Foreign Aid & Africa

Jody sent me a link to an old interview with James Shikwati. It is nice to hear someone agree with me.

SPIEGEL:

Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Of course, stopping the tsunami of aid is going to be an uphill battle. There are too many people getting rich off of it, and there are too many bleeding hearts who really believe it is the only way to help. There are also eminent people who preach aid as the only way out of poverty for poor countries. Just because he's a professor at Harvard doesn't mean he's right. Matter of fact, it makes him suspect in my book. Ivy league slimeball.

One of the weirdest stories about Africa was one I read about the poor in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. Nigeria, the king of the email scam. In most poor countries, the author wrote, the poor are often aimless, indolent, lacking in hope and purpose. But in Lagos he found people bustling about, working all kinds of menial jobs (carrying water bottles to construction workers for instance), earning a veritable pittance, but working, striving, and earning a living.

The world is a very strange place full of all kinds of people, most of whom disagree with either you or me or each other.