End ‘Global Apartheid’ Call Heralds Earth Summit

26 Aug, 2002 by John Hawkins

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End ‘Global Apartheid’ Call Heralds Earth Summit: Poor Colin Powell got stuck with having to represent the Bush administration at the Earth Summit and I’m sure he’s already sick of listening to idiots like South African President Thabo Mbeki,

“This is a world in which a rich minority enjoys unprecedented levels of consumption, comfort and prosperity while a poor majority enjoys daily hardship, suffering, dehumanization,” he said.

“Our common and decisive victory against domestic apartheid confirms that you, the peoples of the world, have both a responsibility and a possibility to achieve a decisive victory against global apartheid.”

Now that’s gratitude for you. I mean the West pumps something like 50-60 billion dollars in ODA money and who knows how much in loans and charity into Africa every year and yet we’re committing “global apartheid.” To be honest, we might as well have dumped all that money in the ocean for all the good it’s done. Look at some of these stats from a July 30 Business Week story,

“Detailing the continent’s woes, the document says child immunization rates in sub-Saharan Africa have fallen below 50 per cent.

Some 20 African countries, with more than half the region’s people, are poorer now than in 1990, and 23 are poorer than in 1975.

The Human Development Balance Sheet, contained in the Human Development Report 2002 issued last week said that during the 1990s, the number of people living in extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa rose from 242 million to 300 million.

By the end of 2000, 22 million people had died of Aids, 90 per cent in developing countries and 75 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.

The report adds that at the current rate, it would take more than 130 years to rid the world of hunger.”

The West cannot carry Africa on it’s back. We just don’t have enough money to pull that many people out of poverty. Even if we did, they’d need it EVERY year to stay afloat because the entire continent is a wasteland.

Africa’s only hope is to emulate the West and do the things that we did to become successful. Learn to love Democracy, capitalism, a free press, the rule of law and globalism. Until Africa adopts these Western practices they are going to stay mired in poverty in despair and there isn’t anything the West is going to be able to do about it in the foreseeable future. But in the interim, while we’re waiting for a Western renaissance in Africa, shut up about “global apartheid” and try saying “thank you” Mbeki…