Africans and water



look out piano said:
I'm suspecting that the governments / bosses of these countries are corrupt bastards that siphon off cash to pay for bling bling and bunga bunga tbh. Sickening stuff, really pisses me off.
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Have you seen the price of a Mercedes stretch limo these days? How can you expect them to give their people aid money when they have costs like that.
 
Aituk7 said:
They don't benefit from surplus level 1 resources, making it a nightmare to develop.

Ironically the best thing for many african states would have been to be still under governance of European rule.
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They never left, now along with the Russian, American and now the Chinese they have even more friends
 
Gala said:
WaterAid is a class charity.

Politics and theft are not their thing.
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I bet ya enough money has been donated to African water supplies over the years to give them a good clean supply. The fact there isn't speaks volumes. I hate to say it, but these African countries don't help themselves.
take the malaria issue for example. Millions of mosquito nets were supplied years ago to help the issue. Most of them were used for fishing nets ffs.
 
Something to do with us being meanies with an Empire iirc

mickeymoor said:
Rather then write an essay one example would be the French who have intervene six times in there former colonies since the millennium and have troops stationed permanently in some.
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That is something to do with the French former colonies being absolutely hopeless at governing themselves.
 
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mickeymoor said:
Rather then write an essay one example would be the French who have intervene six times in there former colonies since the millennium and have troops stationed permanently in some.
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Fair enough, I still think if they were ruled directly by the europeans they would be benefitting from a massive amount of aid, development and investment right now as some of them have resources first world economies could trade for if only they were less prone to outbreaks of lawlessness

It's all hypothetical however, obviously empire was on the whole terrible for them.
 
Aituk7 said:
Fair enough, I still think if they were ruled directly by the europeans they would be benefitting from a massive amount of aid, development and investment right now as some of them have resources first world economies could trade for if only they were less prone to outbreaks of lawlessness

It's all hypothetical however, obviously empire was on the whole terrible for them.
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Disagree. Obviously wasn’t all roses and crumpets but was on the whole a net positive.
 
Reiver said:
"Unless you give us money this 12 year old girl will be married, as is the custom in their country."

And, if I give money will that practice end?

"No, but it will keep hundreds of so called charity workers earning 40K a year."
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I helped arrange a personal loan for a gentleman who worked for Oxfam, wishing to buy a brand new Lexus. He was on approx £52,000 when I went through his affordability checks.

I'm sure the bloke earns fair salary for his work, but it put me off those sort of charities altogether.

We've been donating "Just £2 a month to give a village fresh water" since the 80's, so by definition the cost of that Lexus would've sorted out an entire nation.
 
European colonialism in Africa was pretty benign (with the exception of the Germans, who carried out a genocide in Namibia, and the Belgians, who committed innumerable atrocities in the Congo).

The most notorious chapter in Britain's involvement was the response to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. There's been a lot of rewriting of history regarding it, glossing over the fact that the majority of victims were Africans killed by the Mau Mau themselves. My dad was in the colonial administration in Kenya at the time, and while he was broadly sympathetic with the idea of Kenyan independence, he was revolted by the Mau Mau - who dealt with villages accused of collaborating with the British by mutilating the inhabitants, women and babies included. He was so committed to the country that he returned to Kenya after independence (which is where I grew up).

Since independence, the West have botched their efforts to develop Africa. Too many projects have become black holes into which endless funds have been pumped with very little end result. If you wonder where African politicians get the money for their jets, overseas houses, and stretch limos, it's usually siphoned off from these megaprojects.

China has a different approach. They loan the money for big infrastructure projects with inbuilt penalties against failure to repay. As a result, Zambia has already had Lusaka International Airport taken off them (China to take over Zambian international Airport for debt repayment default; neocolonialism?), and Kenya is about to lose the port of Mombasa (Chinese may take over Mombasa port: Ouko). As more debts are called in, prepare to see the list of Chinese possessions in Africa grow dramatically.

While some Britons bang on about our supposed colonial 'crimes', just watch as Chinese imperial expansion takes over the continent. You can be sure that human rights and African rural development are not prime considerations.
 

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