Will the “Developing World” Ever Develop?

It is one of the liberal media’s favorite code phrases: “developing world” or “developing nation”—by which they actually mean a perpetually retarded Third World nation that, despite massive foreign aid, has been unable to transform itself into anything approaching the First World.

The United Nations Development Program, for example, has warned that the economic growth rate of Africa is so slow that at current rates, it will take 150 years to reach the goals which were set for the year 2000.

That cold fact contradicts repeated attempts by the controlled media to pretend that Africa is “coming out” of foreign aid toward full economic growth.

Most of Africa, despite massive mineral reserves and fertile land, remains reliant on foreign aid for even the most basic of services.

More than $500 billion in foreign aid—the equivalent of four Marshall Aid plans—was pumped into Africa between 1960 and 1997.

The more aid poured into Africa, the lower its standard of living. Per capita GDP of Africans living south of the Sahara declined at an average annual rate of 0.59 percent between 1975 and 2000.

Over that period, per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity declined from $1,770 in constant 1995 international dollars to $1,479.

Tanzania’s ill-conceived socialist experiment, Ujaama, for example, received much Western support. Western aid donors, particularly in Scandinavia, gave their enthusiastic backing to Ujaama, pouring an estimated $10 billion into Tanzania over a period of 20 years.

Yet, between 1973 and 1988, Tanzania’s economy contracted at an average rate of 0.5 percent a year, and average personal consumption declined by 43 percent. Tanzania’s largely agricultural economy remains devastated.

Some 36 million Tanzanians are attempting to live on an average annual per capita income of $290—among the lowest in the world.

Other African countries that received much aid between 1960 and 1995—Somalia, Liberia, and Zaire – slid into virtual anarchy.

The budgets of Ghana and Uganda are more than 50 percent aid dependent.

Much of the aid received was simply looted. Speaking at the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, in December 2003, the former British secretary of state for international development, Lynda Chalker, noted that 40 percent of the wealth created in Africa is invested outside the continent.

In July 2005, Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission revealed that a succession of military dictators stole or squandered $500 billion—equivalent to all Western aid to Africa over the past four decades.

Even when the loot is recovered, it is quickly re-looted. The Nigerian state has recovered $983 million of the loot of the former president, General Sani Abacha, and his henchmen. But the Senate Public Accounts Committee found only $12 million of the recovered loot in the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Foreign aid given to support reform in Africa has not been successful either. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported that: “Despite many years of policy reform, barely any country in the region has successfully completed its adjustment program with a return to sustained growth. Indeed, the path from adjustment to improved performance is, at best, a rough one and, at worst, a disappointing dead-end.

The World Bank evaluated the performance of 29 African countries to which it had provided more than $20 billion in “structural adjustment” loans between 1981 and 1991.

The bank’s report, Adjustment Lending in Africa, concluded that the failure rate was in excess of 80 percent. Even more insightfully, the World Bank concluded that “no African country has achieved a sound macro-economic policy stance.”

Uganda depends on foreign aid for 58 percent of its budget. There are growing concerns about its democracy, defense spending, and rampant corruption. Yet, in December 1999, Uganda’s aid donors announced the country’s biggest-ever loan of $2.2 billion – with no visible strings attached.

Ethiopia, the scene of massive aid following the 1984 manmade famine, remains one of the poorest countries on the planet. About a third of the population earn less than $1 a day and it received $504m from the UK government in 2011/12, making it the biggest recipient of bilateral aid from the country that year.

Observers can only wonder how long it must be before reality pulls the scales away from blind liberal eyes, so that the real cause of the on-going disaster can be laid bare, discussed and acted upon.

http://newobserveronline.com/will-the-developing-world-ever-develop/

The Reality of Black Africa: Nothing Like Liberals Would Have Westerners Believe

The leftist controlled media continually portrays black Africa as a “developing” continent with dramatic growth, potential, and “freedom” where the yoke of colonialism has been thrown off.

The reality is far different. It is a continent of the utmost backwardness, degradation, misery, violence, and primitive savagery—and the only few “bright spots” are where either a tiny handful of Europeans keep the show on the road, or where their legacy has not yet been totally subsumed.

Nigeria is a case in point. Widely touted as one of Africa’s giants, it even formally offered white farmers from Zimbabwe a new start after Robert Mugabe’s thugs seized their land early in 2000.

But, as a rare article in the Economist has revealed, even that “ray of sunshine” has turned into a typical African farce. According to the article, seven years “after 18 white Zimbabwean farmers settled on a chunk of land in Nasawara state at the invitation of the then governor, only one family is still there. All the others have given up in despair.”

