Africa has an addiction and it isn’t to coffee or cigarettes, it’s to foreign aid from Western governments and the best thing Africa could do for itself is to quit cold turkey. The best thing the West can do for Africa is to tie all future foreign aid to goalposts requiring decreases in corruption and increases in governmental transparency.
Africa since independence has been an unmitigated disaster. Almost every single African country now has a lower GDP per capita than it did at independence and in every single measure of quality of life African nations rank at the bottom of the pack. African governments have become rapacious predators with their people as the prey. African leaders embezzle enormous sums of money and spend it on estates in France and Malibu while their people live, on average, on less than $1.00 a day. Governments like Zimbabwe and Ethiopia regularly rig and steal elections and then shoot dead those who protest such blatant fraud while in states like Somalia central government has ceased to function at all.
The most recent and egregious example of disgustingly ostentatious spending by corrupt leaders and family of African dictators is the purchase, in cash, of a $35 million dollar estate in Malibu by the son of embattled Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Obiang. This purchase is all the more strange because the buyer, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, officially earns around $5000 a month. Equatorial Guinea has recently come into oil wealth with the discovery of large off-shore reserves and in what has become a depressingly familiar scene the money from the nation’s natural resources is flowing out of Africa and into bank accounts around the world. At the same time the people of Equatorial Guinea suffer on less than $1 a day.
And what do some in the West feel is the answer to these problems? To give Africa more money. Bono, whose heart I’m sure is in the right place, keeps bleating about the need to shovel yet more foreign aid into a continent than has received over $400 billion from the West in the past 40 years and has not a single damned thing to show for it.
This is madness and it’s time people started speaking out against their governments funneling their tax dollars into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt foreign rules like the President of Equatorial Guinea. I’ve lived in Africa and love Africa which is why I’m so concerned about the need to build a different paradigm in African-West relations which removes the colonizer-guilt complex from the relationship and thus the excuse for African leaders to keep bleeding the West of money for their own personal enrichment. Ordinary Africans don’t benefit from the aid Western governments pour into their countries - the only people who do are African leaders, their cliques and government functionaries along with Western bankers who receive a commission on the accounts they hold for these corrupt kleptocracies.
There are bright spots in Africa. Botswana, which has used the money earned from diamond mining well and enjoyed years of economic growth which has benefited all Botswanans, is one example. Uganda is another and South Africa is also an example of good governance and well-positioned policies which are designed to benefit all South Africans and not just those at the top.
Unfortunately there aren’t many more. Corruption, not Western bad behavior, is the single greatest enemy of the African people. Until there are mechanisms by which Western aid can be channeled directly to the people who it is designed to benefit, that is, citizens of Africa and not their amoral leaders, then all aid to Africa must be rethought. We’re not helping ordinary Africans by funding the real estate market in Malibu or the banking industry in Zurich - we’re causing more harm than if we gave no aid at all, and maybe that is the solution until the issue of top-to-bottom corruption in Africa is dealt with.
Former fattie Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has decided he wants to bring his brand of “Arkansas Conservatism” to the rest of America and today declared that he would be running for the Republican nomination for President.
Me.
If I had to tell President Bush one thing I would tell him that.
