bug-eyed wonder

I see the pleas for aid have started again!
Zimbabwe seems to be affected this time. Hopefully all the lovely sympathy givers don't forget the events there previously. The "great" leader Robert Mugabe had no hesitation in ordering the murder and burning of white men,women and children out of their homes to reclaim the land for the black. This land appears to have been left unworked and let grow wild! [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img] Will someone please explain to me why the West should automatically be called upon to once again provide aid to a nation so inherently stupid that they cannot use a fraction of sense to provide for themselves?
I'll probably get moderated or flamed for this but I for one refuse to be drawn in by another barage of news coverage showing starving children covered in flies,when the governing bodies in these countries are so corrupt and narrow minded that these problems are brought upon by themselves.

Luke

BEW. Your right... They should Hang the M/Fkr. I for one ,wouldnt give a penny..Sick and tired of been asked for money in the street etc.They must sort their own problems out.

SWRTWannabe

Totally agree with you - it's a shame that the general population of a country suffer because of the people that run the country. I do remember hearing somewhere that despite the famine, Ethiopia had one of the more technologically advanced armies in Africa.

SL2

I don't think white people should own most of the farms in Zimbabwe but destroying your own country is fecking stupid beyond belief. Mugabe doesn't care about his people, only his own wealth and fighting wars. Something needs to happen to that guy. I have a friend from Zimbabwe and he has told me a lot about the recent problems. He is very worried for his dad as he is involved in the opposition party.

Mugabe

Trucker Ted

BEW your spot on mate ,but as usual our country with spineless do-gooders at the helm will offer them everything from £100 million to tea and bloody biscuits!

(always nice to see our taxes etc. being chucked away)

Spudgun VI

totally agree with bug eyed wonder. fukk 'em

David Lock

So you plan to deny helpless starving kids the chance of life because you don't like Mugabe?? They didn't vote Mugabe in and many of them have family that are now out of work because they were black farmworkers who got caught up in Mugabe's crazy and corrupt politics. Sure the West have a lot to answer for (and not just in Zimbabwe) but there are a lot of dedicated aid workers who do their level best working in appalling conditions and often at some risk to try and ensure that aid goes to the needy and not just into Swiss bank accounts. So PLEASE don't take it out on the poor and starving. Call me a grey haired do-gooder if you like but what you spend on your next tank of fuel would probably save a life or two (at least until the next time). DL

bug-eyed wonder

I wouldn't give money to help no matter who/what was the cause of their problems. It's just nice poetic justice that Zimbabwe is affected.
Perhaps the best aid to send would be contraceptives,stop them breeding and making the situation worse.

Miles

When I was in Angola about a month ago, I was hearing about the hypocrisy of the president there. Half the country is straving and in desperate need of food. The president lives in Brazil and only returns to Angola for their independence day. That doesn't stop him from creaming off approx $10million *a day* from the oil revenues, leaving the country to beg for food from UNICEF, etc. What a great guy, err not [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

Claudius

Why dont we do that to all the immigrants in our countries?

Because we're stupid enough to abide by the Geneva agreement...

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, fothermucker.

RaZe-=Buzz=-

"They didn't vote Mugabe in " ?

Neither did we, so why should we have to pay (AGAIN) for whats happening there? If they could stop killing each other for 2 minutes they might sort themselves out.

Charity begins at home. I'll make sure my OWN son, wife, family and friends dont starve first, thank you very much.

Pete Croney

It seems almost inconceivable that we are talking about ignoring millions of innocent peoples hunger, to spite Robert Mugabe.

But the alternative is to feed them and so wisper in his ear that he can torture and kill who he wants and the West won't mind.

This has been on the cards for 2 years. The harvest has failed because the farmers have been murdered or have fled. I can think of much more deserving causes for my charity donations.

Claudius

Natural selection means that the strong survive and the weak dont. It's NORMAL.

MarkO

Anyone see Mbeki's new order - a £37m executive jet, only a while after asking the IMO for £100m to help get the country out of major problems?

You gotta hand it to these guys just for the bare-faced cheek they show!

Brendan Hughes

One solution, a lot cheaper, was suggested by a colleague of mine who occupies a high government position in a country near Mr Mugabe's.

It's called a contract hit.

Disclaimer - I do not condone violence, yadda yadda...