Bruce Spain, aged 35, and his father Colin, 66, “together with their doughty wives and a pair of toddlers, are hanging on—but only just.”

Nigeria lies in a fertile part of Africa. Its economy is supposed to be one of the largest on the continent (its population, estimated at 163 million and growing, certainly is). So why was the Zimbabwean farming expedition unsuccessful?

The answer is contained, probably inadvertently, in the Economist article: Crop yields were dismal, mainly due to poor-quality seed and fertiliser. Spares were hard to get when machinery broke down.

“Until good seed is available and the theft factor is dealt with there will be very little commercial farming in Nigeria,” the older Mr Spain said.

Why is there no “good seed” or fertilizer? And what’s all that about the “theft factor?”

But that’s not all, as the Economist dryly continues:

The litany of problems seems endless. “There’s just no organised marketing here,” says the younger Mr Spain. “No marketing boards, nothing—in Nigeria you’re on your own. In Zimbabwe you knew what your pre-planting price was—and the government guaranteed to buy what you grew. There are no support structures…In Zimbabwe you’d send a soil sample to the fertiliser company and they’d tell you what sort would be best. There’s nothing like that here.”

The Spains have no mains electricity, no piped water, no land-line, no trained labour force, no one handy with basic accountancy, no available research facilities, no easy access to agricultural data. Roads are lousy. Theft is endemic.

The article does not explain why these services were available in (pre-farm seizure) Zimbabwe. Perhaps it never occurred to the journalist, or perhaps it did, and was a topic preferred ignored.

The answer, of course, is that there were still a small number of Europeans keeping a basic system running, and they could rely on regular supplies from neighbouring South Africa, which still has several million whites left.

And when they go…..

http://newobserveronline.com/the-reality-of-black-africa-nothing-like-liberals-would-have-westerners-believe/

Why Africa Has Gone To Hell

by James Jackson

White Zimbabweans used to tell a joke—what is the difference between a tourist and a racist? The answer—about a week.

Few seem to joke any more. Indeed, the last time anyone laughed out there was over the memorable headline “BANANA CHARGED WITH SODOMY” (relating to the Reverend Canaan Banana and his alleged proclivities). Zimbabwe was just the latest African state to squander its potential, to swap civil society for civil strife and pile high its corpses. Then the wrecking virus moves on and a fresh spasm of violence erupts elsewhere. Congo, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, even Kenya. Take your pick, for it is the essence of Africa, the recurring A-Z of horror. And as surely as Nelson Mandela took those steps from captivity to freedom, his own country will doubtless shuffle into chaos and ruin.

Mark my words. One day it will be the turn of South Africa to revert to type, its farms that lie wasted and its towns that are battle zones, its dreams and expectations that lie rotting on the veldt. That is the way of things. Africa rarely surprises, it simply continues to appal.

When interviewed on BBC Radio, the legendary South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela spoke of the 350-year struggle for freedom by blacks in South Africa. The man might play his trumpet like a dream, but he talks arrant nonsense. What he has bought into is a false narrative that rewrites history and plays upon post-colonial liberal angst. The construct is as follows: white, inglorious and bad; black, noble and good; empire, bad; independence, good; the west, bad; the African, good. Forgotten in all this is that while Europeans were settling and spreading from the Cape, the psychopathic Shaka Zulu was employing his impi to crush everyone—including the Xhosa—in his path, and the Xhosa were themselves busy slaughtering Bushmen and Hottentots. Yet it is the whites who take the rap, for it was they who won the skirmishes along the Fish and Blood Rivers and who eventually gained the prize.

What suffers is the truth, and—of course—Africa. We are so cowed by the moist-eyed mantras of the left and the oath-laden platitudes of Bono and Geldof, we are forced to accept collective responsibility for the bloody mess that is now Africa. It paralyses us while excusing the black continent and its rulers.

Whenever I hear people agitate for the freezing of Third World debt, I want to shout aloud for the freezing of those myriad overseas bank accounts held by black African leaders (President Mobutu of Zaire alone is believed to have squirreled away well over $10 billion).

Whenever apartheid is held up as a blueprint for evil, I want to mention Bokassa snacking on human remains, Amin clogging a hydro-electric dam with floating corpses, the President of Equatorial Guinea crucifying victims along the roadway from his airport.

Whenever slavery is dredged up, I want to remind everyone the Arabs were there before us, the native Ashanti and others were no slouches at the game, and it remains extant in places like the Ivory Coast.

