Cut off all aid to Africa, today.
From our “Aren’t they fed yet?” files:
Over the years, the international aid industry has suffered many PR setbacks and high-profile critiques. For instance, there was Graham Hancock’s 1989 book Lords of Poverty, an exposé of the ‘power, prestige and corruption of the international aid business’; Daniel Wolf’s 2000 investigative TV series The Hunger Business; Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, published last year; and, this year, Martin Plaut’s radio documentary Aid for Arms in Ethiopia.
Now, we can add to the list of aid-industry exposés War Games, by Dutch journalist Linda Polman (…)
Polman describes white women taking water aerobics classes at the height of the Sierra Leone civil war while in a nearby conference hall their colleagues attended a seminar on ‘The Traumatised Child’. While victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami were navigating their way through the rubble of their homes, charities delivered crates of stiletto-heeled shoes, G-strings, Father Christmas costumes and Viagra pills. Bosnians received packets of Prozac that were past their sell-by dates; Cambodian refugees were given food that a San Francisco zoo had declared unfit for animals; and a New Zealand manufacturer once offered Kenyan children canned dog food. ‘The children are hungry, but not that hungry’, a Kenyan government spokesman said, declining the gift. (…)
Take the American evangelists who bring African amputee children to the US, parade them on Oprah, and put them up for adoption even though they are not orphans. And imagine just what kind of events could have led to one rebel in Freetown telling Polman that WAR stands for ‘“Waste All Resources.” Destroy everything. Then you people will come and fix it.’
