Torture

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Torture

The basic idea is that "I" know

And "you" do not know

Otherwise the whole exercise would be pointless.

So here I come to a country I do not know, to customs I do not know, to people I do not know, and my job is to change your life.

I am here to teach you how to double or triple your maize yields.

You do not believe me?

Big laugh !

How right you are !

Therefore I am going to show how to do it, then you make up your own mind.

The basic problem I have to solve is that I am "one" and you are many, even many of many. So in some way I must increase the number of hands and tongues I have.

My hands are called Agricultural Advisers or any other name you can think of.

They are employed by the Government, the Ministry of Agriculture, they live in the villages, with the farmers. They have been trained at some kind of Agricultural school, some are well trained, some are .... normal.

Whatever they do, they receive a monthly salary. That salary sometimes consists of nothing as the Government cannot really be bothered by the payment of salaries, when would it otherwise have time to work and anyway, where would it get the money?

As a result, as the colonial powers were disdainfully saying of their own expatriates, they go native, instead of being agricultural advisers, they become farmers.

Most of them have been receiving Governmental Instructions for years, sometimes decades and like any experienced soldier, they know that if they wait long enough, the order will be forgotten or contradicted or proved to be idiotic. As the Head Civil Servants are transferred from one position to another every six months, sometimes lasting up to 2 years, they just have to wait out for the wheels to turn and spit out another Governor with new ideas. And still no money.

So here we arrive, with our marching orders, they have seen project like ours so many time that they are mostly curious to see what horrible blunder we are going to make and how to get the most food and services out of the Project. If they are really lucky they might convince us to allocate a motorcycle (Sir, my petrol allowance has run out) and for some lucky chaps, the top prize of all the top prizes, a Duty Vehicle.

A duty vehicle is something very very valuable. So valuable that it is better not to use it for official purposes otherwise it could prove to be damaged or out of petrol when you are going to run your own private taxi service. Duty vehicles also guaranty that you will never run out of friendly girl friends.

Duty vehicles are to be used to carry somebody or something from here to there. But how much? What a stupid question; Let us say that you are going to buy and sell charcoal, the amount you can charge is equal to the number of bags you can put inside the vehicles plus all the bags you can tie on the roof top. Some very sad characters are prone to pointing out that it is probably not foreseen in the user manual that the load should be such that the chassis is leveling the ground in a great display of sparks and skeaks. Timid fellows. Will never make any money.

As to the number of passengers a Governmental Duty Car can carry, especially if their is a road going round the well know police check point, the number of passengers is roughly estimated at twice the amount of space available, experience has proven that passengers always find a way to shrink if needed.

Sorry, I got distracted from the main subject, but vehicles are the curse of any project.

So, there I am, if you look way down, you see the farmers and in between I have my Agricultural advisers and in some way I am supposed to feed the country.

The most obvious method appears to be to tell the adviser what they should advise.

So I will organize Training Weeks at Agricultural Colleges around the country, weeks during which the message is conveyed.

How will the Advisers come to the Training session? That is not my problem, in Africa, moving from here to there has never been a problem. They do turn up.

Why do they turn up?

Because during the Training they are fed. It is as simple as that. They probably get more and better food in one week than they get during one month. Incidentally as you changes, the food being prepared by the College kitchen staff, I do not only feed the participants but, also the College cooks and their families, the Principal of the College, the Teachers, anyone who has some kind of link with anyone near enough to the food. When you have training courses, the most valuable item is "meat". I would advise beginners in this job always to cut up the meat in small pieces, otherwise when one or two beef legs vanish, the mathematical formulation of the rations becomes a bit difficult to work out. Whatever you buy for the course, the amount served in the dining room will have little or no relationship to the amount you have purchased. Do not buy a goat to feed them, it is incredible how little there is to eat on a goat.

Let us assume that you have been a good trainer of trainees, that they have received and understood the message, that you have further to having fed them (and the cook and the principal and anybody else) you have paid them their daily allowance, off they go back to their post somewhere in the bush. And then what?

By the way, did anybody notice that they have been paid twice, first you feed them, then you pay them Food Money? This is the system.

Also one advantage of the system is that you do not have to leave any space in your car for "left over's" from the training courses. No training courses has ever had "left over's".

So they are back in the bush.

They are housed by the Government. Housed means that once upon a time a house was built. Funds for repairs have never been allocated, or, if allocated, never found their way to the house holder. Which means no windows except for taped paper boards, barely a door, certainly no lock on the door, no kitchen, no washing room, all the ducts having collapsed long ago, then it would be ludicrous to have a washing room when you have no water.

The World Bank, with all it's power, imposed on the Developing World, the superiority of the Training and Visit system.

It was also called the Torture and Vanish System by the village staff.

Or "Talk and Vanish"

The main point beign that you tell somebody what he should do and then you vanish, letting him sort how to do it, as best he can. He cannot!

Vanish, is also what the farmers call it, they are told to go to the meeting point at such a day, at such an hour and they wait and wait and nobody comes to talk to them.