[This EXCELLENT article mentions so many things which I, and other Whites in Africa have been saying for DECADES. The FACTS, from the World Bank and many major donor organisations match exactly what many of us “Colonial/Apartheid” Whites have been saying. The FACTS… are firmly on our side. I have highlighted, certain important paragraphs in this article below, showing what is known to donor organisations outside Africa.

Indeed, this article even mentions that there is a growing “neocolonial” mentality.

I had to laugh at the idea put forward by the Institute for Economic Affairs where they suggest privatising Africa and running it like a corporation. It is a great idea… but… this same idea was tried more than a century ago. The British South Africa Company used to own what is now Zimbabwe – and other territories. And yes… This suggestion… of “privatising Africa”… is actually the very basis of Colonialism! Not only that… but like I have said… Colonialism was a ROARING FINANCIAL SUCCESS and all of Africa was being developed at a pace it has never known before nor since.

So how do I think you can help Africa? I think… as per the suggestions below… that AID alone only makes things worse. The first step should be to cut all aid to Africa. That will force African countries to start watching their money and scarce resources like everyone else does. Black Africans are like spoiled children. They want, and want and want… but meantime they steal and waste and waste and steal… and the poor get poorer.

But it is good to see… that even people far away from Africa, are seeing more clearly, how their money is being WASTED here… just as we Whites have been saying for so long.

Mandela’s call for $50 billion will change nothing. The rich will steal and waste it… and Africa will be ever poorer.

Read this excellent article. It makes such a change to see a little bit of sanity once in a while. I hope there will be more in the years ahead. Jan]

Make naivety history
Rod Liddle

‘My friend Kevin says that it’s as if we’re all living with an elephant
standing in our living-rooms – but we just don’t see it!!’ – Richard
Curtis, author of The Vicar of Dibley.

So are you blind, or what? The elephant in your living-room to which
Richard’s friend Kevin refers is the monstrous grey pachyderm of Third
World debt. It is trumpeting its wicked halloos right over there by the
sideboard. Can you see it yet, you callous bastards? No? Hell, maybe it’s
hiding, then. Temperamental creatures, elephants.

What you will certainly have noticed, on the other side of the
living-room, on your television screens, is an endless procession of stars
and superstars and megastars and the fabulously rich and famous all
wringing their hands over the Third World debt burden, over all those poor
people in terribly impoverished countries who are forced, through the
iniquities of Western capitalism, to hand over their meagre earnings to
the evil international debt collectors. The procession is led by Bono, the
lead singer of the popular, if pompous, Irish rock group U2. Bono is much
fe(170)ªted by politicians and by the great and the good. He has audiences with
the Pope and the President of the USA and Blair and Brown, and he lectures
them on the urgent need to write off Third World debt. And, mystifyingly,
they listen to him, this rock singer. Now, more and more celebs and pseudo
or crypto celebs are getting in on the act demanding much the same thing.
They’ve banded together under the catchy headi
ng ‘Make Poverty History’ – because, of course, that’s exactly what would
happen if you wrote off all that debt: poverty would just disappear. But
let me hand you back to Mr Richard Curtis for a moment.

Richard’s epiphany came when he was unfortunate enough to be hit in the
stomach by that famous Boxing Day tsunami. He was on the beach in the
Maldives with his girlfriend when the wave – and then, or maybe
simultaneously, the thought – hit him. Do you know, he asks us all now,
that 30,000 people die needlessly every day? They die as a result of
poverty or through illnesses which we in the West would not so much as
lose a day of work over. It’s incredible, isn’t it?

‘Every day of the year we watch the news and they forget to add that item.
“Chelsea win again – oh, and 30,000 people died who didn’t have to.”

And so there’s a big campaign to increase overseas aid and slash or indeed
write off the debt burden. In order to emphasise their point, some
demonstrators wrapped a white bandage around Nelson’s Column. No, I’m not
sure what it signified, either.

But all of this is fair enough. We live in a democracy. Celebrities have
as much right to get exercised by things as plumbers, traffic wardens and
insurance loss-adjusters. The worrying thing is that somehow the
celebrities have succeeded in persuading everybody that they’re right and
it looks as if we are going to – at the least – reschedule the debts for
the world’s poorest countries, even more than we’ve rescheduled them
already. And we’re going to bung Africa loads more aid. If all this meant
that the poorest countries would end up much better off, or even a little
bit better off, then we might all sign up alongside Bono and Richard. But
quite a lot of people – not, so far as I’m aware, any members of the cast
of The Vicar of Dibley, but economists and people who work in the debt
industry – think it might make the poor countries substantially worse off.
And those views are not being heard, or listened to.