BTW, I worked in international development aid for 6 yrs. All of you who don't know how international aid works, the countries giving are not completely philanthropic. Eg any 10 million pounds worth of food given by the British government will almost certainly be bought from British farmers, so it will be the govt spending taxpayers' money, yes, but effectively giving it back to the taxpayers. I remember explaining this to a cabbie from the airport once, and finally gave him a fiver tip on top of the 45 pound fare, provided he wrote me a receipt for it. When he thanked me, I explained "don't worry, it's not my money. In fact, it's probably yours."

He drove off a little confused

RB5SCOTT

**** em' let them starve. We should be sorting out our own countrys problems before anyone else's

I'm sorry but, 'Charity starts at home'

Luke

Well I hope the plane crashes.............. Who is providing the plane??? I'm going to send them a email.............

MichelleWRX1994

Assasination.

sebastian

So we should be sorting out our own problems first eh? .....Like only being the 4th largest economy in the world, only nearly at full employment, obesity killing us all off at 45, and the shocking price of super unleaded........

Mugabe is an evil tyrant, who has inflicted this on his innocent populace, and to say that women,children and their fathers should be just abandoned to slowly die is just as reprehensible. It is only pure probability and therefore down to luck that you were born in a civilsed country and not in such a hell hole.

Perhaps the UN/West should be as keen to get in and sort out Zimbabwe as it is Iraq for instance. Far more people are likely to suffer and die if nothing is done, than will ever do in Iraq which we are about to invade at huge cost.

Oh, and next time you're all admitted to hospital, remember to thank the Zimbabwean nurse who tends you - she was lured over here by Phony Tony, as British nurses won't work for the pathetic money they're paid and have left in droves. Or perhaps she should have been left to starve?

bug-eyed wonder

They will get help too, saw Yankee grain being off loaded on the news today!
I didn't intend to make it sound that Mugabe was the reason for my indifference to the plight in Africa. As has been raised, the people of these countries bring the majority of their problems on themselves through constant breeding and an apparent inability to plan for the times when drought does strike.


Brendan Hughes you've raised an interesting point. How exactly does the process work where British/European farmers gain from sending aid to these countries. Would this aid not be sent from the surplus mountains held in storage. Genuinely interested in how the aid process works.

bug-eyed wonder

I'm gonna have a rant on this too! [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img] Totally agree with the sh1te money paid to nurses here (got relatives in the profession), however 10 African nurses tested HIV positive in 1 training college recently. So would I prefer them to stay where they where or bring even more problems into Britain/Ireland? Form your own opinion on that one!

Molds

After traveling through many African countries by Landrover 96-97 I have to say it is hard not to become bitter about charity for these people.

Before I say too much I will concede that it is a great shame for the innocnets who do get tarred with the same brush as the rest, and do suffer. However...

My experience was that the attitude of so many black Africans was selfish and self destructive. This extends from the poorest nobody to anyone with the tiniest amount of power to a countries leader. People seem to forget it is not just the countries head man/women. Also why do you think the outcome is the same with every leader they have? This attitude runs deeply though every generation.

Heres a few short stories of my experiences for you: -

I saw so called officials taking bribes in the form of medicine from aid workers travelling to schools and hospitals. They had no idea what it was and didnt care it was for children. They simply saw it as a way of making a fast buck.

Don't know about love thy neighbour but I witnessed many examples of personal gain being sought by selling out a neighbour and/or family.

It seems all of black Africa only thinks by the day and have no regard for tomorrow.

I saw people peeing in rivers 50ft upstream from where women were washing and cleaning food pots. Then they have trouble with contamination and disease. Doh.

I was offered 2lb of rice for $10 US dollars in Mali. The guys family were the stereo typical skinny fly covered type. The rice pack was marked up as official aid!! I told him I would not pay $10. He would not barter lower and said an overland tourist truck was due through tomorrow. He didnt believe me when I told him the truck he was expecting had turned back in the last proper town because of flooding (we sank the landy to the top of the windsreen doing a river crossing just before that - another story). Next morning I was awonken by a so called friend of the other guy. He offered me the same rice pack (stolen now from his buddy) for $5US. I still said no. We left, expect the truck did not come and who knows if the first guys family lived till the next one.

