independent,” though our resources obviously were not.

If you look around, you will realise that not much has changed, except, perhaps, that the players in the plundering game have become more numerous and sometimes more destructive.

We still observe the same desire among our rulers and their cabals to keep us in subservience while they, in cahoots with international cartels, milk our countries dry.

Now that we have been vindicated in our original thinking, we should waste no more time in putting money into what we rightly thought to be the correct thing to do.

Human development is about developing the human being, physically, materially and spiritually. Education and health are key.

A person who has received a quality education and has been given proper healthcare will know how to make sound life choices for himself or herself.

We have seen how families that sent their children to proper schools and kept them sheltered from disease have licked poverty within one generation. It should work for the whole community, for the whole nation.

We may now be bogged down in arguments about what quality education entails. But to me it is more than academic excellence in the sciences and the arts.

Graduate thieves and murderers holding doctorates of philosophy are no better than their illiterate comrades. Yes, the degrees can be useful, and they certainly are desirable.

However they must be undergirded by Ubuntu, the spiritual timber that imbues us with empathy towards our fellow beings, our society and our environment.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]