More Stating the Obvious about Africa
Again this summer, African nations held a summit where they give nice speeches about what’s wrong with the continent, but nothing will actually change.
This year, Ghanian Private Sector Development Minister Kwamena Bartels shocked the World Economic Forum’s Africa Economic Summitt by fingering a previously unknown contributor to Africa’s woes. It turns out that corruption is actually a major problem on the continent.
In other news, African states fund rebel movements that destabilize the continent while denying they do so,
This is an area where Africa fails itself. We can’t look our fellow Africans in the face and say what is wrong. We can’t all people to order publicly and tell them what needs to be done.
To be fair to Bartels, being a government minister in Africa must be like watching a slow motion train wreck. The problems that Africa faces and their solutions are not brain surgery. All they require is the political will to actually give African nation’s rhetoric about promoting democracy and ending corruption teeth.
But for the most part, organizations like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development are simply dog and pony shows designed to generate the right headlines domestically and internationally while allowing business-as-usual to proceed in African countries.
Source:
‘Africa fails by not exposing corruption’. The Natal Witness (South Africa), June 12, 2003.
The More Stating the Obvious about Africa by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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