Africa to the rest of the world, "Get out!"
Africans to Bono: 'For God's sake please stop!'
Africa has never loomed as large in the popular imagination of the West as it does today, thanks to the Jeffrey Sachs-Bono ambition to Make Poverty History, and of course to Angelina Jolie and Madonna's commitment to adopting African babies.
Their message of hope is one that seems to deny Africans a role as agents of their own transformation. We can save Darfur. We can save Africans from disease. We can even save Africans from themselves. Africa can be saved if we just try hard enough.
For the thousands of foreign-educated lawyers, businessmen, and architects from the Diaspora who are leaving cushy corporate jobs to return home with their skills and their dynamism to open businesses, it's about creating wealth, not reducing poverty. Africa is not a victim in need of saving: it's a land of opportunity.
Kenyan economist James Shikwati, who in advance of the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles famously asked rich nations, "for God's sake, please just stop" giving Africa aid, thinks even misery is an opportunity.
We can fight malaria by distributing free mosquito nets, which may cost $10-$60 each by the time you get them down often impassable dirt roads. Or, as Shikwati suggests, we can train locals how to operate a business spraying homes with an insecticide that will keep them mosquito-free for six months at about $2 a family.
We can spend billions importing medication, or you can invest in local farms that grow the Artemisinin, a Chinese herb with potent anti-malarial properties, and the factories that process it.
We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.
Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.
The perverse result is that many of Africa's best and brightest become bureaucrats or NGO workers when they should be scientists or entrepreneurs. Which is why some are wondering: why not just take the aid money and invest in local business?
"If you make Africans rich, they'll be less poor," said Idriss Mohammed, a financier who wants to raise a private equity fund for Sub-Saharan Africa. "Forget making poverty history. I want to make Africans rich."
Audacious, blasphemous, foolhardy—possibly—but that philosophy is precisely how China has been able to lift millions out of poverty in only a few decades and become a magnet for foreign investment.
This is why China's seduction of Africa has been so complete. While Americans are pestering their leaders to Save Darfur–an unlikely prospect absent full-scale military intervention–the Chinese are busy building roads and hydroelectric power dams. China believes Africa is a huge economic opportunity and deals with Africa like a business partner. The Chinese see Africans the way many would like to see themselves.
Yet, while so much of the world fights to be free ... Americans fight to become dependent.
The United Socialist States of America
President Obama is close to completing his socialist revolution. Since coming to power last year, he has sought relentlessly to transform America. From his days as a student radical, Mr. Obama has been obsessed with smashing the traditional free-market system. Like most leftists, he thinks capitalism is the enemy.
"He was a Marxist-socialist in college," said John C. Drew, who knew Mr. Obama as a university student, in an interview. "He kept talking about the need to overthrow capitalism in favor of a working-class revolution."
One of Mr. Obama's favorite philosophers was Frantz Fanon, a post-colonial Marxist who championed Third World liberation movements. Fanon argued that the West - led by America - was based on racism, imperialism and the economic exploitation of the world's poor. The only remedy was authoritarian socialism and a massive redistribution of wealth from Western nations to developing countries.
Throughout his career, Mr. Obama has had radical associations. At Columbia University, while teaching constitutional law, he embraced postmodernist legal theory that maintains that the U.S. constitutional system presents an artificial veneer for liberty while actually advancing the economic interests of powerful white males. As a community organizer in Chicago, he studied and tried to mimic the activism of Saul Alinsky - a neo-Trotskyite who championed "permanent revolution." His longtime associates, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are supporters of Marxist liberation and share a deep hatred for the United States. They believe only fundamental, sweeping change can redeem America.
[Government-run health care] fosters a debilitating spirit of dependency that is fatal to a self-governing people. In short, it kills the self-reliance and individualism critical to a free-market democracy.For Mr. Obama, that is precisely the point. Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, laid out the Marxist blueprint that has been followed by the radical left since 1917. Lenin urged that any disaster should be exploited to "hasten the destruction ... of the capitalist class." The 2008 Great Recession brought Mr. Obama to power. He has been seizing this crisis in order to overthrow the old capitalist order.
Mr. Obama is relentlessly giving birth to a new nation: the United Socialist States of America - the U.S.S.A.
Marxist Andy Stern Calls for Destruction of American Society as We Know It
Americans, ask yourself real hard ... If you're a Democrat, is this really what you want? And if you're conservative, is a "winnable" candidate who talks a good game but adheres to Keynesian economics good enough?
Really? Are you sure about that?
Maybe we're all dependent on government now ... Our Savior!
H/T - Irish Cicero!
I recently read, I believe from a drudgereport link, that LIVEAID funds had obtained by Ethiopian warlords for guns. I donated to LIVEAID back in 2006/2007 through the "ONE" Organization, and I am regretting it even though it was a 1980's LIVE AID concert which raised funds that ultimately landed in the hands of warlords.
Context: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/live-aid-famine-cash-bought-guns-not-grain/19381649
Those who advocate a capitalist approach to Africa are right as far as what would be best for Africa. As for the Ms. Mohammed's desire to raise a Sub-Saharan African PE fund, I say, "Good Luck."
I'm totally for capitalism in Africa, just not with my money. I've watched the struggles of my colleagues who have energy projects in Africa, and hear them lament about the absolutely corrupt nature of the government officials involved in that sector of the economy. These projects, financed with foreign capital, are providing jobs and building infrastructure for these listless nations, yet their bureaucrats' need to get their taste of profits, to the point of obstructing sales, is why many investors stay far away from sub-saharan Africa.
I'm beginning to agree with the author James Jackson on the topic of Africa: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/why_africa_has_gone_to_hell/
Like the articles say, Africans need to be agents of their own destiny. There will come a time I believe in the not-so-distant future where we won't be able to piss away our wealth as we do now by supporting dependency abroad. It's tragic, but the world has always been filled with tragedy. Thinking we can bring the entire world to even the margin of our standard of living in the U.S. seems almost utopian.
Have you ever read one of Jim Rogers books about investing and his trips around the world? Invaluable books for multiple reasons, but you want to know where all that "aid" goes, he'll tell you ... to the crooked government and warlords.
"...Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions..." "...We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future..." great points! thanks very much for sharing.