Twenty-five years ago, on “9/11”—November 9th in European date-notation—the Berlin Wall opened and, it seemed, everything changed. Freedom was no longer just an aspiration across much of Europe but a rising reality. The transformation was so profound that it is now hard to remember the bad old days of communist oppression and Soviet dominance, when peoples all across Central Europe lacked hope for the future and feared the secret police.
A quarter century beyond the settlement of the 75-year European civil war (1914-89), what is the balance of achievement following that remarkable overturning of European history and of much of global politics and economics? There is much good, but also some bad, and history did not “come to an end.”
The Soviet empires—internal and external—are both gone, and so is the Cold War, which was the most dangerous time in all of history, when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. The world escaped, although as the Duke of Wellington said about the Battle of Waterloo: It was a damn close-run thing.
Other good things happened, notably a definitive answer to the 120-year-old question: “What do we do about Germany?” It became unified, was anchored to the West, and, with the wisdom of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, it surrounded itself with NATO and the EU and sank the Deutschmark in the Euro. Thus Germany is again becoming economically the top nation in Central Europe, but there is no valid basis for fearing a German national menace.
Meanwhile, President George H.W. Bush led in working to create a “Europe whole and free” and at peace. The US stayed in Europe, NATO was not wrapped up but has continued to keep European history pacified. Central Europe was taken off the geopolitical chessboard with the Partnership for Peace Program and, for many countries, NATO and EU membership. Ukraine was encouraged in its Western, democratic vocation, but without first being pulled into a Western alliance system that could be perceived as a challenge to Russian Federation. (The fact that a succession of Ukrainian governments largely funked the task is another matter).
The first President Bush, followed by Bill Clinton, also tried to prevent the growth of revanchism in Russia, to avoid what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, whose punitive features against Germany helped produce Hitler. This effort, too, went awry, as leaders in the G. W. Bush and then Barack Obama administrations forgot this central lesson and heaped fuel on the fire of Russian nationalism that was set alight by Vladimir Putin. Maybe the result (in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine) would have been the same, under Putin or any other Russian leader who appealed to his people’s sense of lost position and prestige, but the US failure to take account of legitimate Russian concerns certainly did not help.
There have been other negatives, unintended byproducts of success following the Berlin Wall’s opening. Many West European countries wisely shifted limited security resources from military spending not needed after the Cold War to economic support for Central Europe—beginning with the Federal Republic of Germany’s investment of trillions of Euros in the old East Germany. But the US did not. Today in the United States, non-military instruments are starved while it maintains the mightiest military in history at a time where there is no “peer competitor.” Thus, while priding itself on being the “indispensable nation,” the US was caught short by the Ebola epidemic and has done so much less in other countries compared to the good it could do and the security it could promote in the broadest sense of that term.
The US did not totally ignore Will Roger’s warning: “When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you’ve got to have been looking for it.” But after our “9/11,” the US did overdo Afghanistan by trying to get its political and social cultures to leapfrog centuries of development; and the US then committed one of the worse follies in American history, by invading Iraq for no good reason. The results have been more than 5,000 US servicemen and women dead, thousands more wounded, little promise in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and more than 3 trillion dollars of treasure wasted when it could have been used to refurbish the American homeland and create a more solid and lasting basis for US power and influence.
It is doubtful that either excess—in Afghanistan or Iraq—would have been possible during the Cold War, when the United States had to be worried about a superpower competitor, prepared to promote its own, contending interests. The lesson for today has to be that, just because it is possible to do something, it is not necessarily wise or prudent to do it.
So chto delat? As Lenin asked, “What is to be done?” Here are some ideas, mostly for America:
- Reassess what we do in the outside world. What is needed for our security and that of friends and allies, and what can be “given a pass” or handed off to others (including our European friends)? Where is it wiser, in our own interests, to stand apart rather than to become engaged?
- Recruit a first-class team of people in the Obama administration who know how to “think strategically.” This essential quality began to decline near the end of the Cold War and continues on a steep downward trajectory. With the collapse of the Cold War’s organizing principle, it seemed that less strategic thinking was needed. Yet it has been just the reverse, when so much is in play, there are so many variables, the US cannot “do it all,” it cannot count on the American people to support all foreign ventures, and it thus faces a greater need to set priorities and to make choices than it did when the Soviet threat could justify a wide range of courses of action and involvement. At the same time, press the think-tank community to do the same, instead of continuing to serve largely as means of building political consensus to implement an agreed foreign policy—when there is no clarity of strategy purpose and methodology around which to build a consensus to meet America’s future needs.
