The state of Africa

Kim DuToit is originally from South Africa and has written about the great continent quite a bit. His best essay is Let Africa Sink. A sobering read but an honest one. Now comes this from Kevin Myers writing at the Dublin Independent:

Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS
No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

This is not going to be a popular column for Mr. Myers as it exposes the cognitive dissonance in the liberal mind when it comes to giving charitable aid to nations governed by dictators who loot the very aid being distributed to "the people". It is an accurate column though and one that should be widely distributed...