NOA Episode 9.4.2 Doris Okenwa on Cultural and Demographic Tensions Shaping The Future of Development in Africa

Host: Karyn Tan and Angela Zhou 

Podcast Guest: Doris Okenwa 

Karyn: Yeah, I think when you mentioned the corporate social responsibility portion, it definitely reminded me of the blog post that you wrote about Global Investment in Dryland Eastern Africa, and how in Turkana, a lot of the tensions, tensions do crop up around all investors and these corporations, kind of curry-favoring with the communities and stemming a lot of the resistance that comes from the potential backlash from these communities as well and how this creates an asymmetric power relation. So I kind of wanted to talk about exactly what the impacts of corporate social responsibility are on concepts such as belonging, entitlements, and inclusion. And whether it is a fair or unfair trade for these communities to give up these ideas of inclusion and belonging for what they perceive as more practical benefits, like new infrastructure? 

Doris: Wow.That's a lot in terms of a black and white answer. But yeah, fair question. I don't think development can rise beyond how it was presented, right. So if you define development, if you introduce development, whatever kind of development, as a particular thing to a particular community, then it cannot rise above that. And if ideas of developments have been shaped over time by specific things, projects, then it becomes very hard to go around it. 

So oil was introduced, for example, or much of this, we have lapses that are happening, a huge corridor project is also happening in Kenya, or whether it's wind power or big agricultural products, it's often introduced as, again, economic growth, right? And what is tangible? These are abstract terms, you know, so you need concrete stuff to trade and bargain for the social licence to operate. You need concrete things to negotiate with, and those concrete things often come down to jobs, opening up the space, building up the dry land, building up the environments, businesses, opportunities, and the trickle down effect. So that is often the introduction. Then when people take you at your word, you then have a counter narrative saying that people have unrealistic expectations from investors, but that is how development was introduced, those were the tangible benefits that were promised. 

Now, if you take the oil company, for example, one thing I argued in my work is for us to see the old company as a broker. So the image of the oil companies is this villain, this big behemoth, this huge corporation that is faceless, doing things, pulling strings and all that. In the case of TOLO , the oil company that has been prospecting in Turkana, it is what is classified in the oil industry as a junior company. So it's a prospecting company and they work in parts of Africa, doing the groundwork, laying the groundwork that big names wouldn’t touch. Then, when they make a new road, they could sell their blocks, they could partner with the bigger firms and all that, but they do the groundwork. And that is their unique selling point, right? We go where nobody wants to go, we go into the difficult places, we discover things, we negotiate, we'll make it happen, we build up the discovery, build up the project, and, you know, take it from there. 

So it's a kind of brokerage, right? If you begin to imagine the oil company as a hustler, it becomes easier, in a sense, to look at it for what it is. Oftentimes in the literature on the narrative on brokerage, particularly in Africa, you have the picture of the chief, the gatekeepers, you know, and all that stuff, but an oil company is also building itself to be a gatekeeper, right. So in this region, we have expertise in this region, we are the gatekeepers into the resources of this region. We can negotiate with the locals or we have negotiated with them, we have sorted out licenses with the governments, we have sort of taken over this place and know how to make investments happen. 

The picture I'm trying to paint is that, on the ground, it's like a day to day struggle, a day to day negotiation, between the communities and various social sets, various economic interests, various ideas of different people within a very heterogeneous community, even though, yes, they might share cultural ideals and all that. It’s this day to day negotiation, this pull and push between the oil company brokering its way in, and the community, various sets of the community, brokering their way in as well. So each trying to negotiate their place, negotiate their way, and the common denominator, in fact, is this resource. Of course, in terms of power relations, when you look at money, access, influence, the oil company looms larger, but it's a bit more complex than that.

Development is time, particularly in this context, you know. You have a period of time where this happens and people are aware of it. In 2016, for example, there was a global oil glut. The market was challenged and the oil company stopped its production. Along with that went all the jobs and so there was a bust in the global market, but there was also a bust down in the community. Again, the trickle down effect can be good, but also bad. When exploration activities and all the oil activities started again, people were keen to make the most of what they could before there was another bust and we've seen different cycles of booms and busts even in Turkana. So the shape of the project, the way it's been introduced and the scope of the project determine how both the companies and the communities negotiate their place and try to get the most of what they can.

Angela: Just briefly going off what you just mentioned, and I'm really liking this analogy of development as a broker, as a hustler, but my question was, you mentioned this broader community where everyone is negotiating for a place with the dominator of resources, how does gender and age play a role in this? What impact does generational and gender differences have on developments in Africa? To what extent are these differences detrimental to the impact of development, and the benefits of development to Africa? And how, if possible, can we reconcile these differences?

Doris: So you always have these generational tensions, right? Not just tensions in terms of generational age, the age group, the demography, you also have gender, as you've mentioned, but you also have, you know, social sets right? Take for example, people that have gone to school, have had a ‘formal education’ because I don't like to use the word educated people. The fact that you've gone to school doesn't make you any more educated that someone else that hasn’t, maybe it's a different kind of knowledge, it's a different kind of exposure, so I say ‘formal education’. So you have people that have had a ‘formal education’ but come from a pastoralists background, right? It's a challenge that they don't want to go back to it, so their sense of development will be very different. Meanwhile, for the core pastoralists is the idea that development is anything that helps them restock the herd. And what the youth, what young people would want, their sense of development could be very different from what the older generation within a community would want. 