- Put more money into USAID, change the balance of funding between military and non-military instruments from the current 13:1 to a ratio that will better enable us to promote our interests and values, and recreate the United States Information Agency, one of our best “unsecret weapons” that was foolishly scrapped.
- Recommit the US to being a European power. Washington’s interest in NATO dropped to an all-time low before Mr. Putin stirred up interest by his misbehavior in Ukraine. Now that interest is sinking again, and the number of people in Washington fully engaged in European security or in other aspects of US engagement in Europe is declining radically. The Pentagon, meanwhile, is charged with implementing decisions of last September’s NATO summit in Wales, in part to reassure Central European allies wary of Russia, but it is doling out only peanuts for people in and out of government to think through what has to be done.
- Challenge the Europeans allies to do even more for security on the continent and in selected places beyond—not through increased defense spending in each allied country to at least 2% of GDP, an American obsession left over from the Cold War. Most of that 2% should go to non-military political and economic instruments to help integrate Central Europe more fully in Europe, to do more in Africa, and to get on with the critical work of building a solid Ukrainian economy. Also tell the Ukrainians to dismantle their kleptocracy and tell Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, either to restore his country’s democracy or both NATO and the EU will send it packing.
- Start work on a long-term security structure for the Persian Gulf and other parts of the Middle East. End the illusion that getting rid of the Assad regime in Syria is the answer to anything—it would likely only produce more regional chaos and a Shi’a bloodbath. Meanwhile, put the Saudis and others who have turned a blind eye to the export of terrorism and the fostering of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, to stop immediately the flow from their countries of Islamist ideas, money, and arms, as the price of continued good relations with the US.
More needs to be done to deal effectively with the requirements of a world newly created in the wake of the end of the Cold War’s certainties, a product of the Berlin wall’s opening, but this is enough to be getting on with. It befits America’s role as a great power, a champion of freedom, a protector of those most in need of protecting, a beacon of hope. It is what we expect in terms of leadership by our president and Congress. It would be a fitting commemoration of what a lot of courageous people did across Central Europe a quarter century ago. Can we be less committed and far-sighted than they were?
]]>Noor Wali Shinwarai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, Khaled Noor remembers his father, a [...]]]>
Noor Wali Shinwarai writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS. By distributing the testimonies of survivors of war through print and radio, Killid strives for greater public awareness about people’s hopes and claims for justice, reconciliation and peace across Afghanistan. In this testimony, Khaled Noor remembers his father, a colonel in the Afghan army, who was imprisoned and killed for trying to restore republican rule.
In 1978, Eid al-Adha, one of the two main Muslim holidays, fell on a winter day, Khaled Noor remembers – perhaps less because of the festivities than the events that unfolded the night before.
As families prepared for the holiday, some 200 Afghan army officers gathered in great secrecy in the Asmar Division in Kunar province to discuss ways to restore the republic of Mohammed Daud Khan, Afghanistan’s first president, who had been overthrown in a coup d’etat by Noor Mohammad Taraki only six months before.
The division had an emergency airport, four residential blocks for army officers, many tanks, military vehicles and thousands of soldiers. But their attempt to restore republican rule, would be short-lived.
Lawyer Khaled Noor sometimes wishes “Our father would walk through the door and give us a hug”. Credit: Killid
Rise and fall
The leadership of the division was in the hands of the highly decorated Colonel Ghulam Dastageer Khan, son of the leader of the Shinwari tribe – and Khaled Noor’s father.
Years before, in 1964, he had been given the onerous task of marking out the international border with China in the Pamir mountains – a two-year endeavor that earned him awards from both countries, followed by an appointment as assistant of Sardar Wali Khan, the son-in-law of the Afghan king.
In 1973, Daud Khan overthrew the last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, and founded the republic of Afghanistan.
By the time the communist party seized power through a coup in 1978, Khaled Noor’s father had become a colonel under Daud Khan.
By cutting off communications between the presidential palace and Kandahar, the communists initially managed to keep the colonel and other friends of the president in the dark about the fall of the leader.
When 200 of them finally came together back at the Asmar Division, their attempt to restore the president was in vain — Taraki soon had them arrested, imprisoned and tortured horribly.
