David Craig, on March 20th, 2023Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday blog
I’ll start this blog with a couple of paragraphs about the foreign aid fiasco from my 2015 book THE GREAT CHARITY SCANDAL
In the last sixty years around $3 trillion has been donated by developed countries to help poorer countries. There have been some huge 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 seven hundred million people have been taken out of poverty in just thirty years.
But 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 the Second World War the US-sponsored Marshall Plan is generally credited for helping war-ravaged European countries to rebuild and become prosperous. So some people 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 $100 billion – $20 billion a year – being used to rebuild Europe after WWII. In the last fifty years, Africa has received over $1 trillion in aid. So, Africa received about the same every year – $20 billion a year – for fifty years that Europe received each year for just five years. Yet there’s little evidence that those countries getting the most aid have benefited from this aid and a quarter of Sub-Saharan countries, including some of the world’s greatest recipients of foreign aid, are now poorer than they were in 1960.
So let’s look at the effects of all the aid the West has given to Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan. This chart from Our World in Data shows the GDP per capita for the world, China, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan:
(left-click on charts, then left-click again to see more clearly)
The results should be more than obvious – while the world as a whole and China in particular have hugely improved the lives of several billion people, Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan have stagnated. Why? Probably because most of the hundreds of billions we have given these two areas have been wasted by stupidity and incompetence or just stolen by venal, kleptocrat politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies.
You’ll remember that there some serious floods in Pakistan last year. And, of course, we’re told it’s due to Climate Change. But what we’re not told is that when Pakistan became an independent country it had a forestation level of around 34%. By 2018, this had fallen to just 5.4%. Then there was a massive ‘plant one billion trees’ campaign launched in Pakistan. The result, by 2019 forestation levels fell further to 4.8% because most of the money for the tree planting was lost due to widespread corruption and incompetence. If you have a climate with one wet season and one dry season, it’s rather a good idea to have a reasonable level of forestation to help absorb the rain and protect the land during the wet season. I also imagine that trees are fairly useful in the dry season – they provide shade, keep moisture in the ground and prevent desertification. But our Pakistani friends are either too corrupt and/or too stupid to understand this.
This is just one tiny, insignificant example of how totally pointless it is giving our money to rotten, corrupt hell-holes like Pakistan. If you did a study – which I haven’t done – I think you’ll find that over 90% of all aid money we give to excrement-covered Pakistan gets wasted or stolen by incompetent and corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies.
As for Sub-Saharan Africa, countries like utterly corrupt, horrendously-misgoverned Zimbabwe and Congo and once prosperous but soon-to-be-Zimbabwified corrupt South Africa tell us all we need to know about Sub-Saharan Africa’s future – it doesn’t have one. All Sub-Saharan Africa has coming is more poverty, more misery, more hopelessness, more stupidity, more corruption. Here are just a few of African countries:
You’ll see which way once prosperous South Africa is heading under its incompetent, corrupt, kleptocrat ANC rulers.
The solution for most African countries is, of course, throwing out the garbage who run their countries and recolonising them with people from the West (irrespective of their skin colour) who could restore some semblance of civilisation and progress. But we’re not allowed to say that because the progressive, West-hating lefties claim that colonialism was an unmitigated disaster for Africa. In fact, the disaster really came when Africans took over the running, looting and ruination of their countries.
Anyway, China will soon be running any African country with mineral or agricultural resources. If the lefties think Western colonialism was bad, then they’re going to get a shock when they see the results of Chinese colonialism:
As for us in the West, it’s time for the West to give up on Sub-Saharan Africa and Pakistan. No amount of money will ever help them. Everything we give will either be wasted or stolen. It’s time to isolate Pakistan and Sub-Saharan Africa. It time to stop giving them our hundreds of billions. It’s time to ban all travel from them. It’s time to leave them to rot in a hell of their own making.
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I certainly agree with you that the aid has achieved very little for Africa except for the corrupt leaders who live a life of luxury. They should be the ones rotting in hell not the majority of Africans.
I don’t know whether Thomas Sowell has written extensively about the problems in Africa but I recall him pointing out that geography put the continent at a disadvantage in the past because it hasn’t allowed trade to develop. It is one huge plateau so although there are major rivers they fall over the edge of the plateau and are not navigable very far inland for trade. In contrast the rivers in Europe played a big role in trade and development of our civilisation. The other factor is that it has a very straight coastline and shallow seas and so harbours have not developed as elsewhere. I also think that Africa is very tribal and that has prevented co-operation. Africa should be viewed as a tragedy because it has huge resources, which China is taking advantage of, but that may not be bringing much benefit to the majority of Africans.
