AFRICA, IT'S CHILDREN AND IT'S CHURCH

This paper is a very personal reflection on my journey with the church and children's issues within the African continent. This paper does not intend to be an academic or theological treatise. It is not. Quite frankly, it is just the opposite.It is rather a random selection of thoughts gathered over the past twelve years as I engaged in work with children and Church / Christian Non-Governmental Organisations.These thoughts have been written down all over the place: On notepads, on file covers, on airplane tickets.

They were gathered through observation, intense observation. They were observed in real contexts. They come from reflections as a result of conversations, mail received, papers read and travels to various places. And finally, this paper comes out of deep frustration. Deep frustration. Seeing children die, becoming trapped as soldiers in adult wars, seeing them sleep in holes in the ground, seeing them scavenging for food on garbage dumps, seeing them unable to go to school, and seeing them being exploited for their labour. These observations have led me to compare the plight of children in Africa to the state of leadership in the church as well as by the church within the African context. All this is happening within a context of the rising fame of the African Church leader who dwells in the shadow of his/ her own importance and whose personal wealth and popularity have increased enormously. What we are unwilling to admit as Church leaders is that our fame on the international Christian stage and our new-found wealth are, in fact, hollow victories.
The 11 year-old child soldier with his AK47 tells us our fame is a hollow victory. The 12 year-old girl lying on a sex-stained mattress in a dingy, dark, stinking backroom, where she has to have sex with ten people on average per day tells us our nice new suit is a hollow victory. The 14-month old baby who has had non-stop diarrhoea for the last two weeks and whose weak body is about to breathe its last breath, screams at us that our next trip to yet another conference is a farce. Our personal fame is just a platform for the leaders to get away from it all, but for her however, it's a death sentence. She will be dead by the time we get back from our next overseas trip. We have failed. In the midst of the modern era which announces the greatest organisational success ever for relief and development organisations, the greatest amount of money ever raised, the greatest expansion of the church ever, how dare we celebrate leadership growth and success when these are not measured against the lives of children saved?

Random Thought 1
Africa's most dynamic Christian leaders are prisoners of foreign relief and development organisations. Too often have I seen those “he who pays the piper calls the tune!” scenarios play themselves out within the African Child Relief and Development context. Those African leaders who should be taking a leading role in being entrepreneurial with solutions for Child Care in Africa, get taken into employment with foreign organisations and because of an inherent culture of compliance, lose their prophetic voice which should really be speaking out on what is in the best interests of Africa's children.

They spend all their time on the programme implementation side, with very little opportunity to bring critical contextual thinking to bear on the issues at hand. Their failure to speak out as independent thinkers, as originators of solutions, has severely hampered the impact of the programmes they seek to implement. What has happened is that they have become just another cog in an already ineffective wheel. Why are Africa's leaders not pioneering solutions for their children? Why are they not working together in humility with each other, joining hands around collective strategies to stop the greatest carnage of our generation? Why is it up to foreign agencies to design solutions and African leaders to simply become implementers? It is indeed tragic to see that many brilliant African leaders who, as agents of foreign relief and development agencies, have no courage to bring critical independent contextual thinking to bear on the issues, but rather have allowed themselves to become foreign to their own natural context and, as such, are either ineffective or irrelevant.

Random Thought 2
Africa's Elders have exploited patriarchy and matriarchy to the detriment of Africa's children. Having sat in several meetings in Africa, Europe and the USA, where discussions were held on the issues of new entrepreneurial initiatives to improve conditions for Africa's children, I have often had to sit through frustration after frustration when no progress can be made until a senior African leader or major African organisation is consulted. Our elders have abused the privilege of leadership by stopping conference resolutions, failing to carry out agreed-upon decisions, and stopping progress until they have been consulted. This characterisation is not meant to be facetious, but is borne out of deep frustration with leaders who take upon themselves the mantle of Continental Elder and insist that they must be consulted and included in decisions, but at the same time have no plan, no system, and no vision to ultimately deliver on that which they insist on being a part of, or being consulted on. They have no interest, no plan and no strategy on how to render services to the continent's most vulnerable inhabitants, its children.

This is a grave injustice to our children. I have seen educated African leaders cave in to patriarchy, fleeing to it as a safe hiding space, when they should have taken a stand to speak out against such a horrible waste of time and money. I have seen conferences held to ransom because certain senior leaders first need to be consulted on the programme, the time, the dates, who should and should not be invited to attend or to speak etc. I have seen conferences and meetings held to ransom because some senior African leaders just don't pitch despite undertakings to be present (and these conferences have been planned and arranged around their schedule, after consulting with them!). And all the while, children are dying, daily. African leaders are busy. Very busy. With limited resources at hand it is to be understood that the demand for their time often outweighs their ability to meet all the demands that come their way.

