Hot Air For Africa

[nicky g]

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Nobody mentioned the c-word. Corruption—as in African leaders’ corruption.

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This is indeed the major problem. Taki's major problem is that he believes it happens without the help and connivance of the major countries of the world. As if Africa somehow lives in a fishbowl.

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Well, it's easy to see that corrupt U.N. officials, and the "bureaucrooks" in France and the EU, ran the largest fraud in history with the oil-for-food scam.

But, how exactly did the U.S., U.K., and Japan help and connive to enable the despots of Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sudan and Sierra Leone to steal vast sums and murder huge numbers of people?

Taki writes:

"Sudan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are three glaring examples of this. Ethiopia has spent huge sums fighting Eritrea over a disputed border. Over 65 million Ethiopians can now hardly feed themselves, while the government spends billions on arms. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, is an impoverished nation because of Robert Mugabe’s greed and disasterous anti-white policies. The psychopathic Liberian murderer Charles Taylor is living in Nigeria with the hundreds of millions he stole from the nation’s coffers, and his protector, Olusegun Obasanjo, presents himself in Davos and lectures us on the need to help Africa. Ditto Thabo Mbeki, president of South Africa and the prime mover behind the theory that AIDS does not exist but is an American plot to weaken Africans."

If you know how the U.S., U.K., and Japan are complicit in these things, pray do tell.

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Here's an example. The most glaring example of African kleptocracy was Mobutu's regime. The West (mainly the US and Belgium) were responsible for undermining the Lumumba regime, killing Lumumba (the Belgians did it, the US planned to but were beaten to it) and supported Mobutu's rise and throughout his rule, pressuring for example the World Bank to loan him tens of millions that they knew he was spending on himself and would never be repaid. The legacy of all this was of course the endless Central African wars that followed his death.

[BluffTHIS!]

During the cold war things seemed a little more black and white to western leaders. In the Congo's case they saw it as allowing a communist to rule who likely would favor the USSR, or a corrupt thug who would be a friend to the west.