Tag: Africa

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Pro Bono

U2 singer Paul David Hewson, best known by his stage name Bono, has come to recognize that capitalism is crucial in lifting people out of poverty in any permanent way.

He now calls institutionalized charity like foreign aid only a “stopgap,” not a basic cure for poverty — an understanding perhaps still too generous, since such aid can prevent needed economic and other reforms and thus help entrench poverty.

In any case, for decades Bono has both raised money from individuals for international charity and chastised government officials whose policies seemed too stingy (in spending other people’s money). Now he is surprised to be touting the pivotal virtues of money-making and entrepreneurship.

“Rock star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce — entrepreneurial capitalism — takes more people out of poverty than aid. Of course we know that.” (See a clip of these words.)

The rock star’s epiphany came after a TED talk a few years ago by George Ayittey, in which the speaker “made a special effort to rip into the foreign aid establishment,” knowing that Bono was in the audience. When the star came up after the talk to express his disagreement, Ayittey gave him a copy of his ideology-changing book Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Development.

Perspectives unchained by myth and politics are a good idea too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Save Herds, Save Hunting

Ideas of local control and popular government are perennially revived on both the right and the left. But we don’t often enough export those ideas, especially to areas of endeavor like wildlife preservation.

Considering the sorry state of so much wildlife, especially in Africa, you’d think decentralization and citizen control might more often be trotted out.

Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan, writing for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, argue that devolving hunting rights down to the village level in Africa would almost certainly help preserve wildlife stocks. It’s worked pretty well in Zimbabwe, while Kenya, which prohibited hunting instead of managing it, saw “its population of wild animals [decline] between 60 and 70 percent.”

The usual wildlife policy advocated in the West might as well be called wildlife colonialism. It combines a heavy dose of moralism with a heavy-handed, top-down authoritarianism — the last thing we want to encourage in African governments for other matters. And it doesn’t work for preservation. With it, local communities have no stake in wildlife management, so wildlife degrades through poaching and habitat encroachment.

Far better to provide people in Africa — in villages and towns and in the stretches between them — incentives to keep stocks of elephants and lions and apes and monkeys and what-have-you healthy.

Hunters kill animals, yes — but, with the right incentives, can help save whole species. As Anderson and Regan put it, “if it pays, it stays.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Niger’s Presidential Term Limits

Until recently, things had been looking up for Niger. Europe provides the nation with quite a bit of dough. Uranium is being mined there. Money money money.

Alas, that money perhaps explains President Mamadou Tandja’s dissolution of parliament several months ago. There had been no perceived threat. There was just the institution itself. And it did not want to go along with Tandja’s no-term-limit notion.

So then the 71-year-old leader trotted out his constitutional revisions to the people themselves, in a vote held in early August. But a huge segment of the voting population didn’t trust the man. After dissolving parliament, the stink of a power grab was upon him.

Many, many Niger voters boycotted the referendum.

With voter turnout way down, Tandja’s revisions won. But with a parliament suppressed, a boycott in play, and “ruler for life” on everybody’s lips, the whole thing smells bad. A whiff of it even caught the jaded noses of America’s news hounds.

In America, when leaders seek to escape term limits, media folks too often seem to support them. But, about Africa, anyway, even America’s most elitist media mavens realize that an end to term limits is a move to dictatorship.

Yes, at least regarding African politics, virtually everyone in the U.S. can see that term limits are essential to democracy.

Not much of a bright side, but there it is.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.