VIEWPOINTS
IN CONVERSATION WITH... Dr Rogate R. Mshana
The last of CWM’s NIFEA Colloquium on Economy of Life was recently held alongside its Annual Member’s Meeting in Apia, Samoa this past June. And at every NIFEA conference, you will hear the voice of Dr Rogate Mshana. A Tanzanian development economist, Dr Rogate has been a key driving force behind NIFEA since its inception, bringing to the table over 21 years of his experience in the fields of sustainable development and environment, Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and local knowledge systems to name a few. He took time out from his busy schedule to share with INSiGHT about NIFEA, and explained why ecological concerns should be at the top of our agenda – where the body of Christ cannot remain silent when it comes to economic and climate justice.
You have been an advocate, activist and unflinching voice for economic justice. Please share with us why you embarked on this journey and what drives you? As soon as I completed my first degree at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, I joined the Christian Council of Tanzania as a researcher on Rural Vocation Education in Tanzania. This was from 1977 to 1982. The problem at that time was the influx of young people from the rural areas to the urban centres to look for employment only to discover that jobs were not available in towns. This was a phenomenon in the whole of Africa. We questioned why there were no jobs in the rural areas and found out that the skills offered to young people were irrelevant to their livelihoods on the one hand but on the other there were great disparities between the rural areas and the urban centres in terms of national wealth distribution. The rural areas had a pushing power effect while urban areas had a pulling power effect in terms of wealth creation. We concluded that economic inequality was, therefore, the root cause of rural-urban youth migration. Young people were running away from poverty to follow capital. It is like capital generated in the rural areas moved to urban areas and onwards to rich industrial countries in form of unequal terms of trade. Young people continued to follow this capital in Europe through stowaways and human trafficking. From there on I became an advocate for economic justice both locally, nationally, regionally and globally. Economic justice became an area to be focused wherever I worked as an economist. When I joined the World Council of Churches ( 2000-2014), I studied the role that was played by the World Bank and IMF in poverty eradication and justice but found out that these institutions that worked for “a poverty free world” as their motto did just the reverse to their motto due to their unsuitable policies of Structural Adjustment, liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation imposed to poor countries as a panacea for poverty eradication. Such policies led to the rich being richer while the poor continued to be poorer. These institutions gave loans to poor countries with conditionalities that drove them to further poverty and indebtedness. Policies of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were enforced leading to further impoverishment of these countries especially in Africa. We concluded that over 87% of poverty anywhere is caused by economic injustice instead of people being lazy. I, therefore, vowed to deal with the structural and ideological root-causes of poverty, caused by greed and unequal accumulation of wealth and not with symptoms. Consequently, I rejected the then “Poverty Reduction Programmes by the IMF and the World Bank until they stopped imposing SAPs and collecting interests and repayments of debts for the benefit of the wealthy at the expense of the poor. In the context of ecumenical advocacy, I located such a task in prophetic ministry. Prophesy requires more than just the general critique of injustice. It goes into the analysis of the root-causes showing that poverty arises out of mechanisms of enrichment causing impoverishment, exclusion and today’s ecological destruction. So, the basic ideological model and assumptions on which the IMF and the World Bank are operating had to be prophetically criticised in the light of biblical teaching. Their paradigm of “economic growth without limits eradicates poverty” is not supported by empirical evidence. Oxfam has demonstrated that there has been economic growth without poverty reduction. Economics like Herman E. Dally came up with a book on Beyond Growth critiquing economic orthodoxy and proposing the economics of sustainable development. ¹
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Herman E. Dally Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, Beacon Press, Boston, 1996.
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