Mr. Blair and Africa: first, do no harm
By Rosemary Ekosso

http://www.ekosso.com/2007/01/mr_blair_and_af.html#comment-63540086

I love this blogger's satire:

Tony Blair is to launch a range of cosmetics upon leaving office,
DeadBrain can reveal. The first of those, Blair Foundation, has
already been developed and was discovered by our intrepid reporter
during a bored afternoon searching the internet.

It's alright to send Mr. Blair up, I suppose. If you cannot get rid of
a leader you do not like, you might as well laugh at him.

But I'm picking another bone here.

The Sunday Times of 7 January 2006 had an article entitled "Blair
starts work on building fortune". As we say back home, on top of whose
back does he want to build the fortune? The Sunday Times says that
Blair intends to "tour the world fostering the values of democracy,
slowing climate change and developing Africa."

Develop Africa? You mean, he is prime minister of a powerful country
for ten years, cannot develop Africa, and now wants to do it as a
private citizen?

Congratulations, Mr. Blair! Such nobility of purpose, such self-
sacrifice!

But, as the article notes, "it has become fashionable for former heads
of State to create foundations. Setting up foundations in the names of
prime ministers and presidents has become the modern way for
politicians to secure their legacies."

Mr. Blair won't fool me. His legacy, in my view, is the war in Iraq,
the BAE scandal, the cash for honours scandal, and his holiday homes,
among other things. Furthermore, as the article states, he could get
up to $250 000 in fees for speaking at events. A man is securing a
cushy retirement for himself, and he wants to use Africa as an excuse?

I do not know whether this business of democracy, climate change and
Africa is a direct quote from something Mr. Blair himself issued, or
this is merely surmised by the reporter in the Sunday Times. Perhaps,
in the now habitual New Labour fashion, his cronies quietly leaked it,
just to test the waters. But if Mr. Blair has shown such ignorance and
lack of sensitivity, we should set up a rotten tomatoes and eggs
parade for him should he dare to show his hypocritical mug anywhere on
our continent.

Is Africa that easy to develop anyway? With the kind of development
some people have been visiting upon us, I personally would not mind
sinking gently back into the post-Independence, pre-globalisation era,
before the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO got their hands on us.

I do not get this thing about "developing Africa". I really do not.
What is now known as the Western World is called developed today
because of a combination of hard work, unbridled exploitation of
colonies, and ruthless pursuit of the very policies they now use the
IMF, the World Bank and the WTO to stop anyone else from following.
There is very little of Western Europe today that does not owe its own
development at least partly to the blood, toil, tears and sweat of our
ancestors. So we can work. What we do not have is the ability, or
perhaps the willingness, to exploit other peoples as we have been
exploited.

Exploitation has worked very well for some. Here is some literature
you might like to try. Wikipedia says of Ha Joon Chang: [i]n "Kicking
Away the Ladder" Chang argued that all major developed countries used
interventionist economic policies in order to get rich and then tried
to forbid other countries from doing similarly. The WTO, World Bank
and IMF come in for strong criticism for this kind of ladder-kicking
which is, according to Chang, the fundamental obstacle to poverty-
alleviation in the developing world. This and other work led to the
his being awarded the 2005 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the
Frontiers of Economic Thought (previous prize-winners also include
Amartya Sen).This is an article Chang wrote based on his book.

Not that I am advocating exploitation, mind you.

We cannot "develop" on the basis of charity. In many instances, the
much-touted charity is only a bridgehead through which resources can
be channelled out. Much of the charity - or at least the official
"charity" of government aid - goes into the pockets of leaders we hate
and want to be rid of, but which we cannot throw out because the
charitable ones prefer to have them in power, the more easily to
extract the political favours, policy changes and lucrative contracts
they get in exchange for "aid".

Our continent has problems. And these problems are every bit as dire
as they are made out to be. But they are not as insoluble as is often
made out. It's just that they cannot be solved from outside.
Ultimately, Africa's problems - like those of any other region - can
only be solved by Africans themselves. But we're not going to have a
chance of solving our problems, unless and until the outsiders get out
and stay out, and let us solve our problems ourselves. We should start
by electing our own leaders, and controlling our own resources and the
incomes they generate. Only then we can be masters and mistresses of
our fate. Outsiders cannot come, dressed in Lord Bountiful sheep's
clothing, to ram down our throats a noxious stew of the deceitful and
the blindingly obvious, and then expect us to reward them with big
African grins of gratitude.

We often hear Westerners saying that instead of giving us fish, they
would like us to learn how to fish for ourselves. But we know how to
fish - and it's insulting and paternalistic to suggest that we can
neither fish nor learn for ourselves. The problem is that Western
governments are busy draining the river and erecting electric fences
on either side - then coming along and eating anything we do still
manage to catch.

Recently, in my piece, "Are we failed states?", I wrote generously
about the contribution of Great Britain to ending the slave trade. But
not everyone believes in this altruism. The Black Commentator says in
this article:

England built its Industrial Revolution on an exclusive mercantilist
trading relationship with its Caribbean colonies. This ensured that
West Indian planters had a guaranteed market for their agricultural
products, and "Mother England" had a guaranteed market for its
manufactured goods. But when it became clear that greater profits
could be obtained by negotiating for cheaper raw materials from other
suppliers, and by placing manufactured goods on the open market,
England sought with a vengeance to crush the Caribbean planters by
cutting off their supply of the slaves who were indispensable to the
islands' agricultural operations.

Though that does not discount the work of noted Abolitionists like
Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce, it does afford a new vantage
point from which to consider the history of abolitionism. Perhaps I
have been too generous. The lesson here is that international action,
either by an individual or a country, however noble the sentiment
advanced to justify it, may nonetheless have an altogether more
questionable intent.

The same applies to Mr. Blair's threats of impending altruism.

The Black Commentator article, a masterpiece of controlled ire,
further states:

If Blair really wants to do something for Africa, he should receive
with grace a bill for reparations and restitution for all that England
took from its African colonies and the enslaved individuals forced
into the Diaspora. After England pays that bill, Blair should just
back away from Africa and shut up.

Couldn't put it better meself.