The forum seems to have hit a bit of a lull, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring and say that, apart from stating the bleedin' obvious, which is that cancelling Third World debt is a good idea, Saint Bob is really getting on my tits.
We have a series of programmes devoted to watching him meandering around bits of Africa, droning on about how lovely it all is, what super people all Africans are, and how all the poverty around them would disappear if we cancelled their various countries' debts. Right, so giving their various countries' treasuries millions of pounds in charity 20 years ago didn't really help much, did it, Bobster? No, because it went largely to fund the high living of an elite, it got frittered away on one-off programmes that died through lack of maintenance, and it failed utterly to pour funds in to address the single worst thing affecting sub-Saharan Africa today (or, put another way, mostly non-Muslim Africa), which is AIDS.
The programme last night presented by Sierra Leone-born Sorious Samura, working for a month as an orderly in Lewaniki Hospital in Mongu, Zambia, more than anything showed the desperate state that country is becoming mired in, simply because African men refuse to wear condoms, and because they equally won't constrain themselves to one partner. Sorious tried to reason with young males and females in bars, busily drinking themselves into a stupour, before lurching off into the night to have a quickie with the nearest available member of the opposite sex. Neither man nor woman would be using 'protection'. Those already aware they were HIV-positive weren't going to bother, because they were 'dying anyway', so what was the point?
I'm not entirely happy about the continuing flow of earnest white people forever pointing out Africa as poverty-stricken. People seem to forget that the great continent contains many countries which are anything BUT poor - either in natural resources, or in their current economies. North African countries are never shown in these films - Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Gambia, Mauritania, in fact, virtually the whole upper third of the land mass, seems to be bypassed in order to fixate upon countries which were once self-sufficient and healthy, but are now reduced to poverty levels by government mismanagement, ignorance, and the long-term refusal to admit that swathes of the continent are AIDS-infected due to a lack of will on behalf of Church and State leaders to change old social habits.
Instead of wittering on about the 'luminous continent', as if any of us still refer to it as the Dark Continent (and that actually was a Victorian reference to it being dark as in 'unknown', or 'in the dark', not a physical or racial comment), bypassing facts in order to promote his own subjective viewpoint, perhaps Saint Bob should spend a month doing what Sorious did, at the end of his tether with blighted lives, dead babies, dying children, and watch ruined communities now becoming dysfunctional, moribund and more and more DEPENDENT on Western hand-outs, not less, because of the rout of this vile disease.
Cancelling the debts was no big issue - they were never going to be paid back anyway, they barely amounted to the cost of one really good old crash-bang-wallop war or invasion, and it throws a sop to do-gooders who think that it is the reason for (certain parts of) Africa's enfeebled condition.
Mugabe has reduced Zimbabwe, once the envy of central Africa, to peasantry and feudalistic tribalism. Is the 'West' going to give him a fat hand-out to 'help' put the country back on its feet again? I hope to goodness, NO. Get him out of office, like Amin, or Bokassa, by all means. Induce white Zimbabweans back to run the agricultural backbone of the country's economy, for the sake of ALL Zimbabweans, YES. Ensure that all AIDS-wasted countries get ALL the drugs they need - yes, but also a heavy-duty sexual awareness programme to go with them.
If Bob wants to be able, in future, to roam about an Africa which isn't decimated by mad rulers and sexually-irresponsible men, he ought to rant against the African countries which are NOT helping each other, which are NOT speaking out against the mad rulers, and which are NOT seriously trying to change their old sexual practices - and which should NOT be constantly portrayed as the begging-bowl of the world. They were not, for several decades, and it's a damn disgrace that, free from colonialism, some governments are trying to play an entirely false card and present themselves as poor souls, previously exploited. The only exploitation going on in bits of Africa is by Africans, against Africans, but Saint Bob might need to call upon Saint Jude to save them.
We have a series of programmes devoted to watching him meandering around bits of Africa, droning on about how lovely it all is, what super people all Africans are, and how all the poverty around them would disappear if we cancelled their various countries' debts. Right, so giving their various countries' treasuries millions of pounds in charity 20 years ago didn't really help much, did it, Bobster? No, because it went largely to fund the high living of an elite, it got frittered away on one-off programmes that died through lack of maintenance, and it failed utterly to pour funds in to address the single worst thing affecting sub-Saharan Africa today (or, put another way, mostly non-Muslim Africa), which is AIDS.
The programme last night presented by Sierra Leone-born Sorious Samura, working for a month as an orderly in Lewaniki Hospital in Mongu, Zambia, more than anything showed the desperate state that country is becoming mired in, simply because African men refuse to wear condoms, and because they equally won't constrain themselves to one partner. Sorious tried to reason with young males and females in bars, busily drinking themselves into a stupour, before lurching off into the night to have a quickie with the nearest available member of the opposite sex. Neither man nor woman would be using 'protection'. Those already aware they were HIV-positive weren't going to bother, because they were 'dying anyway', so what was the point?
I'm not entirely happy about the continuing flow of earnest white people forever pointing out Africa as poverty-stricken. People seem to forget that the great continent contains many countries which are anything BUT poor - either in natural resources, or in their current economies. North African countries are never shown in these films - Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Gambia, Mauritania, in fact, virtually the whole upper third of the land mass, seems to be bypassed in order to fixate upon countries which were once self-sufficient and healthy, but are now reduced to poverty levels by government mismanagement, ignorance, and the long-term refusal to admit that swathes of the continent are AIDS-infected due to a lack of will on behalf of Church and State leaders to change old social habits.
Instead of wittering on about the 'luminous continent', as if any of us still refer to it as the Dark Continent (and that actually was a Victorian reference to it being dark as in 'unknown', or 'in the dark', not a physical or racial comment), bypassing facts in order to promote his own subjective viewpoint, perhaps Saint Bob should spend a month doing what Sorious did, at the end of his tether with blighted lives, dead babies, dying children, and watch ruined communities now becoming dysfunctional, moribund and more and more DEPENDENT on Western hand-outs, not less, because of the rout of this vile disease.
Cancelling the debts was no big issue - they were never going to be paid back anyway, they barely amounted to the cost of one really good old crash-bang-wallop war or invasion, and it throws a sop to do-gooders who think that it is the reason for (certain parts of) Africa's enfeebled condition.
Mugabe has reduced Zimbabwe, once the envy of central Africa, to peasantry and feudalistic tribalism. Is the 'West' going to give him a fat hand-out to 'help' put the country back on its feet again? I hope to goodness, NO. Get him out of office, like Amin, or Bokassa, by all means. Induce white Zimbabweans back to run the agricultural backbone of the country's economy, for the sake of ALL Zimbabweans, YES. Ensure that all AIDS-wasted countries get ALL the drugs they need - yes, but also a heavy-duty sexual awareness programme to go with them.
If Bob wants to be able, in future, to roam about an Africa which isn't decimated by mad rulers and sexually-irresponsible men, he ought to rant against the African countries which are NOT helping each other, which are NOT speaking out against the mad rulers, and which are NOT seriously trying to change their old sexual practices - and which should NOT be constantly portrayed as the begging-bowl of the world. They were not, for several decades, and it's a damn disgrace that, free from colonialism, some governments are trying to play an entirely false card and present themselves as poor souls, previously exploited. The only exploitation going on in bits of Africa is by Africans, against Africans, but Saint Bob might need to call upon Saint Jude to save them.