Daud Khan’s assassination the same year was to plunge the country into decades of bloodshed and turmoil.
Colonel Khan’s children – Khaled Noor, Sardar Khan, Bilal, Spinghar and Mirwais – were still young when their father was arrested that wintery night before Eid al-Adha.
There was great excitement in the house over the coming feast. Suddenly there was a great banging on the front door. A military commander loyal to their father had come with bad news. “He told me, ‘Your father and all his friends have been arrested,’” Noor remembers.
“Though we were small, we knew that arrest meant death — the arrested never returned to their family. Our family and all the other families did not wear new clothes that Eid.”
The family was forced to vacate their house. Their things were put in a truck, and taken to Jalalabad. Khaled Noor says since they had no relatives in the city they went to their village in Haska Mena, Nangarhar. Their relatives saved the family from starving by sharing wheat flour and other food that they grew.
In Kabul, Hafizullah Amin, the second leftist president, overthrew Taraki. A military man came to their house with a letter for their mother.
Badly tortured
Writing from prison, Khan said that all his friends were killed in front of his eyes. “He said he was opposed to the communists, and he would never obey them,” Noor says. “He told my elder brother to look after the family.”
The man who brought the letter said their father was in Jalalabad jail and the family went to visit the prison laden with gifts for their father. But he had been tortured a lot and he was very weak, his son remembers.
In 1980, the year Babrak Karmal became the third communist president of Afghanistan, Colonel Khan died in prison.
The family was in mourning when the Soviets bombarded their village in Haska Mena district.
They fled across the border to Hango in Pakistan, where the two eldest brothers worked and the other siblings, including Khaled Noor, went to school.
Now, Mirwais, the youngest, is the head of a school in Kabul. Khaled Noor, meanwhile, is a lawyer working in a communications company in Kabul. “Life is good for us, “ he says. “But we still wish our father would walk through the door, and give us a hug.”
]]>via Tom Dispatch
First came the hullaballoo over the “Mosque at Ground Zero.” Then there was Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, grabbing headlines as he promoted “International Burn-a-Koran Day.” Most recently, we have an American posting a slanderous anti-Muslim video on the Internet [...]]]>
via Tom Dispatch
First came the hullaballoo over the “Mosque at Ground Zero.” Then there was Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida, grabbing headlines as he promoted “International Burn-a-Koran Day.” Most recently, we have an American posting a slanderous anti-Muslim video on the Internet with all the ensuing turmoil.
Throughout, the official U.S. position has remained fixed: the United States government condemns Islamophobia. Americans respect Islam as a religion of peace. Incidents suggesting otherwise are the work of a tiny minority — whackos, hatemongers, and publicity-seekers. Among Muslims from Benghazi to Islamabad, the argument has proven to be a tough sell.
And not without reason: although it might be comforting to dismiss anti-Islamic outbursts in the U.S. as the work of a few fanatics, the picture is actually far more complicated. Those complications in turn help explain why religion, once considered a foreign policy asset, has in recent years become a net liability.
Let’s begin with a brief history lesson. From the late 1940s to the late 1980s, when Communism provided the overarching ideological rationale for American globalism, religion figured prominently as a theme of U.S. foreign policy. Communist antipathy toward religion helped invest the Cold War foreign policy consensus with its remarkable durability. That Communists were godless sufficed to place them beyond the pale. For many Americans, the Cold War derived its moral clarity from the conviction that here was a contest pitting the God-fearing against the God-denying. Since we were on God’s side, it appeared axiomatic that God should repay the compliment.
From time to time during the decades when anti-Communism provided so much of the animating spirit of U.S. policy, Judeo-Christian strategists in Washington (not necessarily believers themselves), drawing on the theologically correct proposition that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the same God, sought to enlist Muslims, sometimes of fundamentalist persuasions, in the cause of opposing the godless. One especially notable example was the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989. To inflict pain on the Soviet occupiers, the United States threw its weight behind the Afghan resistance, styled in Washington as “freedom fighters,” and funneled aid (via the Saudis and the Pakistanis) to the most religiously extreme among them. When this effort resulted in a massive Soviet defeat, the United States celebrated its support for the Afghan Mujahedeen as evidence of strategic genius. It was almost as if God had rendered a verdict.