Now in terms of gender, if we look at the specific examples of my field sites, you have this idea that traditionally negotiations are done with men, but sometimes how it's managed is in general settings. It's called community sensitization meetings or community engagement meetings. That would happen in town and you have women speaking, but it often appears tokenistic. You have the women's group, women's leader, cheer lady, and all that, but there is this general overarching idea that it's the men, and that it's cultural. But that also tells us how culture is a very flexible concept. You pick and choose depending on the context. 

There are things that women are considered good for and you have a situation where women are used to mobilize a lot. I remember a cheer lady complaining bitterly to me that the men would often tell them, go and share the news with the market, women mobilize if they want to protest against the company, or against a particular process. Women are often encouraged to mobilize, but when a benefit emerges from that, they are sidelined. And then again, in terms of jobs, you have the argument that oil work is a male dominated thing, right? And how many women have the expertise or the physical power to work in rigs and all that. Women have had to fight their way, that's the gender dynamic and sometimes it comes after the fact. Give women some contract for vegetable supply, or, you know one thing or the other. So, yes, the gender dynamics is very, very, very unbalanced. 

But you have younger women, more than the older women actually being more assertive and I call this inclusion by assertion. This cuts across, and that's a very interesting thing in Turkana where across each age group, across social sets, you have people asserting their rights, or their sense of rights, or their sense of a rightful share. Groups of interests begin to merge and it's a change from what you had previously, like age groups and all that. Well, not a change but maybe a transformation, or transition away, to age groups that unite among their common cause. You have that emerging in new forms. People that feel they share similar interests, a group of drivers will band together and assert themselves, protest and find a way to negotiate for themselves, and sometimes they break through. Again, that is the point of some tension because you find that, after a while, people go like, oh, I'm not interested in that, that is just for the drivers, they're fighting for their rights and it's not going to benefit me. 

Then you have different groups trying to stick a claim in one in one way or another. And for me, I think it's good. I'm all for community speaking with one voice, but you know, one voice, unity, solidarity, it sounds good and it sounds warm, in principle, but how, like James Ferguson asked in his book, Rightful Share: Give a Man a Fish, how does this narrative of let everybody, all citizens, share the wealth of a nation,  how do you do that? Is it universal credit? What exactly is it? 

When you talk about participation and inclusion you call a meeting under a tree or in a town hall and give everybody a voice, but like whose voice? There will always be the loudest, there will also always be different ideas, you know. So sometimes it's the only way. I'm not saying in terms of protests and roadblocks but you know, different groups, showing agency and making a name for themselves and refusing to be subsumed into this general broad narrative of everyone. At the end of the day there is really nobody, but it is some people, you know.

Karyn: I think when you mentioned how there are new groups emerging and appearing with their own goals, their own aims, and how they want to stick their own claims in Africa, it kind of reminded me of what you said earlier about renewable energy, wind farms and solar farms as well. I was wondering whether renewable energy can be seen as a ‘permanent’ or an ‘impermanent’ development and where African countries stand in terms of renewable energy as well. 

Doris: Renewable energy has prospects but a project, or a development, becomes impermanent based on its conception and its execution; based on how it is framed, based on what the motivations for it is. The gist of renewable energy right now is Africa’s green energy transition is the way forward, and which in many ways it is. We are seeing some collaborations and projects from UNDP, from the International Renewable Agency and all that, making it inwards and pushing for funding in that direction. The idea is that failing technology costs have made renewable energy a cost effective way to generate power. In countries all over the world, especially so called developing countries and the number of Africans that still do not have access to electricity, it is a lot. This of course affects any kind of digital transformation or technological improvement. 

But the thing is ownership, right. This idea that Africa is going to leapfrog directly into renewable energy sources, turning away from coal, away from oil and gas, is not going to happen as fast, or as easily, as it has been propounded. Yes, we have seen improvements with communication, cellular technology and all that. We’ve seen a lot of improvements, we’ve seen giant strides taken in that regard, but the challenge really is governance and we’d always come back to that. It comes down to governance, it comes down to ownership of how these renewable projects are executed because, if you notice, the same kinds of challenges, albeit in new forms, often emerge. We had it with the broad international development sector, I’d like to call it the development industry because it is, and then you have it with natural resources, you have it with, even in this era of ethics, you have it with the extractive industries, despite their social impact problems and ambiguous political and economic challenges. What is happening now is that, even with renewable energy you would still have the land constraint. You have the largest wind power project in a part of Turkana where issues of marginalisation, land grabs and community agitations are still happening. These projects are not without consequences. Look at what happened with the Palm Oil Revolution in Latin American countries, you still have these huge inequalities and huge social impacts that emerged from it. 

In principle, it’s the way to go. In principle it's going to be a very transformative development but I think it will take a while and it still needs some working out. And I don’t think it is just going to be a question of external investments. I think it’s something that African governments need to also own so that we don’t have the same narrative and process of external investors coming in and we face the same challenges, old problems in a new form. Ownership is a very, very important focus, but oil and gas, and existing fossil fuels as well, are still going to be dominant for some years to come. It's picking up and there are prospects, but it will take a while.