Fukuyama on Dead Aid

By | May 13, 2009
8 Comments

Fukuyama wrote a review of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, and the somewhat less popular The Challenge for Africa by Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. The following paragraph raises a very important issue about the problem with African countries.

The roots of Africa’s political malaise go far deeper than the post-independence foreign-aid regime. Unlike East Asia before its encounter with colonialism, more than half of sub-Saharan Africa was not governed by a state structure at the time of the European scramble for Africa that began in the 1870s. The Europeans built colonial institutions on the cheap, seeking to govern vast tracts of territory with skeleton administrations. The big man of contemporary African politics is in many ways a colonial creation, since Europeans sought to rule indirectly by empowering a series of local dictators to carry out their purposes. And, finally, colonialism imposed a set of irrational borders on their colonies. South Sudan fought a 30-year civil war with the regime in Khartoum only because a long-dead British administrator in Cairo didn’t want to offend Egypt by giving it to Uganda, where it more naturally belonged.

The more I read these reviews the more I think I should order a copy of Dead Aid. In fact I am going to do that now.

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8 thoughts on “Fukuyama on Dead Aid”

  1. Seye Abimbola

    Have you read William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden? If you haven’t, I suggest you look it up.

  2. Seye Abimbola

    Have you read William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden? If you haven’t, I suggest you look it up.

  5. Judi

    hi,
    did you order it already? if not, we could get it for the institute’s library. i would be interested in having a look at it for my seminar.
    btw: did you come up with any idea rgd. a film about “development” i could show to my students?
    cu tomorrow,
    judi

  6. Judi

    hi,
    did you order it already? if not, we could get it for the institute’s library. i would be interested in having a look at it for my seminar.
    btw: did you come up with any idea rgd. a film about “development” i could show to my students?
    cu tomorrow,
    judi

  7. Judi

    … i mean the dead aid book, of course, not the white man’s burden …

  8. Judi

    … i mean the dead aid book, of course, not the white man’s burden …

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