Yet not so many years after the Soviets withdrew in defeat, the freedom fighters morphed into the fiercely anti-Western Taliban, providing sanctuary to al-Qaeda as it plotted — successfully — to attack the United States. Clearly, this was a monkey wrench thrown into God’s plan.
With the launching of the Global War on Terrorism, Islamism succeeded Communism as the body of beliefs that, if left unchecked, threatened to sweep across the globe with dire consequences for freedom. Those who Washington had armed as “freedom fighters” now became America’s most dangerous enemies. So at least members of the national security establishment believed or purported to believe, thereby curtailing any further discussion of whether militarized globalism actually represented the best approach to promoting liberal values globally or even served U.S. interests.
Yet as a rallying cry, a war against Islamism presented difficulties right from the outset. As much as policymakers struggled to prevent Islamism from merging in the popular mind with Islam itself, significant numbers of Americans — whether genuinely fearful or mischief-minded – saw this as a distinction without a difference. Efforts by the Bush administration to work around this problem by framing the post-9/11 threat under the rubric of “terrorism” ultimately failed because that generic term offered no explanation for motive. However the administration twisted and turned, motive in this instance seemed bound up with matters of religion.
Where exactly to situate God in post-9/11 U.S. policy posed a genuine challenge for policymakers, not least of all for George W. Bush, who believed, no doubt sincerely, that God had chosen him to defend America in its time of maximum danger. Unlike the communists, far from denying God’s existence, Islamists embrace God with startling ferocity. Indeed, in their vitriolic denunciations of the United States and in perpetrating acts of anti-American violence, they audaciously present themselves as nothing less than God’s avenging agents. In confronting the Great Satan, they claim to be doing God’s will.
Waging War in Jesus’s Name
This debate over who actually represents God’s will is one that the successive administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have studiously sought to avoid. The United States is not at war with Islam per se, U.S. officials insist. Still, among Muslims abroad, Washington’s repeated denials notwithstanding, suspicion persists and not without reason.
Consider the case of Lieutenant General William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin. While still on active duty in 2002, this highly decorated Army officer spoke in uniform at a series of some 30 church gatherings during which he offered his own response to President Bush’s famous question: “Why do they hate us?” The general’s perspective differed markedly from his commander-in-chief’s: “The answer to that is because we’re a Christian nation. We are hated because we are a nation of believers.”
On another such occasion, the general recalled his encounter with a Somali warlord who claimed to enjoy Allah’s protection. The warlord was deluding himself, Boykin declared, and was sure to get his comeuppance: “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” As a Christian nation, Boykin insisted, the United States would succeed in overcoming its adversaries only if “we come against them in the name of Jesus.”
When Boykin’s remarks caught the attention of the mainstream press, denunciations rained down from on high, as the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon hastened to disassociate the government from the general’s views. Yet subsequent indicators suggest that, however crudely, Boykin was indeed expressing perspectives shared by more than a few of his fellow citizens.
One such indicator came immediately: despite the furor, the general kept his important Pentagon job as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, suggesting that the Bush administration considered his transgression minor. Perhaps Boykin had spoken out of turn, but his was not a fireable offense. (One can only speculate regarding the fate likely to befall a U.S. high-ranking officer daring to say of Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, “My God is a real God and his is an idol.”)
A second indicator came in the wake of Boykin’s retirement from active duty. In 2012, the influential Family Research Council (FRC) in Washington hired the general to serve as the organization’s executive vice-president. Devoted to “advancing faith, family, and freedom,” the council presents itself as emphatically Christian in its outlook. FRC events routinely attract Republican Party heavyweights. The organization forms part of the conservative mainstream, much as, say, the American Civil Liberties Union forms part of the left-liberal mainstream.
So for the FRC to hire as its chief operating officer someone espousing Boykin’s pronounced views regarding Islam qualifies as noteworthy. At a minimum, those who recruited the former general apparently found nothing especially objectionable in his worldview. They saw nothing politically risky about associating with Jerry Boykin. He’s their kind of guy. More likely, by hiring Boykin, the FRC intended to send a signal: on matters where their new COO claimed expertise — above all, war — thumb-in-your eye political incorrectness was becoming a virtue. Imagine the NAACP electing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as its national president, thereby endorsing his views on race, and you get the idea.