But such circumstances call on us to recognise the problem and to ensure that, on behalf of children, we dispense with such inefficiency caused by allegiance to patriarchy and rather move forward with those who are able to deliver. Good leadership recognises this crisis and it is incumbent on our leaders to say: “Move on, get the job done, save the children! Don't wait for me!”

Random Thought 3
Africa's leaders attend too many conferences.
Africa's leaders attend too many conferences. Full stop. In my own recent count, I think that the average African Christian leader attends between 8 and 12 conferences/major national / international meetings a year. This is ludicrous! Each conference has resolutions. Each conference has outcomes. With the limited administrative infra-structure at hand for African leaders, it is self-explanatory that resolutions and outcomes will suffer in the process because the capacity to implement at that level and volume just does not exist. I think we fail our children when we go away to these meetings and come back with no intention to do anything with the information gathered. Foreign agencies also are implicit in this ”crime” committed against children. They always invite those who are recognised leaders because it gives their event a certain profile. It's a bit of an ego-booster to have a major African leader around. Little do they know that this conference is the third one he is attending this month and that his presence in person does not guarantee his presence in mind and full participation.

Random Thought 4
For too many leaders, conferences, travel and speaking engagements are all about opportunities to raise much needed finance or seek new employment opportunities with foreign agencies.

The integrity of Africa's leaders has been ruined by foreign organisations' promises of money/resources. Money and promises of money have been instrumental in destroying the core focus of the mandate due to the immaturity of leaders. To a degree, the billions of dollars/pounds poured into NGOs/Relief organisations in Africa have made little difference to the macro situation of children. We have seen how leaders pitch up at conferences without money. With no return air ticket. With no accommodation. Because they know someone will inevitably pick up the tab. Other examples abound. Invariably, the host group foots the bill, pays the money and rescues the situation. Classic scenarios which we have all seen before. When will we learn the lesson? The classic statement goes: “What you win people with, is what you win them to!” We must ensure that money plays its proper role within the promotion of relief and development for Africa's children. In addition, too many leaders use the plight of children to make money that in essence never gets to the children themselves.

This is true of both African and Western organisations. Let me tell you the Western version: I remember well a Western organisation that was funding relief in Africa during the very early 90s. We had applied to them for funding to buy some IT equipment. I remember the copious forms that we had to fill in. The documentation was staggering. But we filled them in. We complied. After they reviewed our application we got turned down. On one of my trips overseas I visited their offices and saw open plan office systems with staff and IT technology all over the place. I asked: Who bought these computers? Well, we know the answer: The plight of Africa's children bought those computers. They had some twenty work-stations, all funded as part of the cost of raising money for Africa, but in turn they made it really difficult for African leaders to access the same funds. We often felt that they had access to the funds at the drop of a hat, those funds raised in our name, without going through the same process of accountability with us, that they wanted us to go through with them. This vicious cycle must be stopped. African leaders must stop desiring Western money.

They must stop legitimising Western fundraising that is not directly linked to or raised on behalf of direct African recipients. We must untangle the cords made by Western money that we have woven around ourselves. The tragedy is that too many African Leaders have so abused the Western Fundraising opportunities that it has become a form of bondage for them. They are in danger of self-destructing because they are so dependent on foreign money. They have been made to believe that they are worth nothing without that money. They have been deceived into thinking that they are not worth anything without that job and title. Herein lies the tragedy. Every conference they attend is seen as an opportunity to raise money. Western Christians and conferences are also guilty of parading themselves as excessively wealthy in front of leaders from poorer countries. This gives room for the evil attitudes of envy, pride and selfishness by either party to manifest themselves and leads inevitably to behaviour patterns that are not mutually beneficial. I have always ensured, over twelve years of ministry with an indigenous African NGO, that our funding sources were local and internal to our national context. There was absolutely no reliance on foreign donors to sustain our ministry.

Foreign funding was always regarded as leverage funding and incidental to our primary objective of doing ministry that we would be able to pay for with national funding. Non-national funding must never be pursued in order to create long-term sustainability. We must examine our dependency on foreign funding. It is wrong. We must look for ways to create sustainability within the context of local resources. There is nothing wrong with foreign funding used as leverage to open a new avenue of service or to provide relief in dramatic situations. But on-going reliance on such funding for day-to-day provisions contains the seeds of death. It creates a dependency that robs cultures and communities of integral survival and developmental values such as responsibility, creativity, hard work, entrepreneurship, etc. We need Africa's leaders to show the way in creating and establishing new models of sustainability for relief and development. Our future development depends on leaders who show that they are not all standing, generation after generation, with a collection tin in the doorways of Western Agencies, but have themselves come up with creative ways through alternative thinking to address the sustainability needs of their constituencies.

