Quote Of The Day

"In Africa, because we are portrayed poor, politicians can use food as a means to get to power. In rich countries, there are many examples in history of how leaders manipulate. Making a continent to be like a laboratory helps others to sustain themselves, because they can say: 'If you think I am bad, go to Africa, it is worse.' This is externalizing Africa’s problem and while this dimension exists, I would rather shy away from it and focus on Africans themselves. I would like to meet and talk to those who think that unless they get tons and tons of aid dollars, they will not go anywhere. If we externalize Africa’s problems, we will never get them solved.

Africans will sit back and say: 'If they messed us, let them fix it.' We share a bigger part of the responsibility. If we have been messed, we allowed someone to mess us up. We should be able to say: 'We take 80 per cent of the blame and leave the rest to them.' This is a safer bargain than loading a bigger part of the responsibility on others. It is true that we were colonized and enslaved but should we invest all our resources into asking for payment from the colonizer?

Or focus firs on building ourselves, so that when we ask people to pay for what they did, they will be sure to pay it. On one hand we are begging, while on the other we are saying that they enslaved us and must therefore pay. Today, they come admitting to have enslaved us and want to build roads. If we tell them that we do not need a road but a small factory, they say, that their priority is roads. We cannot bargain. We first need to build ourselves so that we can engage them.....This is what we want – that together with America, Europe and China, we are just another customer in a shop: confident and able to choose what we want. Everybody is happy and nobody feels left out. However, with the aid approach, Africa always goes as a baby on its knees, and is told to wait. It is humiliating!"

— James Shikwati, Kenyan libertarian commentator