What the FRC’s embrace of General Boykin makes clear is this: to dismiss manifestations of Islamophobia simply as the work of an insignificant American fringe is mistaken. As with the supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who during the early days of the Cold War saw communists under every State Department desk, those engaging in these actions are daring to express openly attitudes that others in far greater numbers also quietly nurture. To put it another way, what Americans in the 1950s knew as McCarthyism has reappeared in the form of Boykinism.
Historians differ passionately over whether McCarthyism represented a perversion of anti-Communism or its truest expression. So, too, present-day observers will disagree as to whether Boykinism represents a merely fervent or utterly demented response to the Islamist threat. Yet this much is inarguable: just as the junior senator from Wisconsin in his heyday embodied a non-trivial strain of American politics, so, too, does the former special-ops-warrior-turned-“ordained minister with a passion for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Notably, as Boykinism’s leading exponent, the former general’s views bear a striking resemblance to those favored by the late senator. Like McCarthy, Boykin believes that, while enemies beyond America’s gates pose great dangers, the enemy within poses a still greater threat. “I’ve studied Marxist insurgency,” he declared in a 2010 video. “It was part of my training. And the things I know that have been done in every Marxist insurgency are being done in America today.” Explicitly comparing the United States as governed by Barack Obama to Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, and Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Boykin charges that, under the guise of health reform, the Obama administration is secretly organizing a “constabulary force that will control the population in America.” This new force is, he claims, designed to be larger than the United States military, and will function just as Hitler’s Brownshirts once did in Germany. All of this is unfolding before our innocent and unsuspecting eyes.
Boykinism: The New McCarthyism
How many Americans endorsed McCarthy’s conspiratorial view of national and world politics? It’s difficult to know for sure, but enough in Wisconsin to win him reelection in 1952, by a comfortable 54% to 46% majority. Enough to strike fear into the hearts of politicians who quaked at the thought of McCarthy fingering them for being “soft on Communism.”
How many Americans endorse Boykin’s comparably incendiary views? Again, it’s difficult to tell. Enough to persuade FRC’s funders and supporters to hire him, confident that doing so would burnish, not tarnish, the organization’s brand. Certainly, Boykin has in no way damaged its ability to attract powerhouses of the domestic right. FRC’s recent “Values Voter Summit” featured luminaries such as Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, former Republican Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Representative Michele Bachmann — along with Jerry Boykin himself, who lectured attendees on “Israel, Iran, and the Future of Western Civilization.” (In early August, Mitt Romney met privately with a group of “prominent social conservatives,” including Boykin.)
Does their appearance at the FRC podium signify that Ryan, Santorum, Cantor, and Bachmann all subscribe to Boykinism’s essential tenets? Not any more than those who exploited the McCarthyite moment to their own political advantage — Richard Nixon, for example — necessarily agreed with all of McCarthy’s reckless accusations. Yet the presence of leading Republicans on an FRC program featuring Boykin certainly suggests that they find nothing especially objectionable or politically damaging to them in his worldview.
Still, comparisons between McCarthyism and Boykinism only go so far. Senator McCarthy wreaked havoc mostly on the home front, instigating witch-hunts, destroying careers, and trampling on civil rights, while imparting to American politics even more of a circus atmosphere than usual. In terms of foreign policy, the effect of McCarthyism, if anything, was to reinforce an already existing anti-communist consensus. McCarthy’s antics didn’t create enemies abroad. McCarthyism merely reaffirmed that communists were indeed the enemy, while making the political price of thinking otherwise too high to contemplate.
Boykinism, in contrast, makes its impact felt abroad. Unlike McCarthyism, it doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of incumbents on the campaign trail here. Attracting General Boykin’s endorsement or provoking his ire probably won’t determine the outcome of any election. Yet in its various manifestations Boykinism provides the kindling that helps sustain anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. It reinforces the belief among Muslims that the Global War on Terror really is a war against them.
Boykinism confirms what many Muslims are already primed to believe: that American values and Islamic values are irreconcilable. American presidents and secretaries of state stick to their talking points, praising Islam as a great religious tradition and touting past U.S. military actions (ostensibly) undertaken on behalf of Muslims. Yet with their credibility among Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the Greater Middle East about nil, they are pissing in the wind.
