Why are so many countries so badly governed?

I’m not going to answer this question in a 600-word blog – but it’s something that puzzles me

It can’t be that difficult to run a country properly. After all, we know that tight central control, imprisoning opponents and widespread kleptomania by the ruling elites isn’t a recipe for success. Whereas promoting development, opening the country to investment and tourism and encouraging education are the right sort of things to do. So, why are so many countries such utter hellholes?

Let’s start with Egypt. Mohamed Morsi became the first democratically elected president in the country’s history. He took power with a huge wave of public support and the US and EU offering billions in aid. So, what did he do? Encourage investment and tourism? No. Try to improve the lives of the majority of his people? No. Instead he perverted the constitution granting himself unlimited power to “protect the nation”, encouraged religious intolerance, persecuted minorities and put his Muslim Brotherhood cronies into positions where they could enrich themselves while condemning most of Egypt’s 81 million population to grinding poverty. What a disaster! What a lost opportunity! And this guy got his PhD in the US and even taught there for a while. So he should know better. I imagine the result of this idiot’s short-sightedness will be 10 years or more of a low-level civil war and maybe 100,000 dead as in Algeria.

Most of Africa is a hopeless basket case, where almost all the leaders think like the mad Robert Mugabe and act like the ludicrous (but now rich) Jacob Zuma. I doubt there’s an African leader with less than $1bn stashed away in offshore bank accounts. I imagine the average is somewhere between $10bn to $20BN. Why do they need to steal so much money? How much can they spend, eat, drink and screw? They could run their countries properly and still enrich themselves. But none of them seem to care. They just loot all they can and to hell with the poor sods they rule.

Here in Th**land, there’s a similar collapse of sensible government. Th**land has been a great Asian success story. It has a massive tourist industry and is one of the largest car-makers in the world. But now there’s competition from Cambodia, Vietnam and even Myanmar. So what does the current leader do? Strive to make her country a stable attractive place for foreign investment? Nope. Instead she risks provoking total political breakdown and a military coup by trying to pass an amnesty that would allow her brother – a former PM accused of looting billions while he was in power – to return to the country so he can carry on looting. The stock market and currency are in freefall and commentators are talking about the country committing “economic suicide”.  Why? How much more money does the guy need to steal? Why such poor government?

Then there’s Britain under idiots Blair, Brown and Balls. While Blair was gallivanting around the world setting up good contacts to enrich himself after he left office, Brown and Balls wrecked our economy. They inherited a wonderful situation – a growing economy with tax revenue exceeding spending. So, as they had committed to sticking to the previous Tory government’s spending plans for the first 2 years in office, they were able to pay down our national debt by almost £20bn a year. With rising taxes, they could have massively increased public spending wasting a trillion or so on hiring an extra million bureaucrats and hugely increasing public-sector salaries.  But no, they wanted to waste even more. So they let spending outstrip rising tax revenues (apologies for the quality of the images, but for some reason WordPress is acting up).

And as Mr Micawber should always remind us  “Annual income £400bn, annual expenditure £390bn, result happiness. Annual income £400bn, annual expenditure £410bn, result misery”

So, that’s what I really don’t understand – why are so many countries (including our own) so badly governed?