Page 113 - Afrika Must Unite

98 AFRICA MUST UNITE

U.S.O .M ., U.N.T.A.B., F.A.O., W .H .O ., but since we are
having to compete with so many other bidders, we have had to
apply also to private quarters. Even there, the demands are too
heavy to leave an ample supply of best quality people. In order
to secure even the minimum of well-qualified technicians we are
having to offer terms of service which make development for us
disproportionately costly. M oney which we could otherwise
spend on more basic requirements has to go, for example, into
housing and other amenities for foreign personnel. These would
be matters for private provision if we were able to recruit the
same people locally. They are, moreover, requirements which
create precedents that our own people demand when they come
to take over posts formerly held by expatriates. We are trying to
establish more realistic standards of service for our local people
in government employ, though we have met a certain amount of
resistance.
I do appreciate that in a market where many are competing,
we have to make our terms of service to expatriates as inviting as
we can, even though they place an additional strain upon our
far from unlimited resources. Yet I feela strong sense of injustice
in that we lately-colonial countries are forced to bear such addi­
tional burdens through the fact of that very backwardness in
which we were kept by the countries which have made their
industrial progress to a large extent out of us. It is these same
imperialist powers who are reaping another harvest today by
providing the machinery, equipment, management, consultants
and personnel which are the requisites of our reconstruction.
Capital investment, too, we have to seek abroad. There has
not been developed in Africa even that bourgeois accumulation
of \vealth based upon landholding, trade, commerce and in­
dustry which has arisen to some extent in some unadvanced
countries in Asia, let alone the accumulation out of which Europe
financed its industrial revolution. This I think can be attributed
in a measure to the fact that the British banking firms which
operated here were essentially banks of exchange and looked
unfavourably upon the dispensing of credit to African entre­
preneurs. This attitude was upheld by the fact that our system of
land tenure does not encompass individual ownership offreehold.
W hen it came to the question of the provision of collateral against