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Commentary
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Thursday, 27 May 2010 20:36 |
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By Michael Madill
Poor neighborhoods might just be the best hope of poor African countries. The rich ones certainly aren’t up to the job. You can find wealthy people and big governments in every country on the continent, but they have done little to make their neediest people better off in the fifty years since many of them got their independence. There are arguments about how much of this problem is their fault or even their responsibility, but we can look back at half a century of attempts to mitigate poverty and suffering and see only modest, irregular gains.
Today two-fifths of a country’s income vanishes into corrupt practices and politicians’ pockets in places like Uganda. Official development assistance makes up more than half the government’s budget in Niger, the Central African Republic and Liberia just to name a few. Countries with relatively more exposure to the world economy like Nigeria and South Africa are struggling to close budget gaps like their poorer neighbors. And in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea-Bissau it’s hard to distinguish government employees and soldiers from petty thugs and criminal warlords because they are often the same people.
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Commentary
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Tuesday, 06 April 2010 03:22 |
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By Michael Madill
There is a good side to the machete and bludgeoning death of Eugene Terreblanche in South Africa on April 3, but it’s not what you think. You don’t have to listen very close to hear the cries of ‘good riddance,’ and indeed Mr Terreblanche and the white supremacy and separatism he preached won’t be missed, but the passing of an exponent of a vile racist nationalism isn’t the most important thing to issue from his murder.
South Africa may now finally be able to confront the fear that lurks in the public imagination there but which is rarely addressed in a rational way – the fear that white retribution for the end of apartheid will cause a civil war.
In a sense, the threats of a white backlash were always like the shouts of a petulant teenager. The government is big enough and the army and police loyal enough to the government that it can meet any internal threat easily. But that didn’t stop people like Terreblanche from trying.
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Commentary
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Friday, 29 January 2010 23:49 |
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By Michael Madill
Stop for a minute and reflect on Haiti. It’s a mess, isn’t it? Poverty, disease, corruption, crime, environmental destruction and now an earthquake. But turn your mind to Africa, because Haiti is richer than Rwanda. That’s right. Haiti’s per capita GDP is around $1,300 per year. Rwanda’s is little over $1,000. That means that the Haitian economy is thirty per cent bigger than Rwanda’s.
Suffering plays really well on TV, so when you watch the misery broadcast from Haiti you might think, ‘How could anywhere be worse off?’ You wouldn’t know it by looking, and it’s true that the devastation caused by the earthquake will trim Haiti’s fortunes considerably. Now, rewind a few weeks, to before the catastrophe.
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Commentary
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Tuesday, 23 February 2010 01:26 |
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By Michael Madill
In case you missed it, there was a coup d’etat last week in Niger. The President, Mamadou Tandja was arrested and forced to live in the servants’ quarters of his palace while a group of junior army and air force officers installed Colonel Salou Djibo as the new head of government. State power lies with the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, which overthrew the elected president.
Niger is big and dry. It’s double the size of Texas and is made up mostly of the sand of the central Sahara Desert. The Niger River passes only through a panhandle in the far southwest of the country. The country’s name is a holdover from the Scramble for Africa, the competition between Britain, France, Belgium and Germany to claim colonial or protected territory in the late 19th century.
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Commentary
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Thursday, 21 January 2010 18:14 |
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 By Robert Rudner
It was 1776 when Haitians started shouting USA! Now, we hear our nation's name in praise in Haiti when assistance is delivered after a 7.0 Richter scale quake in the capitol. But it was our founding father Thomas Paine who openly advocated revolution in Haiti and among slaves. He rooted them on, as the author of "The Rights of Man," during the tricolor of 18th century revolutions from ours to France and the island in between.
The year 2009 was the bicentennial of Tom Paine's death. His bones were not allowed to rest in the nation whose name he invented. Some say his bones were tossed in the Thames, perhaps leaving a pair of femurs, mandible and skull for someone's trophy collection.
He was wise beyond his years and unfortunately ahead of his time. As for Haiti's cry of USA during the 1789 to 1804 uprising and liberation, most Yankees North and South thought the way Pat Robertson still talks today. Back then, many a Bible believer, which Paine was not, justified slavery in Biblical proportions.
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