Whenever I hear the Aids pandemic somehow blamed on western indifference, I want to point to the African native practice of dry sex, the hobby-like prevalence of rape and the clumps of despotic black leaders who deny a link between the disease and HIV and who block the provision of antiretrovirals.

And whenever Africans bleat of imperialism and colonialism, I want to campaign for the demolition of every road, college, and hospital we ever built to let them start again. It is time they governed themselves. Yet few play the victim card quite so expertly as black Africans; few are quite so gullible as the white liberal-left.

“On the eve of this millennium, Nelson Mandela and friends lit candles mapping the shape of their continent and declared the Twenty-first Century would belong to Africa. A pity that for every one Mandela there are over a hundred Robert Mugabes.”
So Britain had an empire and Britain did slavery. Boo hoo. Deal with it. Move on. Slavery ended here over two hundred years ago. More recently, there were tens of millions of innocents enslaved or killed in Europe by the twin industrialised evils of Nazism and Stalinism. My own first cousins—twin brothers aged sixteen—died down a Soviet salt mine. I need no lecture on eggplants and neck-irons. Most of us are descendents of both oppressors and oppressed; most of us get over it. Mind you, I am tempted by thoughts of compensation from Scandinavia for the wickedness of its Viking raids and its slaving-hub on the Liffe. As for the 1066 invasion of England by William the Bastard…

The white man’s burden is guilt over Africa (the black man’s is sentimentality), and we are blind for it. We have tipped hundreds of billions of aid-dollars into Africa without first ensuring proper governance. We encourage NGOs and food-parcels and have built a culture of dependency. We shy away from making criticism, tiptoe around the crassness of the African Union and flinch at every anti-western jibe. The result is a free-for-all for every syphilitic black despot and his coterie of family functionaries.

Africa casts a long and toxic shadow across our consciousness. It is patronised and allowed to underperform, so too its distant black diaspora. A black London pupil is excluded from his school, not because he is lazy, stupid or disruptive, but because that school is apparently racist; a black youth is pulled over by the police, not because black males commit over eighty percent of street crime, but because the authorities are somehow corrupted by prejudice.

Thus the tale continues. Excuse is everywhere and a sense of responsibility nowhere. You will rarely find either a black national leader in Africa or a black community leader in the west prepared to put up his hands and say It is our problem, our fault. Those who look to Africa for their roots, role-models and inspiration are worshipping false gods. And like all false gods, the feet are of clay, the snouts long and designed for the trough, and the torture-cells generally well-equipped.

I once met the son of a Liberian government minister and asked if he had seen video-footage of his former president Samuel Doe being tortured to death. ‘Of course’, he replied with a smile. ‘Everyone has’. They cut off the ears of Doe and force-fed them to him. His successor, the warlord Charles Taylor, was elected in a landslide result using the campaign slogan He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him. Nice people. Liberia was founded and colonised by black Americans to demonstrate what slave stock could achieve. They certainly showed us. Forgive my heretical belief that had a black instead of a white tribe earlier come to dominate South Africa, its opponents would not have been banished to Robben island. They would have been butchered and buried there.

When asked about the problem of Africa, Harold Macmillan suggested building a high wall around the continent and every century or so removing a brick to check on progress. I suspect that over entire millennia, the view would prove bleak and unvarying.

On the eve of this millennium, Nelson Mandela and friends lit candles mapping the shape of their continent and declared the Twenty-first Century would belong to Africa. Whatever. Meantime, the vast natural resources have been frittered and agricultural production since independence has halved. A pity that for every one Mandela there are over a hundred Robert Mugabes.

Visiting a state in west Africa a few years ago, I wandered onto a beach and marvelled at the golden sands and at the sunlight catching on the Atlantic surf. It allowed me to forget for a moment the local news that day of soldiers seizing a schoolboy and pitching him head-first into an operating cement-machine. Almost forget. Then I spotted a group of villagers beating a stray dog to death for their sport. A metaphor of sorts for all that is wrong, another link in a word-association chain that goes something like Famine… Drought… Overpopulation… Deforestation… Conflict… Barbarism… Cruelty… Machetes… Child Soldiers… Massacres… Diamonds… Warlords…Tyranny… Corruption… Despair… Disease… Aids… Africa.

Africa remains the heart of darkness.

Africa is hell.




Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights. http://takimag.com/article/why_africa_has_gone_to_hell/print#disqus_thread#ixzz1isD99qFm

http://takimag.com/article/why_africa_has_gone_to_hell/print#disqus_thread