John Githongo, Kenya’s famous whistleblower, has had to leave his country in a hurry a couple of times; he was hired by his government to clean things up and then did his job too well...
DJ Rowbow, a Mike Tyson doppelgänger. His station, Ghetto Radio, was a voice of reason when the volcano of ethnic tension was exploding in Kenya in 2008...
Youssou N’Dour — maybe the greatest singer on earth — owns a newspaper and is in the middle of a complicated deal to buy a TV station...
Luisa Diogo, the country’s (Mozambique) former prime minister, who is now the matriarch in this mesmerizing stretch of eastern Africa...
Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese entrepreneur who made a fortune in mobile phones.
He refers to Nelson Mandela as "Madiba, the great Nelson Mandela — the person who, along with Desmond Tutu and the Edge, I consider to be my boss."
All this leaves me wondering, if Africa so overflows with exceptional people such as these, does this mean it will soon cease hemorrhaging excess males to the rest of the world? Does it mean Western governments will soon cease looting their working populations in order to send enormous sums of foreign aid to that continent? Does it mean that "African" will soon cease being a synonym for "disadvantaged" or "victimized"? As a matter of fact, the author does address foreign aid; he calls for a new kind of foreign aid - which he calls "smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two." Oh joy! We can look forward to a self-sufficient Africa in merely forty or fifty years. Let's see, I'll be... very old by then. Even my kids will be old by then. How convenient that Bono's new era for Africa won't actually arrive until most of us are already dead from old age. One wonders if, fifty years hence, leftists will still be singing the same tune.
This much is for sure, Africa is not going away. Furthermore, those courageous Africans who risk their lives to battle corruption, fight disease, further education and reduce poverty have my utmost respect. It is difficult enough to do these things in modern Western nations. How much more so in darkest Africa. If worthy and capable African leaders and activists need guidance and resources in order to improve their homelands and make them more habitable, then this is the sort of foreign aid we should be promoting - but only by free choice. Not at the barrel of a gun in the form of taxes.
[...] Bono’s take οח Africa « Jewamongyou's Blog [...]
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young I liked the guy, but since he called my Primeminister a name of which I forget simply because he didn't suport giving a straight percentage of our GDP to help benefit Africa, I stopped liking him.
ReplyDeleteI think he's just a PC liberal goof with nothing better to do with his time.
I cringe every time I hear Bozo's name mentioned in the media. Because I just know it's going to be some international socialist cause that's going to piss me off.
ReplyDeleteForeign aid to Africa makes it worse, according to a study published in the medical Journal Lancet:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/09/AR2010040901510.html
Like James Watson famously said: "Our policy on Africa is based on the idea that they are as intelligent as us. When all the evidence points to that not being the case." (Not an exact quote but more or less.)
Few things are as irritating as pretentious, self-righteous “celebrity” hypocrites telling us that we should donate our money to specific causes they deem worthy.
ReplyDeleteIn an ideal world, Bono would give away all his property and income, move to his beloved Africa and live there quietly in a rural village - never to annoy the rest of us again.
Unfortunately, it never will happen because it is far easier for him to insist others make sacrifices for his cause than to personally make them himself.
All this leaves me wondering, if Africa so overflows with exceptional people such as these, does this mean it will soon cease hemorrhaging excess males to the rest of the world?
ReplyDeleteAnd does this mean that White liberals will be leaving the racist Western world to move to liberated Africa? If Africa is to become the great big showcase of progress, diversity and multicultism, then I am sure liberals will be flocking their by the millions, perhaps following in the footsteps of Amy Biehl.