The NGO Bazaar: When Civil Society Becomes an Industry

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens regularly in the conference halls of Maiduguri, Abuja, and other places. Smartly dressed men and women gather around branded tables, sip bottled water, and speak in the polished grammar of international development. They talk about beneficiaries. They produce deliverables. They write reports. And when the day ends, they collect their sitting allowances and drive home in Toyota Hiluxes paid for by foreign donors, this is not the issue!

But, this is civil society in its truest form today, and increasingly, it looks less like a movement and more like a market.

Civil society, in its truest conception is the space between the state and the individual where citizens organize, advocate, and hold power accountable. From the anti-apartheid struggle to pro-democracy movements, civil society organizations, trade unions, student federations, civic associations, press freedom groups played a decisive role in shaping political outcomes. They drew their legitimacy from roots, not receipts. That tradition seems to be dead.

In over one and the half decades since the international community scaled up development aid to conflict-affected regions, the number of registered NGOs and civil society groups across sub-Saharan Africa has grown at a rate that no organic democratic energy can account for.

In Nigeria alone, tens of thousands of organisations are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission under the NGO bracket. In Borno State, a theatre of active insurgency, displacement, and humanitarian crisis, the proliferation has been dramatic. Where there is a crisis, there is funding. Where there is funding, there is an organisation. This is not coincidence. It is motivated by incentive with no visible impact to write home about especially in changing the lives of the downtrodden or the so-called benefiaries of their self-centered and benefits oriented initiatives.

The architecture of international humanitarian and development financing effectively creates a market for civil society. Donors, bilateral agencies, foundations, UN bodies require local implementing partners. Those partners must be formally registered, capable of writing proposals in English, and fluent in the vocabulary of logical frameworks and theories of change. What emerges is a civil society shaped not by the grievances of communities, but by the preferences of funders.
Service, or the Performance of Service.

Many organisations do genuine work. Feeding displaced persons. Training women in vocational skills. Providing psychosocial support to survivors of violence. That work is real, and in a place like Northeast Nigeria, it saves lives, no doubt. However, the point here is does the presence of these CSO actually impacted or shelved our people from the impact of conflict?

But alongside it runs a parallel economy of organisations that exist primarily to access the resources attached to crisis. The telltale signs are familiar to anyone who has worked in this space organisations that spring up precisely when a new funding window opens; executive directors who sit on so many boards alongside their family members of close associate care more about what they get in the bussiness than the communities they claim to serve, reports written to satisfy donor whims rather than inform decision-making, workshops that train the same hundred people on the same topics every year and call it capacity building much of what Nigerians refer to as ” Yahoo Yahoo” in a corporate form.

The communities these organisations claim to serve often cannot name them. The beneficiaries listed in quarterly reports sometimes did not know they were beneficiaries. The “consultations” happened in a hotel meeting room, with community leaders who were invited but not chosen.
This is not service. It is the performance of service.
Self-Interest wearing a noble face of saving the humanity.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to attribute this entirely to cynicism. Many CSO founders begin with genuine conviction. But institutions, like individuals, develop interests of their own. The interest of an organisation in its own survival is not inherently corrupt. It becomes a problem when survival displaces purpose.

When a civil society organisation spends more energy on donor relationship management than on community mobilisation, something has shifted. When it opposes policy that would address the root cause of the very problem it addresses because solving the problem would end its funding that is not civil society. That is a vested interest dressed in advocacy language.

There is also the quieter problem of elite capture. Civil society is disproportionately run by educated, English-speaking, urban professionals who share more cultural proximity with the international donors funding them than with the rural communities they report on. The structural gap between the organisation and its supposed constituency is vast but rarely acknowledged. In bottom line is community are still left behind in participation on projects that directly affects their lives.

Governments are accountable to voters, at least in theory. Businesses are accountable to the market. But who does civil society answer to? Formally, to their donors. And that is precisely the problem. Downward accountability to communities is voluntary, irregular, and often cosmetic. An organisation can fail its beneficiaries comprehensively and still receive a renewal grant, provided the reports are clean, the monitoring visits is well plannee and the relationship with theprograme officer is warm.

The accountability gap is genuine, however, it is not cynicism to raise these questions. The answer is not to dismiss civil society but to demand its reinvention.

Genuine civil society is community-rooted, not donor-responsive. It raises issues because communities raise them, not because a funding call has been announced. It speaks in the languages communities actually use not only reports in a well furnished English Language. It is comfortable being inconvenient to power, including donor power. And it measures success by change in people’s lives, not by the number of participants who signed attendance sheets.

The proliferation of civil society is not, in itself, the problem. When civil society becomes an end in itself, when the organisation becomes the cause, when the donor becomes the constituency, something essential has been lost. What remains may look like civil society. It may speak its language and wear its colours. But it serves, above all, itself.

Abdulsalam Alkali is a Journalist based in Maiduguri, and can be reach via Abdulsalamyusufalkali71@gmail.com