Africa
- Thread starter raebhoop
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"The problem with Africa is the africans",I have interesting discussions with Raymond who is from Sierra Leone. The first statement is from him, his view is that corruption and a selfish short sighted attitude is the cause of the woes.
He's given me many examples of why he holds that view.
He's given me many examples of why he holds that view.
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You could send a million tonnes of food over there and it will only get worse.
We need to send a tonne or two of condoms along with some leaflets telling them to stop shaggin' the shyte out of each other and the place should start to get better.
Every second, 163 African babies are born.
Ok, I just made that up, lol
We need to send a tonne or two of condoms along with some leaflets telling them to stop shaggin' the shyte out of each other and the place should start to get better.
Every second, 163 African babies are born.
Ok, I just made that up, lol
AronSearle said:
raebhoop said:
I don't know what you should call China's almost unique brand of state controlled capitalism.
I imagine it's a pretty miserable existence for most Chinese people but you can't deny that it's making some of them very rich indeed.AronSearle also said:
Got it in one! For every child you save from starvation today, there'll be another one in ten years time and one more a year thereafter.
and also said:
They fixed it by limiting their citizens to one baby per couple - and the upshot was that huge numbers of baby girls were left to die.
That's just one example of the Chinese dark side. I predicted at the time that they would pay a terrible price when a largely male generation reached puberty but I guess they dealt with that in an equally brutal fashion.joinerjohn said:
That doesn't surprise me at all. It's what starving people do. It reminds me of an old saying originally from Albania, "Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow".
pred said:
In the absence of a welfare state, your children are your pension and the more you have the better. We can't lay all the blame for the population explosion at Pope Benedict's door - though he certainly isn't helping.
raebhoop also said:
The presenter of an old TV series, "The Road to Riches" asked the same question. Somewhere in Africa they grew cashew nuts, a potentially valuable crop but only once the shells are off. They had a nut shelling factory. It was standing idle with a large group of Africans hanging around hoping to get a job. Problem: Not one of them had the slightest idea how to make this factory operate as a business. The nuts were sold at a knock down price to a factory in India. Pretty much said it all.
P
peaps2
Since the 70s china have gone through economic reforms but are still run by a communist political system.
Corruption has lead to the uneven distribution of wealth something the Chinese have said they are to reform.
China is a communist run state.
Corruption has lead to the uneven distribution of wealth something the Chinese have said they are to reform.
China is a communist run state.
Im not clever enough to know what caused africas problem, im certainly not clever enough to know how to solve it but, but im peeved that my little country chooses to spend so much of our money on them, we have enough problems here that need sorted, our resourses and finances are reducing rapidly and we need to solve our problems before we give to external problems, i would have no problem spending £1 GB when we have sorted out our own issues, and if that isnt a PC comment i couldnt care less, cause its my opinion and not racist or bigoted in any way, cause i wouldnt give a penny to any man from any country of any colour or religion until we were fixed here
it's the only way, have copy & paste below as this was mentioned a few months ago
I have a friend who did volunteer work for the Red Cross and helped to provide water wells in Africa, one of the water pump stopped working, so they went back to carry on fetching the normal way for a quite a long distance, went on investigate and all it was a nut/bolt missing which was on the ground which was very simple to do to get it working again. The biggest problem is they need to be educated and learn how to do these simple problem solving, for some reason they don't understand and they forever pinching his tools! It's not their fault that they don't understand but it's hard work sometime
But have adopted the Economic Capitalist principles rather well.
Whilst we may not agree with many of the ways the State control the people over there, it does give the country a semblance of civil order.
Upwards of 1.2 Billion people takes some looking after.
As for corruption, i think we only need look as far as that s**t hole we call London to see we have no moral grounds to lecture others.
Correction = Something the Chinese government controlled media say they are to reform.
The Chinese have private businesses, and millionaires, you think a system in which total control is maintained this happens by accident?
The communism is a façade.
It's state-directed capitalism
http://www.economist.com/node/18330120
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126835124
P
peaps2
In Marxist theory, pure communism is a specific stage of historical development that inevitably emerges from the development of the productive forces that leads to a superabundance of material wealth, allowing for distribution based on need and social relations based on freely associated individuals.[1][2] The exact definition of communism varies, and it is often mistakenly, in general political discourse, used interchangeably with socialism; however, Marxist theory contends that socialism is just a transitional stage on the road to communism. Leninism adds to Marxism the notion of a vanguard party to lead the proletarian revolution and to secure all political power after the revolution for the working class, for the development of universal class consciousness and worker participation, in a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
Is it just me or is communism the most sloppily used word in political science?
That's pretty much how I've always understood Marx' and Lenin's vision, and a grand one it was too but with a fatal flaw. For the most part, the working class didn't want political power; they only wanted justice and fair wages and they set about getting them in the only way they could, by withdrawing their labour. If Stalin and Mao were communists, my nephew is an anthropoid!
But I digresse - and this thread is in danger of going off topic.
peaps2 said:
That's pretty much how I've always understood Marx' and Lenin's vision, and a grand one it was too but with a fatal flaw.
For the most part, the working class didn't want political power; they only wanted justice and fair wages and they set about getting them in the only way they could, by withdrawing their labour. If Stalin and Mao were communists, my nephew is an anthropoid!But I digresse - and this thread is in danger of going off topic.
I've been travelling all over Africa on business for 25 years and I've a few thoughts on the subject, as you might expect!
