Tough love for Africa
on February 8, 2008
Category: Governance, The World, Africa
The Atlanticist : Africa needs tough love, not more aid poured down a rat hole:
There is not a single state on the African continent that would not today be better off administered under a colonial regime, as Hong Kong was by Britain. If the West genuinely cared about Africa and wanted to make a difference rather than more charity, it would send soldiers to overthrow corrupt and despotic regimes, and constitutional law experts and administrators to architect and operate governing legal and economic systems there patterned after our own.
Like it did in Iraq? I kind of followed this line of thought, clipping my mouth shut with clothes pegs at places, so I wouldn’t yell out obscenities in front of my children. And I went through without a single f-word. I think the writer does identify the problem most of the time:
The African continent is a patchwork quilt of artificially drawn and imposed borders, established, for the most part, by European colonial powers.
Apart from the wars being fought now in Africa, the ones that the colonial west interrupted (while the west itself was free to fight its own murderous wars and get them over with — effectively establishing its borders without African or other outside interference) — but I was saying, apart from these wars, frontiers on the African continent were established entirely by the colonial master and mistress. It is inaccurate therefore to say for the most part. Nevertheless, the writer identifies there a seed for conflict.
Monetary aid is poison. It does not encourage more responsible government. […] A deluge of aid will not fix what ails Africa.
Of course it doesn’t, and it won’t. Whoever said it did or will? But, again, the writer has identified part of the problem. Here’s the thing, as an African, I want the west out, not in, for several reasons. The writer mentions the first one. The second one is unfair trade practices from which Africa is getting thinner and its western trade partners fatter. The third one is that the west messed Africa up once, it’s time it stopped. Got on the bus home. Knowing that “legal and economic systems […] patterned after our own,” as the writer so shamelessly puts it, seem to the west to be the best because ours were uprooted and incapacitated by the same west.
Lack of access to Western markets for products in which African producers enjoy comparative advantage such as sugar, cotton and textiles is a huge problem. Western import restrictions and tariffs stymie wealth creation in Africa.
There again, the writer concurs with me. It is of course a huge problem. And the solution? “American and European markets should be unilaterally opened to Africa goods, with protective regimes for Western producers being discarded.” Why not stop there, and also provide logical solutions for the other problems so nicely identified? Why talk of colonial regimes in Africa administered by America and Britain? We’re quite tired, as a people, of fighting the west off. We want to be left alone.
That’s all we’ve ever wanted, really, even as the west scrambled for chunks of our land. But guess what… instead of getting out, the west is getting in deeper: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7026197.stm . I think somebody took your advice, dear writer. The shame of it is that it’s a waste of money, and we’ll just have to fight and kick the west out again, albeit with an even more messed up continent.
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3 Comments so far
1. Beauty
February 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Stripping out the fact that the Atlanticist blog was written with its self serving benefit in mind, I believe that thinking outside of the box will be our salvation. Africa has been considered as a zoo (how else would you describe Bob, Bono & Bill shows?) for so long that radical change will probably be our only way out.
One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation. The US, EU & China use us and abuse us in every way possible but their collaborators (our governments) are ineffective, inefficient and irrelevant. They must be made accountable. How? See the Atlanticist blog again.
May I remind you that Africa and the rest of the world runs on institutional failures. Schools that can’t teach, police that can’t enforce the law, judiciary that cannot deliver justice, inefficient/non existent logistics systems; but there are exceptions. It is these tiny windows that led us into diaspora, open it wider for a little bit more light in Africa.
Our countries, no matter how bad/well they are run, they are only as good as the people who live and work in them. We must find a little bit of ethics, morality and deep concern about order and relationships in a more productive and constructive way of life. Proposing Iraqi style terror might not be so bad after all.
2. Rethabile
February 10th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Beauty,
Nyet. Proposing Iraqi style terror is bad all the way through. It means that the terrorist who invades my country “to straighten it out,” inherently believes that (s)he or their way is superior. And I disagree. It just means (s)he has the gun, and knows how to shoot with it.
The reason Africa was colonised in the first place, next to greed and hegemony, is that the coloniser thought (s)he was helping educate, civilise, and so on, exactly what Mr Grover is re-suggesting. Instead, things were broken, beliefs, customs, administrations, families, and so on.
The Atlanticist blog post flashes a lot of figures and percentages, but I could easily come up with my own figures and percentages for an argument against the west. What counts here, if I dare insist, isn’t mathematics, but reason, and that unidentifiable thing that makes us different from animals.
3. Beauty
February 16th, 2008 at 11:42 am
“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind - computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind — creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people — poets, artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers — will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind.
I embraced a potentially useful stranger in order to get a result for our selfish interests and our future will be about reason and mathematics. Those figures and percentages are relevant baselines that will help to map that future.
The past is full of sorrows and to continue in the same path spells disasters yet seen anywhere. How will the 3rd world become part of of a free future?
Our people in Africa have been subjected to servitude and as such hails the next person that brings the cola. How can we turn that around in order live free? How do we stop our leaders using our national treasuries as their personal piggy banks? How do we stop the big banks help our looters stash our stolen monies? How do we stop gas flaring in our back yards?
The answers to these questions have become too complex and refining them is a reason for adding the Iraqi style terror which may either way turn out to be outcome in Africa. Downtrodden people always find a way out of any bad deal.