Just a small snippet from the Torygraph on the new proposals for aid to Africa. (And yes, I will be returning to Jim and Own’s comments later today…sorry, but real work has got in the way of blogging pleasure.)
Its main remedy for the continent’s ills is thus a
depressing throwback to the 1960s school of aid and development – that
Africa should get an extra £13 billion of aid by 2010 and another £13
billion after that.
Bitter experience suggests
that even if these huge sums were multiplied tenfold, they would do
little good. For Africa received £220 billion of aid between 1960 and
1997, the equivalent of six Marshall Plans, and finished up even poorer
than before.
With the possible exception of
President Robert Mugabe, everyone now accepts that Africa’s central
problem is not a shortage of aid but "bad governance". Put simply, the
continent is filled with repressive and incompetent regimes whose chief
pastime is grand larceny.
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