One of the biggest problems is the "Big Man" complex where you are not respected unless you are ostentatiously wealthy with cars, cellphones, mistresses and wads of cash. Most Africans can't afford this lifestyle so the temptation to steal is overwhelming. Add short-term thinking into the mix and you can see why in Nigeria for example everything operates on bribes with no consideration for the long-term effect; you have senators who are paying themselves several million dollars a month from the public purse, grabbing what they can for now with no thought for the consequences because they don't know where they will be tomorrow. Public contracts go not to the most efficient bidder but to the bidder who offers the biggest kickback. A good example of short termism is the almost complete lack of any electricity supply in Nigeria: the reason is that ministers get fat from kickbacks from the importing of generators so they have no reason to set up any programme of investment in a public supply, with a ten-year investment cycle in power generation they will almost certainly be out of their jobs by the time it might be possible to profit from the investment.
Religion: African Christians and Muslims have a fatalistic belief in the will of God, meaning that any misfortune is merely accepted as God's will with no attempt to rectify the problem. Religion also has a detrimental effect on development; in northern Nigeria polio is thriving because the mallams in the mosques tell people not to let their children be inoculated because the inoculation is a US-funded plot to sterilise them and stop them having kids.
Lack of education is the principle hindrance to development; intellectual flight means that anybody with a decent brain leaves Africa and takes their expertise elsewhere. This affects white South Africans as much as black; much though I like white South Africans I find them mentally lazy and almost childishly naive at times.
There are a few rays of hope: presently Lagos state has a good governor called Fashola who is thought not to be chopping all the money. Consequently some money is being invested and it's remarkable what a difference this makes when a city is as bad as Lagos once was - the streets are being cleaned and there is street lighting, traffic lights and investment in new roads and bridges meaning that life is less awful than it was ten years ago. This kind of public investment attracts private money so there are new hotels, new malls and restaurants appearing in Lagos, all of which has a knock-on effect on the local economy.
In South Africa the premier of Western Cape province, which includes Cape Town, is a white protestant Afrikaaner named Helen Zille who runs the state by the book and consequently Cape Town is a city which works; there's reasonable security, investment and companies are happy to remain in the city meaning there's employment, people in the streets and cash in circulation.
There are other small pockets of hope, I haven't been there since the war but I've heard that Rwanda is being run correctly by the president and that consequently there's security and money and the country is doing well. If Rwanda can improve the level of education it will be on the road to recovery. Meanwhile people say that one of neighbouring Uganda's biggest problems is the general lack of education caused by former governments' fear of creating an educated middle class because these are the kind of people who object to malpractice and cause political instability.
Obviously these are just a few random thought on the subject; anybody who travels to Africa has their own ideas and the problem is massively complex.
One of the biggest problems is the "Big Man" complex where you are not respected unless you are ostentatiously wealthy with cars, cellphones, mistresses and wads of cash. Most Africans can't afford this lifestyle so the temptation to steal is overwhelming. Add short-term thinking into the mix and you can see why in Nigeria for example everything operates on bribes with no consideration for the long-term effect; you have senators who are paying themselves several million dollars a month from the public purse, grabbing what they can for now with no thought for the consequences because they don't know where they will be tomorrow. Public contracts go not to the most efficient bidder but to the bidder who offers the biggest kickback. A good example of short termism is the almost complete lack of any electricity supply in Nigeria: the reason is that ministers get fat from kickbacks from the importing of generators so they have no reason to set up any programme of investment in a public supply, with a ten-year investment cycle in power generation they will almost certainly be out of their jobs by the time it might be possible to profit from the investment.
Religion: African Christians and Muslims have a fatalistic belief in the will of God, meaning that any misfortune is merely accepted as God's will with no attempt to rectify the problem. Religion also has a detrimental effect on development; in northern Nigeria polio is thriving because the mallams in the mosques tell people not to let their children be inoculated because the inoculation is a US-funded plot to sterilise them and stop them having kids.
Lack of education is the principle hindrance to development; intellectual flight means that anybody with a decent brain leaves Africa and takes their expertise elsewhere. This affects white South Africans as much as black; much though I like white South Africans I find them mentally lazy and almost childishly naive at times.
There are a few rays of hope: presently Lagos state has a good governor called Fashola who is thought not to be chopping all the money. Consequently some money is being invested and it's remarkable what a difference this makes when a city is as bad as Lagos once was - the streets are being cleaned and there is street lighting, traffic lights and investment in new roads and bridges meaning that life is less awful than it was ten years ago. This kind of public investment attracts private money so there are new hotels, new malls and restaurants appearing in Lagos, all of which has a knock-on effect on the local economy.
In South Africa the premier of Western Cape province, which includes Cape Town, is a white protestant Afrikaaner named Helen Zille who runs the state by the book and consequently Cape Town is a city which works; there's reasonable security, investment and companies are happy to remain in the city meaning there's employment, people in the streets and cash in circulation.
There are other small pockets of hope, I haven't been there since the war but I've heard that Rwanda is being run correctly by the president and that consequently there's security and money and the country is doing well. If Rwanda can improve the level of education it will be on the road to recovery. Meanwhile people say that one of neighbouring Uganda's biggest problems is the general lack of education caused by former governments' fear of creating an educated middle class because these are the kind of people who object to malpractice and cause political instability.
Obviously these are just a few random thought on the subject; anybody who travels to Africa has their own ideas and the problem is massively complex.
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