As long as substantial numbers of vocal Americans do not buy the ideological argument constructed to justify U.S. intervention in the Islamic world — that their conception of freedom (including religious freedom) is ultimately compatible with ours – then neither will Muslims. In that sense, the supporters of Boykinism who reject that proposition encourage Muslims to follow suit. This ensures, by extension, that further reliance on armed force as the preferred instrument of U. S. policy in the Islamic world will compound the errors that produced and have defined the post-9/11 era.
Andrew J. Bacevich is currently a visiting fellow at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. A TomDispatch regular, he is author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, among other works, and most recently editor of The Short American Century.
Copyright 2012 Andrew J. Bacevich
]]>At the coffee plantation Monte Café, to the left of its dilapidated pink colonial buildings, stands a huge shed. The caretaker unlocks a gigantic padlock and we step into a surreal [...]]]>
Ghost factory. By M. Sayagues
At the coffee plantation Monte Café, to the left of its dilapidated pink colonial buildings, stands a huge shed. The caretaker unlocks a gigantic padlock and we step into a surreal décor for a tropical Blade Runner movie.
The shed houses a web of pipes and drums, coffee-processing machinery made by the Brazilian company Pinhalense. It is huge, complex – and never used.
The caretaker remembers when the machines were put in place, about a decade ago, but he never saw them working.
Donors pulled the plug on this US$24 million project after US$14 were spent and a few siphoned off.
The project was sponsored by ESAGRI, the agricultural arm of the Portuguese group Espirito Santo, with US$10.9 from the African Development Bank, totalling US$13 in foreign aid.
I went with a coffee grower who groaned at all the inappropriate elements: for example, a wasteful layout and excessive drying capacity for the production of the 1,800-hectares plantation. The optical scanner for bean selection made him laugh: it required a dust-free, air-conditioned environment, not the dust, humidity and power cuts of Sao Tome.
Going back to the capital after 4 pm, there were no taxis so I start walking. A man in a 4×4 offers me a ride. He is a businessman in his fifties and he insists on showing me his failed textile factory.
In the 1980s, it produced trousers and shirts for both the local market and for Angola, following an agreement between the two allied Marxist governments. When Angola liberalized its economy in the late 1990s, the contract was cancelled and the factory closed.
“Naively, we thought the contract would go on forever and did not look for other markets,” he explained.
Another padlock, another eerily silent space, a 2,000 sq.metres building with rows of old sewing machines.
Two ghost factories: one, the failure of a donor-funded development project. The other, a failure of the post-colonial regime’s industrialisation drive.
Provocative analysis
Improductive from Day One. By M. Sayagues
Africa is littered with abandoned industrial parks and two new, thought-provoking books explain why.
In Dead Aid, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that foreign aid to Africa has discouraged free enterprise while fuelling corruption and rent-seeking, defined as the use of governmental authority to make and take money without trade or production of wealth.
Aid, she says, lowers the incentive for investment and chokes off growth.
Because aid flows are seen as permanent income, policymakers have no incentive to look for other ways of financing development. Worse, they have no sense of urgency “in remedying Africa’s critical woes.”
In Architects of Poverty, South African author Moeletsi Mbeki argues that African elites obstruct the development of an indigenous entrepreneurial class, seen as a threat to their power. (Read an interview here).
Instead, elites entrench themselves as a “parasitic bureaucratic bourgeoisie…unproductive but wealthy black crony capitalists” who live off state revenues, ignore or exploit peasants, and divert profits to elite consumption or capital flight.
Mbeki notes that one of the biggest scandals is the underinvestment in transport in Africa.
Long wait
The 70 kms drive from Sao Tome to Porto Alegre on the south of the island takes 5 hours and a sturdy car to negotiate potholes.
Few minibuses ply this route because drivers don’t want to destroy their cars. So the trip from Porto Alegre to the capital turns into a day-long journey. That hurts tourism, trade and travel.
Since 7 am, Alice Tavares waited for a bus with her 2 young children and a neighbour’s teenager. They carried school satchels, two baskets of fish, five bundles of clothes and two jerry cans of petrol.
Patient Alice buys a pig. M. Sayagues
The early minibus was full. The second arrived at noon and went half-way to Angolares, where we waited for three hours. Alice bought a freshly butchered pig and stuffed it in a plastic bag. I took photos. We got to the capital after sunset.
How hard can it be to maintain a total of 320 kms of roads in the tiny islands? Since 2007, small billboards brag about a European Union aid project to improve roads. What a joke. Looks more like dead aid managed by the architects of poverty.
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