Industrialise Africa
Periodically, the 900,000,000 people of Africa attract the attention of the West. Well meaning, decent individuals go to Africa and do good. They provide water, medical relief, an acknowledgement that other humans exist and care, and sometimes they don't go home. At home, individuals lessen their nervous sympathy by giving a few pounds here or there, tut tutting at the apparent intractability of the problems of Africa, or occasionally raging within the bounds of political correctness at the ridiculousness of most of the governments there. The latter is an attitude not unknown to the urban middle classes here when they look around them, of course.
However, as a very good friend of mine pointed out a couple of weeks ago, these attitudes don't really solve anything. What would solve things is determined and managed industrialisation.
What is it that holds Africa back? Lack of effort? Can a continent with the world's mineral mines, huge amounts of oil businesses, some of the most backbreaking and unrewarded agriculture in the world be said to be lacking in effort? All those people who work so hard?
Is Africa incapable of monetary stability? The CFA in West Africa runs the world's most longstanding international currency union, with one currency, and doesn't even require a central bank. Britain proved incapable of proferrig the correct figures to the IMF in the 1970s, let alone truly sticking to IMF deals.
Is it that Africa is uniquely warlike? In whose streets are children gunned down whilst the police offer 'safe drop-off areas' for guns whilst popular celebrities flaunt their heroin habits? Who started and fought and still celebrate World War One, World War two, the Cold War conflicts, or the Middle East wars? Africans? Where do those fighting Africans get their guns?
And what of that hoary old chestnut, slavery? A foul trade the emotional benefit of which to some in Europe is that we can shed tears for people we never knew who had things done to them by people we never knew to show people who are institutionally determined to trade in race that we don't notice race anymore. Sadly, this in itself strikes me as an indulgence in impotent and high-minded hypocrisy.
Africa was devastated by slavery as the world never will be again unless we ever suffered some sort of science-fiction alien invasion. But there is a solution to all this.
Industrialise the place.
Build stable manufacturing bases that use Africa's own resources. Organise the time of people left to maunder with work. Create a discipline on politicians and voters of growth for Africans and for world markets. There are plenty of technologies and plenty of talents which could be employed.
Just wait, though, for the objections. Pet africans can't be subjected, some in the west would argue, to that sort of temporary environmental change. It'd upset the safaris and reservations. Land can't be reformed just like that. International debtors and vulture funds won't accept less of a return temporarily. And corrupt black racist gangs in government, accompanied by self-important frauds, have a terribly African approach to the iron will and rationality that would be required for an industrialisation to take root.
Bunkum. The alternative is that thousands upon thousands of our fellow human beings continue to maunder and live near despair, snatching at the snake oil of those who would use them for their purposes. Of course, the professional friends of Africa in the west would also object to the despoiling of their reserves, just as sinophiles went quiet when China got serious.
There will be enviromentalist objections. At the moment, the deeply conservative and self-serving side of greenery is suffused with the back-glow of the sixties' generations radicalism, so their 'stop the world it's burning' politics are difficult to challenge. But there is no danger to humanity and no challenge to humanity which cannot be solved by what is right about humanity. And one of the things which is right is the rationality and industrial reason created by the Judeo-Christian West, especially when it is pretending to be beyond religion. Humanity needs more of that. Not lentils.
So--while there is time, unlock and untap Africa. Let it clear away the exploiters and the dependence. Keep caring, but hope for change. Hope for that which could fix it and its economy and society and politics.
Industrialise Africa.
Periodically, the 900,000,000 people of Africa attract the attention of the West. Well meaning, decent individuals go to Africa and do good. They provide water, medical relief, an acknowledgement that other humans exist and care, and sometimes they don't go home. At home, individuals lessen their nervous sympathy by giving a few pounds here or there, tut tutting at the apparent intractability of the problems of Africa, or occasionally raging within the bounds of political correctness at the ridiculousness of most of the governments there. The latter is an attitude not unknown to the urban middle classes here when they look around them, of course.
However, as a very good friend of mine pointed out a couple of weeks ago, these attitudes don't really solve anything. What would solve things is determined and managed industrialisation.
What is it that holds Africa back? Lack of effort? Can a continent with the world's mineral mines, huge amounts of oil businesses, some of the most backbreaking and unrewarded agriculture in the world be said to be lacking in effort? All those people who work so hard?
Is Africa incapable of monetary stability? The CFA in West Africa runs the world's most longstanding international currency union, with one currency, and doesn't even require a central bank. Britain proved incapable of proferrig the correct figures to the IMF in the 1970s, let alone truly sticking to IMF deals.
Is it that Africa is uniquely warlike? In whose streets are children gunned down whilst the police offer 'safe drop-off areas' for guns whilst popular celebrities flaunt their heroin habits? Who started and fought and still celebrate World War One, World War two, the Cold War conflicts, or the Middle East wars? Africans? Where do those fighting Africans get their guns?
And what of that hoary old chestnut, slavery? A foul trade the emotional benefit of which to some in Europe is that we can shed tears for people we never knew who had things done to them by people we never knew to show people who are institutionally determined to trade in race that we don't notice race anymore. Sadly, this in itself strikes me as an indulgence in impotent and high-minded hypocrisy.
Africa was devastated by slavery as the world never will be again unless we ever suffered some sort of science-fiction alien invasion. But there is a solution to all this.
Industrialise the place.
Build stable manufacturing bases that use Africa's own resources. Organise the time of people left to maunder with work. Create a discipline on politicians and voters of growth for Africans and for world markets. There are plenty of technologies and plenty of talents which could be employed.
Just wait, though, for the objections. Pet africans can't be subjected, some in the west would argue, to that sort of temporary environmental change. It'd upset the safaris and reservations. Land can't be reformed just like that. International debtors and vulture funds won't accept less of a return temporarily. And corrupt black racist gangs in government, accompanied by self-important frauds, have a terribly African approach to the iron will and rationality that would be required for an industrialisation to take root.
Bunkum. The alternative is that thousands upon thousands of our fellow human beings continue to maunder and live near despair, snatching at the snake oil of those who would use them for their purposes. Of course, the professional friends of Africa in the west would also object to the despoiling of their reserves, just as sinophiles went quiet when China got serious.
There will be enviromentalist objections. At the moment, the deeply conservative and self-serving side of greenery is suffused with the back-glow of the sixties' generations radicalism, so their 'stop the world it's burning' politics are difficult to challenge. But there is no danger to humanity and no challenge to humanity which cannot be solved by what is right about humanity. And one of the things which is right is the rationality and industrial reason created by the Judeo-Christian West, especially when it is pretending to be beyond religion. Humanity needs more of that. Not lentils.
So--while there is time, unlock and untap Africa. Let it clear away the exploiters and the dependence. Keep caring, but hope for change. Hope for that which could fix it and its economy and society and politics.
Industrialise Africa.
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