ninme

London Calling - Moral pygmies

I am just a lowly blogger, wondering whether I should criticise Saint Bob or pass a comment on Africa at all. God knows, I am a racist Anglo who wants nothing more than to see black people suffer. I suppose I must have subconsciously rejoiced as Mugabe’s bulldozers buried the children in the shantytown, yesterday.

Something has gone badly wrong when the world’s most powerful nations are pleading with political non-entities for a straight-forward condemnation of criminality. I guess its an improvement on the slave trade. But it is still an abrogation of responsibility.

Two words from the moral giant Mandella would stop Mugabe’s madness. But he is strangely silent. I realise it’s churlish to criticise living Saints. But couldn’t Saint Bob and Saint Nelson issue a brief, joint communique?

Yeah, seriously. On the subject of the saintly being by and large completely useless, Peter and I watched Hotel Rwanda over the weekend. So the point of the movie is that the UN is useless and impotent and won’t do anything to help, enabling the death of a million people who trusted them, leaving the hero to do what he could all himself. So in the special features, Don Cheadle, our star, says he was so moved by making the movie he was inspired to help by getting involved with the UN.

Anyway, back to Africa’s current problems:

The Australian - Rockers deaf to aid realities, by Helen Hughes

All but five of the 40 countries initially selected for the scheme were in sub-Saharan Africa. They did not include Botswana and Mauritius, the two African countries with honest and prudent governments and a 30-year record of growth and rising living standards. Among the HIPCs, Ghana and Uganda are regarded as having successfully fulfilled their conditionality obligations. Ghana does have democratic elections and some growth, but it has 88 ministers and deputy ministers - all with a car, secretary, other staff and other perquisites - heading a vast bureaucracy. Not much government expenditure percolates to health and education in the villages…

The evidence that aid flows are inversely related to growth and development is incontrovertible.

The countries with the highest aid per capita (including Pacific countries) have had the slowest growth. But, in political terms, forgiving debt that they are not servicing from African countries is much easier than reducing the subsidies that western Europe, the US and Japan give their farmers at a cost of $300 billion annually to developing countries. So is increasing the volume of aid to $100 billion a year by Western taxpayers.

Yup. This is going to end real well. Just eight days!