Random Thought 5
Africa's leaders must learn to say “NO”.
At many levels African leaders find themselves torn apart by competing with Western Relief and Development Agencies. Africa's good and great leaders are sought by everyone. And the agencies that pay the best incentives usually end up with the prize. We must, as leaders, have a proper perspective of what the future demands of us. We must be willing to build and develop initiatives ourselves and not just seek to sell our skill for the sake of employment, a job or status. We must be willing to work hard. We must learn to say “no” to initiatives that we know in our hearts are foreign to our vision and mandate, but are appealing to our financial maintenance or self-preservation. We must say “no” to conferences that are, in light of the pressing demands on us and in light of the needs of our children and communities, not serving the advancement of our vision and mandate and essentially end up as a misuse of both timend money. We must say “no” to events and people that do good in terms of our cause and mandate, but are not necessarily the best for our cause and mandate.

That's the tough call we must be willing to make. We are often too scared to offend Western leaders so we never say “no” to them and we end up serving several masters (who all do good things) but with no lasting impact (the best thing) on the constituency which we serve. Our openness, friendliness and graciousness have created problems for us as well as the communities that we serve. In promoting the cause of children, (especially where we do so effectively) we must be careful not to fall into the trap of being “bought by several overseas funders”, which in the end ruins our reputation and causes our natural effectiveness to become stunted because of competing external interests. In order to save lives, we must learn to say NO to events, people, agencies and funders whose engagement with us will destroy our effectiveness at grassroots level.

Random Thought 6
The Church in Africa is like an abused wife: Despite the violence, she is too scared to leave her abusive husband, and so the children in the home see the face of domestic violence everyday.

This is one of the horrors of the modern day church in Africa. Money is spent on things that do not address the plight of the main concerns of our communities, especially the plight of children. Despite the many resolutions, programmes, etc we see an ever deepening gulf erupting between the demands of Scripture as normative for the well-being of entire communities, especially the plight of children and the chronic state of well-being throughout the continent. But the Church in Africa seems unable to stop this spiralling catastrophe. We mindlessly imitate Western churches in design, custom and tradition.

We keep on trying to do things in our churches just so that the next foreign mission family can become members of our church, and perhaps will commend us for the way we organise our church/organisation. We appease, we compromise, and we adjust. But nothing changes in order to advance the mandate that addresses the plight of children in our communities. And despite all the death and starvation of children in our communities, we continue to make our main agenda a flirtation with fame for the sake of finances. We appear to be incapable of stopping this abusive cycle. I think that God is horrified by His church universal, not just in Africa, whose leaders have developed themselves into teaching gurus more popular than Jesus, whose programmes claim to be more relevant than “anything ever designed” and whose trademark success indicator is that “thousands attended” whatever it was they did. And they do all this while 16000 children die each day on the continent of entirely preventable diseases. Such abuse must stop. In the face of such overwhelming death and suffering of children, how dare we buy another new book of some hot new Christian author? How dare we make arrangements for another major church campaign that will have thousands sit for days listening to sermon upon sermon? All this happens in the name of Christianity, while another 16 000 children die simply because we don't make the time to address the issues that will stop their diarrhoea?

We have chosen to compromise our voice in favour of personal survival. The Bible speaks out uncompromisingly on injustices towards children.The prophets cry out against the death of children on the streets. They implore God to judge the death of children. Jesus says that those who cause children to stumble and who prevent them from coming to him deserve death. Despite thousands of children dying daily from entirely preventable diseases we appear to be unable to speak out prophetically against the injustices perpetrated against children. We have chosen not to fulfil our prophetic role when we decide not to challenge Governments who spend Aid money and taxes on useless arms and personal enrichment. We have chosen to remain silent when we see church leaders ignoring the death of children by spending money on buildings and travel and not on much-needed medication, education and other areas of prevention and intervention. The death of our children due to preventable diseases on the African continent happens within a context of where one trip to a USA/European conference can pay for nutrition or education of at least ten children for an entire year.

We need the prophet to raise its angry voice once again against this injustice and to call our leaders to account. We have opted rather to ensure that amidst this pervasive smell of death, our own personal survival and continued employment remains our priority. So the voice of the prophet dies. And children continue to die, because there are no prophets. And we will still bury them from our churches. On our way to the airport.

Random Thought 8
Africa's leaders often fall asleep in meetings, are often too tired to concentrate and appear to have very little interest in being an agent for change as that may require too much effort.

