I suppose I'll start with some job news. I'm still waiting for the next call. If I don't receive a call by end of business today, I'll be sending a follow-up email to see where things are. These guys got me excited to go back to work, so I'm not going to be giving up easily.
Since I've been waiting at home for a phone call, I've watched a lot more TV than usual. I keep catching people begging for more aid to Africa, partiularly Darfur. Just this morning I saw Mia Farrow asking people for their hard earned money to send to Africa. Ok, my next comment is going to piss off some people, but hear me out.
Giving aid to Africa is for fucking idiots.
Now don't get me wrong, I think the desire to help the people of Africa is a noble one. The thing is that aid isn't helping, and is making it worse for the most part. Do you realize that we've given over 1.45
trillion dollars to Africa. Where has it gone? According to my calculation, that's over $1,700 for every man, woman, and child on the African continent.
Where has it gone?
For the most part, charitable aid to Africa comes in 3 forms; money, medicine, and food. We give it to the governments there to divide as they see best. Which is what they do, in a way. They think the best way to handle it is to keep it all for themselves. The estimate is that 90-95% of aid never makes it to the people. That's not just the money either since medical supplies and food are easy to sell on the world market. So now these dictatorships are rich with all of our aid money. So what do they do with it?
First of all, they live in complete luxury. They have immense estates, with the most expensive cars. Trump would be jealous with how some of these guys live. Second, they stash some away for a rainy day, like when they get ousted in a military coup because the generals want to be earning the kind of cash that the leader is currently pulling down. They estimate that over $100 billion is held in Swiss bank accounts of African leaders. The third thing they do is to buy weapons for their military so they can keep their citizens from rising up in revolt. This guarantees that their population will remain poor, and the funds will keep flowing.
So let's look at the real problems in Africa. The biggest challenge is that people have no rights. In most countries, the government claim ownership of everything. They control business and more importantly, they control every piece of real estate in the country. If people don't own the land, they see no reason to improve it. So the people are using seriously outdated techniques and equipment to farm the land. They don't farm any more than what they need to survive since the government takes the extra, and since they have poor land management the crops fail on a regular basis.
Why don't the people rise up and boot out these leeches they have as leaders? Well, they don't enjoy the rights we do here. They have no freedom of speech, so they can be censored, jailed, tortured, and killed for speaking out against the government. They have no freedom to bear arms, so they can't protect themselves from the government and can't revolt to start up a just government. A government should always be afraid of it's people, not vice versa.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough. We have to stop thinking short term and start fixing problems in the long term. You can't put a band-aid on a gunshot wound thinking that it will fix it. The reason why problem in Africa hasn't been fixed is because the real solution is ugly and cold. Cut off aid to any country that mishandles any of it, and start supporting democratic rebel groups in that country with arms. I know this guarantees that there will be famine and war in that country, but hasn't that always been the price of freedom?
Comments welcome and encouraged as always. Bonus points for the first to name the song the title comes from.
