guest column:Reinfor Khumalo THE number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) sponsored by Western countries has increased excessively as neocolonialism intensifies. The strategy by Western countries to partition Africa in 1844 at the Berlin Conference in order for Africa to sustain the West at the expense of the former has only changed from being brutal to subtle. World institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations (UN) set up by developed countries are designed to impoverish Africa to benefit the West. NGOs together with other charitable funding, aid and so forth are advanced to African countries to lull them from an awareness to look after themselves. All aid from Western countries is designed to save the face of Western countries from the subtle exploitation they inflict on Africans through extracting their primary resources for virtually nothing in exchange. By this aid and by sponsoring Africans through NGOs, Western countries instil self-pity on the African continent and that enables self-condemnation on developing countries as they see retrogression in their economic development. This act portrays Western countries as little redeemers of Africa, yet they are the very initiators and perpetrators of the problem. No country on earth can develop economically through trading on its primary resources without any manufacturing. Western countries are encouraging and sponsoring African countries to do exactly that — concentrate and pride themselves in trading in primary resources and never manufacture anything. To cite an example, Zimbabwe because it has an abundance of cotton used to have many textile factories in Kadoma, the urban centre of cotton production and Bulawayo the industrial hub of the nation. At the moment, all those textile factories have disappeared because tonnes of bales of cheap clothing some of which used to be sold at dollar-for-two are frequently shipped from China and Europe for sale in this country to ensure that no textile industry takes off, but to encourage the export of cotton to textile industries in China and Europe. NGOs established in Africa have pseudo missions. They do not operate in a manner that is true to their mission statements of ensuring sustainability. If this mission was fulfilled, after so many years of the operations of NGOs in African countries, we could be having less or no NGOs on the continent. I challenge anybody to show me a single NGO that achieves its objectives of self-sustainability, even in this country. If any NGO responds that it fulfils its mission, I will ask why such an NGO still exists in the country. If it does exist, it means that it does not follow through its mission of providing sustainability to the programme. NGOs are proverbially giving people fish and not training people how to catch fish. For that matter, most NGOs that I have known in this country are required by their funding partners in Europe when reporting about deliverables to state how the funds that have been provided by the funding pa