As an African who has shared many international and national conferences with African leaders, it is embarrassing to see our leaders falling asleep in major meetings that require their attention. Often I do not blame them. They simply travel too much and attend too many events and as such do not allow their bodies to recover adequately. Further, after having spent thousands of dollars on travel to attend a conference, deemed as “critical to Africa”, I am amazed to see how many African leaders do not attend the workshops or participate in full. They will be at the plenaries, but not at other parts of the conference. Some of them would sleep in their rooms through conference sessions. Others would be out shopping on the High Street during conference time. This is an injustice to the children and the church which has sent these leaders there. These children are the ones desperate for the opportunity to see some glimmer of hope that this might be the trip, this might be the conference which brings an end to their pain, carnage and death. Despair builds upon despair, as yet another opportunity to act prophetically on behalf of children, goes begging. Literally, folks, it is money down the proverbial drain. We cannot allow this to continue. These leaders are the shepherds of these children. They ought to do all in their power to promote the well-being and protection of these children. These children look to them for relief. We fail them when we fall asleep. We fail them when we do not promote their cause, but instead rather look out for our own. And God will hold us accountable!

Random Thought 9
A follow-up paper is coming out in June 2007, in similar vein, a further collection of random thoughts, on my concerns around Western Leadership, its Church, its Missionaries and its Money.

Conclusion
In closing, let me rewrite Ezekiel 34 in my own modern language. From an African mind. With an African voice. It's the great chapter on failed leadership and God's judgement:
“God's message, His words, came to me: My son, speak out against the leaders of Israel! Say to them: “This is what God wants to say to all of you: I am going to deal severely with all of you leaders in Israel, you who only take care of yourselves! Should you not rather be looking after all the people, especially the young ones? You end up drinking the best of the milk, you wear the best clothes and are nice and warm, and when you are hungry, the best food is prepared for you, but you don't care at all about the people, those who are my children! You do nothing to help the weak, especially children. You do nothing to provide medication for the sick. You do nothing to help those who have injured themselves through no fault of their own.

You do nothing to help those people who have lost their way and have become disillusioned. You spend no energy, you make no time to bring them back or even to go yourself to look for them. You act in a harsh and brutal way towards them. Because of you, the people became so despondent and disillusioned they just started drifting away! They lost their way and could not find you anywhere. They fell into the hands of wicked and exploitative people. They wandered all over, really lost. None of you leaders even bothered to look for them, no one cared to put a search party together.

Authored by Lorenzo A. Davids CEO and founder of The Urban Issues Agency, a registered company and charitable trust. Urban Issues seeks to serve the needs of the African City. The mission statement is: Influencing leaders, building values, and connecting people in order to create successful cities. Now listen to me, says God, listen carefully: A ssure as my name is God, I say to you today: Because you as a leader did not look after them but have knowingly allowed them to be attacked and killed by disease as well as by other bad people, and you had no interest to even leave the warmth of your comfortable homes to go and look for them, but rather stayed indoors in the comfort of your homes, I, as God say this to you: I am against you as a leader. You do not deserve to be a leader. I will make it my business to hold you accountable for every one of my people that die. I will take your comfortable job away from you, that job that has made you so overweight. I will ensure that you can no longer feed yourself with money that belongs to them, no longer live off the plight of my children. I will remove my people, my children from such leaders. These leaders will no longer be able to live off the money they make from the plight of these children.

I promise them, those who are my children that they will live in peace. I will make sure that all those leaders who behave like wild beasts, who rob and kill my children, will be removed from the land and the resources that they use. My children will live in safety in both the desert and the forest, with nothing to fear. I will make them happy. I will ensure that the rains come on time, and my children will be so happy when they see it! Fruit trees will carry fruit in abundance, enough for everyone. My children will really feel secure in the place where they live. When I destroy all the things that people have done to them to make them slaves of such bad and exploitative practices, when I set them free, oh boy, when they taste their freedom from slavery to bad leaders, they will know that I am God. No longer will bad governments rob them and illegally take things from them. No longer will bad leaders exploit them for their own selfish ends. I promise them that they will live in safety. No one will make them afraid, ever again. I will give them a great place to live in, a place that is world famous for the food it produces! No one will ever have to go hungry, ever again! No one will ever have to be embarrassed by the fact that they don't have food In their house! Such stories won't ever make international news again!

Ah, then my children will know that I, their God, am with them. In fact I am really close to them. And that they, in fact all of Israel, are regarded by me as my children. You are my children, and you will live and sustain yourself off all that I own. You are my children, you are associated with all the resources, which I have. And for those who still doubt it: You are real people!! And I am proud to be your God!

Authored by Lorenzo A. Davids CEO and founder of The Urban Issues Agency, a registered company and charitable trust. Urban Issues seeks to serve the needs of the African City. The mission statement is: Influencing leaders, building values, and connecting people in order to create successful cities.