Remember those starving African babies we saved?

Like me, you’ve probably been giving money to charities for years to save starving African babies. And like me, you were probably bombarded over the Christmas period by appeals for money to (yup, you guessed it) save starving African babies.

So, why are African babies still starving?

When most people think of foreign aid, they tend to imagine brave aid workers rescuing people from earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, famines and other such natural disasters. But this emergency aid accounts for an extremely small part of the foreign aid money we give either directly to charities or through our taxes to charities and various relief agencies. Perhaps just $5bn to $6bn of the $135bn a year foreign aid is emergency aid. The other 95% of charity and aid money goes to what’s called ‘development aid’ – helping countries escape from poverty and putting them on the path to development.

In the last sixty years around $3trn has been donated by developed countries to help poorer countries. There have been some major successes – extreme poverty has been more than halved, diseases like river blindness and smallpox have been all but eradicated and millions of lives have been saved from famine and conflict. Moreover, many aid recipients have managed to break free from poverty and achieve rising levels of prosperity for their people. In the 1960s countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan had lower income per capita than some African countries. Now, thanks in part to aid, they have shot ahead of their African counterparts. South Korea for example, used to have a lower income per capita than Ghana. By 2013 South Korea’s income per capita at $33,189 was close to ten times that of Ghana at just $3,461. Though the country which has achieved most in improving the lot of its population is probably China where, with very little foreign aid at all, close to 700,000,000 people have been taken out of poverty in just 30 years. Meanwhile, in Africa close to 700,000,000 more people are living in poverty than 30 years ago. Ooops!

While most formerly poor Asian and some South American countries have made significant progress on the road to development and modernisation, too many countries, particularly in Africa, have stagnated or even become more impoverished over the last few decades in spite of being given more in aid than any other part of the world.

In Europe, after WWII the US-sponsored Marshall Plan is generally credited for helping war-ravaged European countries to rebuild and become prosperous. So some progressive holier-than-thou lefties have demanded a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’. There’s only one problem with this demand. Africa has already had its Marshall Plan – several times over.

In the last fifty years Africa has been given the equivalent of around ten Marshall Plans. In today’s money, the five-year European Marshall Plan saw about $100bn – $20bn a year – being used to rebuild Europe after WWII. In the last fifty years, Africa has received over $1trn in aid. So, Africa received about the same every year – $20bn a year – for fifty years that Europe received each year for just five years. Yet where are the new roads, the hospitals, the water supplies, the electricity networks and the prosperous middle classes that we’ve been paying for? They don’t exist. And almost all the money we’ve given to ‘starving’ Africa has been wasted or stolen by corrupt, incompetent multi-billionaireAfrican rulers.

What did China do right that Africa has failed to do?

China realised that the only way to take people out of poverty is to restrict population growth so that the economy grows faster than the number of people. In Africa all our money has achieved is massive and unsustainable population growth:

And when you have too many people you get two things: war as tribes fight over limited resources and mass emigration:

So, remember those starving African babies we saved? Millions of them are now on their way to Europe:

For over 50 years the charities and aid agencies have lied and lied and lied. Our money hasn’t helped Africa. What Africa needed wasn’t money, it was population control. What the charities and aid agencies have given us is massive predictable and avoidable human disaster that threatens not just Africa, but Europe as well.

Time to stop giving!!!!!