12
July 20005
Thomas Sowell
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The
official declarations coming out of the G8 meetings in Scotland, as well as the
raucous demonstrations surrounding those meetings, talk about saving Africa.
But, looking back over the decades and generations, Africa has been
"saved" so many times that you have to wonder why it still needs
saving.
Desperate and tragic conditions
afflict millions in Africa today and any humane person would like to help. But
the repeated failures of previous help ought to make us at least question the
particular manner in which Africa can be helped.
"Forgiveness" of foreign
debts is always high on the agenda of those on the political left.
At any given moment, this would of
course free up money that African governments could spend to help relieve their
people's distress — assuming that this is what they would spend it for. But why
would anyone think that promoting irresponsible government borrowing by
periodically "forgiving" their debts is going to help African countries
in the long run?
As for the people of Africa, they
have to survive in the short run in order to get to the long run. So emergency
aid for emergency conditions makes far more sense than long-run "foreign
aid" programs with an almost unbroken track record of failure, not only in
Africa but around the world.
Years ago, a courageous economist
in India pointed out that, however helpful it was to receive food from abroad
during India's famines, the long-run policy of continually giving wheat to
India was just reducing the ability of Indian farmers to grow wheat and sell it
for a price that would cover their costs.
Eventually the policy of
continually dumping wheat into India was stopped and today India produces so
much wheat that it has been able to send some to Africa to deal with African
famines.
Promoting dependency and
irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any
more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the
bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see
themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.
Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the
most tragic geographic handicaps of any region of the world. Navigable
waterways, which have been crucial to the development of nations and of
cultures, are severely limited in most of Africa. Poor soil and inadequate and
undependable rainfall patterns shrink the possibilities still further.
Ideologues love to think of
African poverty as caused by "exploitation" on the part of Western
countries. But, with a few notable exceptions, Africa has had little to be
exploited. Even at the height of European imperialism, there was far less
foreign trade or foreign investment in the whole vast continent of Africa than
in a little country like Belgium or Switzerland.
In more recent times, so-called
"foreign aid" has left many monuments of futility in Africa, from
rusting machinery and the ruins of many projects to cows sent from Europe that
keeled over in the African heat.
With all its handicaps, Africa
used to feed itself and even export agricultural produce to Europe. In some of
the more geographically favored parts of sub-Saharan Africa, iron was smelted
thousands of years ago.
During the first two decades after
African nations gained their independence in the 1960s, one sub-Saharan nation
that stood out with its economic prosperity and political stability amid
economic disasters and social catastrophes among its neighbors was the Ivory
Coast under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Yet neither the Ivory Coast nor
its leader attracted nearly as much attention, much less adulation, as was
showered on Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or other
big-name African leaders who led their countries into ruin.
The Ivory Coast in those days
relied on markets instead of the kind of policies and rhetoric that the
intelligentsia favored. When its policies changed, it became just another
African basket case.
Today, too many people in the West
continue to see Africa as an outlet for the visions and policies of the left
that have failed in the West and are even more certain to fail in Africa.