There are several moral conundrums in the issue of debt repayment. One
perspective is simply that it is wrong to force impoverished countries to
pay interest on loans – payments which frequently outstrip the entire
public expenditure budget of the countries concerned. That seems to me a
reasonable argument, if that were as far as it went. There is, of course,
the counter moral and practical point that countries (or people, or
companies) should pay what they owe or financial chaos will ensue. And the
further moral point that letting some countries off the hook is unfair on
those nations which have made strenuous efforts to pay off their debts.
(Incidentally, there seems to be a very strong correlation between
countries which meet their debt repayments and later, long-term strong
financial performance.)

But then there’s this. According to Brian Hammond of the OECD, cancelling
or rescheduling debt repayment would immediately affect the country’s
credit rating and, further, would leave that country vulnerable to higher
interest rates on future loans. This point seems to me almost
incontestable. Indonesia, which owes a total of $132 billion, has had its
credit rating hit three times in such a way. Frane(167)§oise Nicolas, Asia
expert at the French Institute of International Relations, suggests that
debt rescheduling would be beneficial to none of the countries hit by the
tsunami save for Sri Lanka (because of the nature of its debt).

Indeed, some of the world’s poorest countries – including Laos – are
vehemently opposed to rescheduling their debts for this very reason. But
maybe Bono and Dawn French haven’t visited Vientiane yet.

The United States treasury department has argued that countries have a
tendency to use debt relief as a platform to borrow more from
international financial institutions and that therefore debt relief
actually increases debt at an almost exponential level.

There is then the thorny question of governance. Even when it is not used
as a basis to borrow more money, debt relief rarely guarantees that a
country will begin to develop its economy, unless economic power is
redistributed from the incompetent or corrupt elites which incurred the
debt in the first place. In fact, to forgive the debt is effectively to
forgive the dictator and entrench him in power.

Nobody who knows a thing or two about Third World debt, be they on the
Left or the Right, thinks it quite as simple as Bono and the Vicar of
Dibley appear to believe. Even Clare Short, once the government’s most
persuasive advocate of overseas aid, is, at best, equivocal on the
subject. ‘Debt relief alone won’t help Africa,’ she said. ‘We need to
focus on conflict resolutions. If some debt owing to the World Bank is
written off, there is less money to give to others. There are some very
poor countries without debt – so you have to be careful about being fair.’

It is but a short hop, skip and jump from the huge elephant of Third World
debt in the living-room to the fairly large hippopotamus of overseas aid
hanging out by the breakfast bar – to use Richard’s friend Kevin’s
allusion one final time.

Of course, if aid were the answer, we would give it, as Richard and Bono
and their hangers-on so demand. But it isn’t. Specifically, it isn’t the
answer for Africa and most of those in the know reckon overseas aid has
been counter-productive. There are scores of reports which suggest that
the net impact of aid on Africa has been negative; that it has damaged the
capacity of each individual country to govern its own affairs, but allowed
despotic elites to borrow more money and wage war against their
neighbours.

Carol Lancaster has worked in the aid industry all her life, and she
served in the Carter administration. Believe me, she ain’t no hard-headed
supply side e(188)¼bermoppet. She has this to say: ‘Aid may have unintentionally
encouraged the misrule that led to collapse and civil conflict.’ And
here’s Michael Edwards, formerly of the Ford Foundation and the World
Bank: ‘Africa’s crisis is really one of governance,’ adding that almost
all public development in Africa is paid for by overseas aid. In fact the
1996 World Bank Report made this observation: ‘Almost every African
country has witnessed a systematic regression of capacity in the last 30
years. The majority had better capacity at independence than they now
possess.’

There have been so many reports running along the same lines that there’s
now quite a healthy, or unhealthy – depending upon your point of view –
neocolonialist movement taking root. In the same year as that World Bank
Report, Robert Wheelen from the Institute for Economic Affairs suggested a
different approach to helping the stricken continent: privatise all the
countries and allow Western multinational corporations to run them under a
21-year lease. Now how about starting a campaign for that, Bono?

Almost everybody is agreed that it is not the greedy, grasping and callous
West which is to blame, nor that aid is in any sense the answer. Conflict
resolution – or, to paraphrase Ms Short, stopping mutton-headed despots
spending vast sums of money attacking each other – and, as we’ve heard,
incompetent and corrupt rulers in general come rather nearer the top of
the list.

But even that won’t sort things out. In Africa a change of regime means
one of three things: a regime just as bad as the one before, or one a tiny
bit better, or one rather worse. The real problem is the way in which the
state – and politics – is perceived in Africa; as a means of accruing vast
amounts of personal wealth. And so the state is forever vulnerable to
attack by predatory, money-grabbing elites. More aid won’t solve that, or
even help to. Shove that up your elephant, Richard.

Source: The Spectator (UK)