As I stated last week, we rely on words not just for communicating with others but also to identify and develop our own thinking. If we don’t have a word for it, it is difficult to think it. Words, then, can expand or limit our thinking depending on how we use them. Thus, misuse of words can lead to them losing their meaning and even our thinking.
That is why we have to stand up and defend words against those who think they can just play around with their meanings. On the one hand, we have Humpty Dumpty who believes that:
‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’ When he is asked ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’ He arrogantly replies that ‘The question is which is to be master–that’s all.’ The powerful can manipulate meanings as they wish.
This week and next week, I would like to look at a word which to me is key to both development and democracy but which is in danger of losing its meaning. The word is participation.
Originally, participation means: To take part in something, to share in something; to take part, be or become actively involved or share (in); and to be one of a group actively doing something.
In all these three definitions, participation is voluntary. It comes from the person himself or herself. More broadly, in relation to community participation, for example, this could mean contributing to a programme or activity in which you have no say (very basic participation), or actively being involved in and influencing the nature, implementation and outcome of a programme. At its highest level, participation becomes the key element of democracy.
READ MORE: The Power of Words, for Better or for Worse
The process of sharing decisions which affect one’s life and the life of the community in which one lives is the means by which democracy is built, and it is a standard against which democracies should be measured.
Whatever definition one gives to democracy—and I am suspicious of leaders who insist that democracy can mean whatever they choose—without the active and voluntary participation of the people, democracy atrophies and gives way to power exercised by those who fear participation.
They fear it because participation enables people to challenge existing power structures and directives imposed without their involvement. Community participation, for example, originally emerged as a challenge to impositions by outsiders.
Subversion
However, such an idea has been effectively subverted as the Humpty Dumptys of this world have learned how to make participation mean what they want it to mean. In Kiswahili, the favoured translation of the word ‘participation’ is ushirikishwaji. It is no longer a voluntary act. People are participated. Others participate them.
I was one of those who actively campaigned for ushiriki, voluntary participation, rather than ushirikishwaji, which prevailed for a while but was quickly adapted to ushiriki na ushirikishwaji, with much more emphasis on participating others than on people participating themselves, above all, in decision-making.
Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s founding president, once stated that: “People must be allowed to make their own decisions and therefore their own mistakes.”
READ MORE: In Tanzania, English Is Not Just a Language. It Is a Whole Religion
This is fine in theory, even if difficult in practice, but it carries deep implications. As Nyerere emphasised, people make mistakes and learn through those mistakes. Equally, the people do not have a monopoly on making mistakes. Leaders and experts also make mistakes.
And they tend to make more mistakes than the people directly affected, as, firstly, people know their own mistakes far better than anyone else, as they have to live with them, and secondly, they debate among themselves and, therefore, can adapt and rectify.
Mistakeholders?
But the outsider with power can come and pontificate without even being questioned. They claim they are the stakeholders, but we could also call them the mistakeholders, as they brook no participation, no alternative views that might challenge them to see things in a new light, or challenge the underlying interests in their pontification.
Thus, if you take the Swahili proverb, siri ya mtungi aijua kata, leaders, experts, externals are the kata, and they don’t actually have a deep knowledge, as they are only dipping in and out of the mtungi. They don’t reside there.
It is the water inside the mtungi, the people, that really know the siri, or secret, and when the kata fails to recognise that, we end up either with ‘white elephants,’ development projects that have been abandoned once the kata disappears, or, as often happens with externally developed projects, people are forced to participate in the use of that project for it not to become a white elephant.
The current directive from above that all buses have to start from a distant bus terminal because it is losing money, and those who invested in it, including hawkers, boda bodas, shops, etc are not getting a return on their investment is a good case in point.
READ MORE: Book Bans And Moral Panic in Tanzania: Is It Why They Want to Ban the Internet Too?
Other development practitioners have argued that when governments often build massive, expensive public markets or bus terminals on cheap, empty land outside the city, these frequently fail and sit empty because they ignore what people want and follow.
The users have not participated, but now they have to be participated even against their will. In planning, instead of forcing people to move to a new market or terminal, planners should interact with what the people have already organically created and work out solutions with them.
When that doesn’t happen, we have the current situation, where, in order to validate a decision which did not involve them, people are forced to spend serious portions of their income for no reason.
For example, I live in Kigamboni, where I used to be able to get on a bus nearby, with no addition to traffic congestion. But now, if I have a heavy bag, I have to spend as much on getting to the bus terminal as on the bus ticket itself.
My income is being sacrificed to the need of the town planners to make their massive expense pay. But if there had been some participation in decision-making, such a situation would never have arisen, and there would have been no public dissatisfaction either.
Mini Humpty Dumptys
The same applies inside communities where there are plenty of mini Humpty Dumptys who align themselves with the big Humpty Dumptys. Many programmes, government, donor or otherwise, believe that talking to the community leaders, usually older, usually more educated, usually better off, has fulfilled the need for participation.
READ MORE: Are Suits Suitable? A Meditation on Clothing
But the women, the young women and men, the poorest and most marginalised who will be most affected by whatever decision is made have not had any say, which again leads to dissatisfaction, even anger and resistance, as the interests of others in the community, the women, the young women and men and other marginalised groups are not taken into account.
I will give many examples of this in my next article, but I would like to end with the response of those who have not been able to participate meaningfully, or who have been participated against their will.
Tanzanians have their own way of expressing opposition in the face of enforced participation, called kubali yaishe. It is impossible to translate into English, but I guess it is quite similar to passive resistance or the Freirean concept of the culture of silence.
When being pressured to do this or that, people shout their agreement so that whoever is pressuring them feels happy and justified and goes away, leaving people to resume their lives as they wish.
Elections are a case in point, and the Humpty Dumptys of this world need to take note. Elections have meaning if people voluntarily participate in the belief that their vote counts.
Thus, if you look at how people voted when gaining independence, the long, long queues of people waiting to vote in the sun and in the rain were a huge example of participation, but that is no longer the case.
READ MORE: Parents Might Want Their Children to Be Taught in English. But Are Children?
When people feel that their participation in this exercise no longer has any meaning, that they have been participated, that they are being used as decoration to convince the outside world that something meaningful is happening, they stop participating, or they have to be participated.
The meaning of the word has changed, and that affects our claims to democracy and the development of us all.
