"The Madmen of Africa" YouTube Video

These men are the cream of a large crop of megalomanic and psychotic 'leaders' that have plagued the African continent for the past forty years. The heartache, misery and suffering caused by these men is truly appalling.

In order of appearance:

Mobutu Sese Seko, Sani Abacha, Idi Amin Dada, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Siad Barre, Jean Bedel Bokassa, P.W. Botha, Gnassingbe Eyadema, Muammar Gaddafi, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Robert Mugabe, Macias Nguema, Jonas Savimbi, Ian Smith and Charles Taylor.





The $300,000,000 Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in Yamoussoukro represents the squandering of the continents resources by these lunatics.

Info:

1. Two acres of hand-blown French stained glass windows.

2. Individual air conditioning ducts at each of the 7000 seats.

3. On the average Sunday about 200 people attend mass in the largest church on earth.

4. Four of the basilica's 272 gargantuan columns contain elevators that can carry 10 people to a balcony beneath the dome.

5. 7.4 acre marble-floored courtyard.

The song in the video is by legendary Afro pop singer: Fela Kuti. it is tittled: Sorrow, tears and blood. Viva Nigeria.

"A note about African Anti Americanism"

It is statism, not the market, and socialism, not capitalism, that has destroyed the African economies. After independence, the African elites who formed the political leadership generally adopted the Soviet and Chinese systems. Thus they were able to assume absolute power with access to the levers of personal enrichment.

And from communism they borrowed an infallible recipe for agricultural ruin: collectivizing the land, from Algeria to Tanzania, setting up “cooperatives” that quickly became unproductive.

In these fatal mistakes the Third World has had false friends. In particular, the privileged pseudo-revolutionaries of Seattle and Göteborg have encouraged them down the primrose path of anti-capitalism. Lacking any real knowledge about the African cataclysm, and careless about finding remedies, the anti-globalist agitators prefer hurling brickbats at their perennial hobgoblin to the moral imperative of saving and improving lives.

This just licenses Africa’s socialist dictators to commit their robberies. In Madagascar, the anti-American radical Didier Ratsiraka received a fortune in francs, but the starving Madagascan people never had the slightest whiff of it. An investigative journalist could do well to search for traces in Switzerland or elsewhere of the billions of dollars stolen by the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha.

And what’s the point (other than irritating America) of defending Robert Mugabe, a typical dictator who has rigged every election in Zimbabwe and managed in 20 years to transform one of the most fertile lands of Africa into one of the most desolate? Between 1960 and 2000, Africa received four times as much funding and aid per capita as Latin America or Asia. How was it that these last two continents took off, and not Africa? By practicing capitalism and establishing world trade.

~ Jean-Francois Revel

To read the whole article go here
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18005/article_detail.asp