The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty in the least developed countries of Africa.
These good intentions have been damaging the continent for the past 40 years.
I want to paint you a very different picture of Africa in the future. One with which you might not be quite so familiar.
If the industrialized nations really want to help the Africans, except for occasional humanitarian emergencies, they would wind-down and terminate aid altogether. Why? Because the countries that have received the most development aid are the ones that are in the worst shape now.
Despite the billions that have been poured into Africa, a lot of the continent remains poor, and more people are getting poorer. And as Einstein once said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.
The explanation for this paradox is twofold. Huge bureaucracies are financed with the aid money ~ voters are disconnected from their politicians, corruption and complacency are promoted ~ and Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. Additionally, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship they so desperately need.
As absurd as it may sound, development aid is one of the primary reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, most Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would feel hard done-by. Which is why they maintain that the world would ‘stop turning’ without overseas development assistance (O.D.A).
Take Kenya for an example ~ even with all that aid, people are still starving to death there each year. So someone should help them, right? But unless Kenya is going to be holding out its begging bowl forever, it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. But right now, whenever there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, the corrupt politicians instinctively cry out for more help rather than ask themselves what can we do?
This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program ~ which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of being, on the one hand, dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other, faced with unemployment where hunger actually to be eliminated. It’s only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help.
And it’s not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousand more tons of corn is shipped to Africa. Corn that predominantly comes from highly subsidized European and American farmers.
And at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians, who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market, where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices.
Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers then give up or ‘go under’ in the face of this pressure, Kenya will have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but brutally fatal cycle.
So you might ask, what if the World Food Program wound down their operation and eventually didn’t do anything ~ would the people of Africa starve?
I don’t think they would. In such a case, the Kenyans, for example, would be forced to initiate trade relations with Uganda or Tanzania, and buy their food there. This type of inter-state trade is vital for Africa. It would force them to improve their own infrastructure, while making national borders ~ drawn by the Europeans, by the way ~ more permeable. It would also force Africans to establish laws favoring a market economy.
