‘They Eat Money’: How Graft Enriches Mandela’s Political Heirs And this is a worthy target for financial and development aid?
Is this someone’s idea of a bad joke? We’re supposed to allocate foreign aid to South Africa to rectify “decades of white/apartheid” oppression? Apartheid ends, majority rule begins, the world rejoices. Watch it squandered away.
This is not how I want my tax dollars spent.
You can’t start a thread with “Look at this article…isn’t it a disgrace?”. What’s the broad outline, so I don’t need to open a link before I have any clue whether it’s worth reading?
On the “tax dollars” thing, I gather a lot of US aid to africa is actually just spent on american contractors, suppliers etc anyway. Which is an issue in itself, but at least limits how much graft can happen at the africa end, plus almighty jabs.
A large part of that corruption was facilitated by Western companies, so it’s a bit hypocritical to single out just the South Africans and not, say, the McKinseys, SAPs, Thyssen-Krupps, BAEs and Saab-Gripens of the world. It takes two to tango, in corruption, after all.
You do realize that only a trivial percentage of your tax dollars goes to foreign aid in total, right? Around 0.16%. (If I was in charge it would probably be 100x that, but that’s a different story).
Anyway, America has its forms of corruption too, it just takes different forms than what you might see in a developing or semi developed country.
I have no strong opinions about corruption or about Transparency International, and I’ve never been that interested in looking into the matter, but they rank South Africa as about 64th in the world, so in the top half of countries and close to being in the top third. Certainly not one of the worst.
Fortunately the courts and the press in South Africa are still operating at least somewhat independently, so it isn’t as bad as in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. But corruption scandals have threatened the ANC’s hold on power, as they have lost elections in SA’s three most important cities. (Cite.)
A lot depends on the general elections in 2019.
Regards,
Shodan
Yet you have no problem with the whopping 21% of our tax money that goes to the military industrial complex? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that we need a strong defense, but we should be getting it for half that amount of money.
The arms dealers of this nation are making a fortune off the tax payers. Here’s just one example:
Pentagon Buries Evidence of $125 billion in Bureaucratic Waste
African countries aren’t as corrupt (in general) as a lot of people think (South Africa ranks as less corrupt than Greece and the Balkans on the index I cited), and there’s more corruption than you would think outside Africa too. That being said, whether or not corruption is a problem in a country isn’t the most important factor in whether development aid is a good idea. Because costs of living in poor countries are lower than they are elsewhere, any dollar that gets donated to Africa is going to have a much bigger impact than a dollar spent on aid or social services elsewhere (I’ve heard a back of the envelope estimate to the effect you can educate twelve children in West Africa for the cost of educating one here). Even if 70% of your aid dollar got ‘squandered’, and I don’t think it’s close to that, the 30% that gets through the filter is still going to have a massive impact on people’s lives.
What is the debate here?
There are two parts.
A. Should there be such a thing as helping others?
B. Is wasting money a good idea?
“Yes” and “no” respectively. Who would answer otherwise? I know you’re not the OP, but are these really debatable propositions?
In any event the central premise of the OP, such as it is, is flawed. The article linked in the OP,which makes zero reference to any misappropriation of any foreign aid (which in any event is provided for specific projects and not for the state to dispense as it deems fit) funds and was clearly used by the OP as a sounding board for his misplaced rant.
Again, I ask: what is the debate here?
The courts are operating completely independently, as they should. (as is the press) The problem is that the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) isn’t and they determine what criminal matters are brought before the courts. Not for nothing is NPA head Shaun Abrahams called Shaun the Sheep.
Although the article linked by the OP is good in many respects, it does downplay what President Ramaphosa has achieved so far, the tightrope he has to walk on to negotiate different factions in the ANC and the high regard he is held in by many South Africans, including opposition voters. The ANC will recover many lost voters and will win in 2019, whilst the opposition Democratic Alliance will lose many voters due to handling of internal divisions and Cape Town’s water crisis.
I agree with you.
Whether or not the next Sean Hannity program should focus on this issue, or Donald Trump’s version of corruption.
I think it’s probably meant to be something like “I’d rather my corruption dollar was spent locally by a nice Middle Aged White Man like Scott Pruitt, than in some foreign shithole”, but maybe the OP could return and clarify?
I’m sure the ANC would prefer to continue to steal the money. The question is whether we should overlook it and try and change the subject.
For all the screeching that happens when “Black Lives Matter” gets the response that all lives matter, I would have thought that “Black Corruption Matters” wouldn’t be turned aside with “All Corruption Matters”.
Regards,
Shodan
Quick poll: everyone who thinks that the typical way that the U.S. deals out foreign aid is by simply giving money to other governments? Please raise your hand. OP, I’m pretty sure you should raise yours.
Substantial corruption in third world governments has been generally accepted for decades. I am surprised this was the first time the OP read such an article.
Who said the South African corruption was Black corruption? It’s been quite multiracial, actually.
No, there aren’t.
Helping others is one thing. Giving money to people who’d squander them and use them in ways opposed to our intentions is, at least, debatable.
Also, the massive aid funds used in Africa for decades on end have done next to nothing to even make a dent on Africa’s problems. If the money is wasted while empowering the people who cause the problem then “at least 30%” is meaningless, because the other 70% is used in damaging those guys.
The money serves the political power of the ANC to continue to be corrupt.
Aid programs sound nice on paper, but in reality they seldom work unless it’s a specific emergency.
After 40 years in Peru, the UNICEF office here found out that, despite the myriad of programs they’d done over time, their final effect was, basically, zero. This, without massive corruption issues.
Here in Peru we have a program called “vaso de leche” (glass of milk) in which the government gave poor people a glass of milk for children and elderly people. It sounds nice and everything if you don’t know that Peruvians are, massively, lactose intolerant after age two. So, instead of nutrition, you get diarrhea.
Also, some of the programs, after decades, have become so corrupt that you get people driving their own cars to get free milk, supposedly for the really poor.
And for fuck’s sake, can we not turn every thread into a Trump/US thing? It serves no purpose.
I mean, “Ghana’s president rapes babies and then burns them alive” is answered two posts later by “Ann Coulter does like sucking Trump’s dick before commenting on something”