I’m 
... on In Africabeat, a blogger posts M7′s comments from a recent meeting with Indian business men:
“The Europeans waste a lot of our time coming here talking about aid,” he said. “We told them: if you talk about aid, I go to sleep. What we need is market access — open your markets to our products.”
Obviously, M7 has an agenda when it comes to these things – he’s trying to decrease aid dependency through increasing investment and exports, a theoretically good plan. But, I’m waiting to see the demand for matooke on the European market.
(Speaking of matooke, according to Bananalink, Ugandans are the single largest consumers of bananas ANYWHERE, and most of it is for local consumption rather than export. NOTE: not from Banana Link, but from a recent interview I did with International Institute for Tropical Agriculture, though some small 2 percent of bananas are exported, its mainly for regional trade within East Africa.)
Much ink has been spilled, and much blog space filled, with discussions on the efficacy of aid. I won’t spill too much more because I’m certainly no expert, so I’ll just provide you with this example of a recent aid project:
Nigerian school without power receives 300 laptops
LAGOS (AFP) – A Nigerian school has received a gift of 300 laptops — one per pupil — but has no electricity to power them up, the official News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported Friday.Ndidi Nnoli-Edozien, coordinator of the One-Laptop-Per-Child programme (OLPC) that donated the computer, said the two-block Galadima Primary School in the centre of the federal capital Abuja had no electricity.
Do I even need to comment???? Waiting for your comments… Perhaps a more in-depth aid post to follow.
The 27th Comrade says:
Museveni is generally right on that. The only hole is that West hasn’t yet paid up for the robbery that has been going and still goes on. I mean, the brain drain can’t be paid back, or even blamed on them, for example, but the rest of the things are in dollars … ;o)
You know, I am slightly angered by the West’s seemingly perverse insistence on `reaching out to Africa’, when it is clear the problem is the West.
Why don’t they just leave us alone? Do we really need aid? If so, what has aid helped with, thus far?
It is one thing to get inflated by that superiority complex the West is showing, trying to sweat the superman instinct on poor Africa, trying to heal the ego and conscience with cheap, vain, empty handouts that will cause more pain and tears than they will heal … and it is a completely-different thing to actually help a people. If the West was so bent on helping Africa, why is it so hard for them to drop the `debts’ and cut their subsidies? Because they aren’t trying to help Africa. Photo opportunities and a chance to dump toxic laptops off is all they get from helping Africa.
Read `The Confessions of an Economic Hitman’.
Come, O Bright Revolution!
Okay, you will be spared on the day of the Great Conquest. You and Dave (since one can’t really have survived without the other … ;o) ). I’ll see to it that you are ferried to safety before we drop the Bomb.
)
[Reply]
— July 3, 2007 @ 3:37 pm