THE FUTILITY OF...
THROWING MONEY AT AFRICA

By: Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Tony Blair’s new crusade to eliminate poverty in Africa makes as much sense as trying to eliminate poverty in the U.K. Even in America we still have poverty, despite the famous War Against Poverty launched by the Johnson administration and fought by an army of bureaucrats. After throwing billions of dollars at "poverty," the result has been the creation of an entrenched and well-fattened bureaucracy dedicated to the preservation of its own perks and the perpetuity of the war.

Why does poverty exist even in the richest nations? It has something to do with human nature and character. There are those people in all societies who do not have the desire, the capability, or ambition to raise themselves out of poverty. In Africa, despite all of the advances in agricultural technology made in the last two hundred years, you find rural Africans using the most primitive methods of farming used for thousands of years to eke out a subsistence living.

When you look at the refugees in Darfur, you see an entire society that has lived in huts, surviving at the edge of starvation, in which little of the modern world has had much of an influence. The Sudanese government has done nothing to lift its people into the modern age, mainly because of its thirteenth-century Islamic mindset. If it wasn’t for oil, Saudi Arabia would be as poor as Darfur.

And, of course, African leaders blame all of their problems on the West. They were all liberated from their colonial overlords in the 1960s, and forty-five years later they are worse off than they were under colonial rule. If the colonial powers must share the blame, it is because they educated the future African leaders to adopt socialism as their economic system. The London School of Economics taught the Africans the glories of Fabian Socialism. The Fabians used the gradual method to take over England, but the Africans didn’t have to use the gradual method. They could impose socialism immediately. According to Dr. George Ayittey, a native of Ghana, who advocates free markets and the rule of law for Africa:

[The] socialist transformation required the institution of excessive legislative regulations and controls. All unoccupied land was appropriated by the government. Many foreign companies were nationalized, and numerous state-owned enterprises were established….Bewildering arrays of restrictions were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, wages, trade unions, prices, rents, interest rates and the like.

Thus, the mechanisms of wealth-creation were thwarted in favor of governmental and bureaucratic aggrandizement. Thus, if you wanted to get somewhere in that kind of society, you got a job as a bureaucrat so that you could partake of the benevolence of the Western powers. If you wanted to become an entrepreneur, a capitalist, you had to leave the country and go to Europe or America. Thus, the most intelligent, ambitious, and creative Africans have gone West. That represents a brain-drain the continent could hardly afford.