Aid to Africa is the equivalent of the welfare state that we have developed. It does not encourage people to take responsibility for themselves and just the same as welfare here, it results in corruption and benefits for people running the schemes. Aid is pouring into Africa but there are no sound economic plans in place to bring about long term improvement in living standards and a lot of it just gets syphoned off to the corrupt tribal leaders. The west could be making it worse by failing to monitor where the money goes. Just like the failure to monitor charities here.
The west looks at the floods in Pakistan and sees them as evidence of climate change which we must act more quickly to prevent. If Africa is to develop it is expected to do this with expensive and unreliable renewable energy. The west is as much to blame for the suffering of ordinary Africans as the African leaders.
The only way any country is going to advance and improve standards of living is through investment and trade. Corruption in Africa prevents investment. But we don’t have free competitive trade, we have controlled globalised trade that benefits the big corporations. As you say China has seen reduced poverty but this is at the expense of jobs in the west. Trump introduced protectionist measures to bring jobs back to the USA but this was paid for by taxation and does not work. The west believes it is entitled to a high standard of living and so the higher wages make it uncompetitive. Imagine what would happen in the west if Africa developed industry with cheap labour in the same way as China. We would see more jobs losses and it could have an impact on China as well.
These are all signs that the world is heading into chaos and it is because democracy is a complete sham. Voting does not give us any control over the government because we cannot change anything through voting. The governments are now effectively controlled through the influence of bankers and big corporations who are motivated only by profit. Business does not like competition but that is vital for the development of a healthy society and one that develops naturally through free competitive trade with people taking responsibility for their decisions. Decisions are now taken away from us and made by politicians controlled by elites in the form of an increasing welfare state – socialism in other words, which gives leaders a life of luxury with poverty for the rest.
I think there is an even bigger problem which Carroll Quigley identifies. He says there are three stages to our economic development. Firstly, essentials such as food, clothing and housing, health; secondly industrial products and then finally luxuries. Each stage has a limit to how much is needed, so for growth it has to move through each stage and the income for a country to move through each stage must increase. I do not see how it is possible for the world population to move through these stages and for us all the live in luxury. The result it produces is huge disparities in wealth. We have a situation in the UK where we are not self-sufficient in food and cannot house people. We have food banks, the government is providing welfare to support people in essentials and this allows those with more money to spend on luxuries such as entertainment and travel. Complete failure of this system must be on the horizon. I am sure the WEF recognises this is happening and thinks it can control it, but not to our advantage.
This article is along similar lines and has the benefit of having been written by someone who actually grew up in Africa.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924795/posts
Depopulation would solve all of these problems.
It is pretty obvious to me that the “pandemic” and its gene-therapy mRNA vaccinations, the “climate emergency”, feminisation and the negation of the white male, rewilding farmland, immigration/migration, polluting rivers with raw sewage, the resulting cost-of-living crisis, fifteen-minute cities, etc., all point to an overarching depopulation agenda.
But how many people were vaccinated in places like Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa? I expect not many. So, pulling any genetic trigger hidden in the vaccinations and boosters wouldn’t result in an effective population-controlling number of deaths. But the demise of the degenerating woke aid-dispensing West, determinately would.
What is clear is that the powers that be are evil, nihilistic and extremely stupid and so can be guaranteed not to use the ever-increasing powers of technology creatively or wisely. But Einstein’s relativity says that the past, present and future of space-time are one. That everything is connected. Which means that that the fate of this dark and evil state of affairs either works out well in the end or does not.
Here is an excellent must-watch video – Stop the Collapse! –
Richard Vobes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNeoFfn6i5w
Description – “There is a solution to the potential financial collapse. In 1914 the Bradbury Pound saved the British Economy from collapse. Rather than Central Bank Digital Currency and communist state control, a debt-free alternative is already available.”
Justin Walker is interviewed and he says the the coming financial collapse is deliberate by the criminal globalists in order to get rid of cash and bring in the digital currency. He explains the Bradbury Pound, Sovereign Money and the Bank for International Settlements that controls most of the world’s central banks. It meets in absolute secrecy.
There’s a video of Prof Michel Chossudovsky being interviewed which you can find on this link:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-most-serious-economic-and-social-crisis-in-world-history-michel-chossudovsky/5813213
He makes a point about Africa, which is they have been forced into taking GM modified seeds which they can’t afford because they have to buy the seeds every year. Nothing seems to work in the favour of Africa.
He makes a lot of points that have been discussed in this blog so is worth watching for other issues. He hasn’t any obvious solution except that we need to understand the logic of the crisis we face and how everything is linked. He mentions the protests in France but effectively says they won’t achieve much because they are too specific. To me they seem to be advancing the case for a new world order because they are protesting about having to work rather than living on the taxes of other workers. We have exactly the same problem here with the state pension scheme. The present system is not sustainable so protesting to keep it will make the problem worse.