Similar story of greed. I asked a group of Masai in Kenya if I could photo them. We had already fed a load of their kids. They said no, they wanted $5US for each picture!! What happened to the days of a Bic pen buying anything? Told em they could have $1 for as many pictures as I wanted. They said no, so I took the pics anyway and they got squat.

When you consider this attiutide from the poorest men you find you start to understand how this continent is in such a mess. Without a thought for tomorrow or a little love and courtesy for your fellows, what chance do you have?

This is all doom and gloom stuff so to finish let me just say that there is some small glimmer of hope. During my year there I did have some rare moments of amazing generosity and kindness from some wonderful, if poor, people.

Geez, I have got myself on one now. I must stop before I write a whole paper of for and against with personal conclusion

My in a nutshell finish must be to say charity is a personal thing. Do what you _feel_ you want to do.

Matt

Brendan Hughes

BEW, I can't comment too much on humanitarian aid, but I worked in technical assistance (fancy name for transfer of know-how), which is hated by the locals compared to financial assistance as there is never anything concrete to show for it; no schools or hospitals.

A country would be promised X million pounds' worth of aid. Those X million pounds would mainly pay the fees of the consultancy companies, who give about 50% to the consultants. Contracts state that consultants must be from the paying or paid country (and there are few qualified ones in the paid country, otherwise no need for the assistance), money spent on equipment to do the project (usually computers copiers and fax machines, occassionally a car) should be spent on equipment manufactured in the paying or paid country, etc etc. So the receiver gets the benefit of the consultants' knowledge, but most of the actual money goes back to the paying country. Hence my comment to the taxi driver.

Molds - of course these people only think of today and bugger tomorrow. If you grew up with their life expectancy, their political system, and their level of corruption, you wouldn't exactly put all your money in a trust fund, would you?

I had a whole load of friends in Russia who lost their life savings in the financial crash of Aug 98, many intelligent young people who were saving to do scholarships abroad and had been finally convinced to put their money in a bank rather than a mattress. They did, and lost 10-15 000 dollars each. For a 25 yr old in the UK, that would be pretty tragic. For someone with Russian earning potential, you can't even start to consider it. Now you go and try telling those people - who are way more intelligent than the average Brit - to plan for the future, see where they tell you to shove it.

BJH

David Lock

Re comments about how aid works. A brief overview is as follows.

1) Big international stuff like World Bank and International Development Agency. Largely support major projects e.g. dams, major agricultural programmes, education reform etc. Mostly paid for by long term country loans often tied to insistence by IMF that recipient country gets its economic act together which is a often a hard pill to swallow because of corruption at top. I was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when Governor of Bank (an IMF appointee) was murdered for being too compliant so it can get nasty. In my view many of these huge projects are ill conceived and money would be better spent on smaller projects.

2) Regional aid institutions such as African Development Bank that works in defined regions often combining with agencies like World Bank.

3) Individual countries such as UK although most British Aid now is via EC. Used to be tied to British goods unless they were not available in UK. Now more tied to EC manufacture. Example pumps for a water-engineering scheme would come from Europe and not say Far East (which would usually have been cheaper). Sometimes preference can be given if say pumps are manufactured in receiving country. Rules and regulations can become farcical. Some time ago British Government decided to purchase fuel to some West African countries under a British Aid programme (to lessen those countries foreign exchange expenditure). I was involved in this programme and was told that fuel supply had to come from UK source. In fact it would have been much cheaper to either give the countries the money directly or to buy the fuel in Abidjan but it had to come from UK despite extra cost and freight, ridiculous! BTW much aid does go into contraception and Aids prevention but even this isn’t straightforward as, for example, it gets undermined by Catholic attitudes to contraception.

4) Major charities, Save the Children, Red Cross etc. In my view pretty efficient these days and worthy of support.

5) Lesser charities often supported by church groups. Usually work on small carefully defined projects with dedicated in-country staff. These also deserve much credit IMHO.

The West stabilised and then ripped the heart out of a wonderful continent. It failed to put education at the top of the agenda and, of course, bullied generations of locals with a racial policy that has only recently been overturned. Ironically some of the black leaders are probably even more racist (witness Rwanda) but this being black on black doesn’t get such a bad press. Corruption is horrific but in some ways is simply a cruder version of what goes on in the West. If this wasn’t bad enough Aids, drought and war added to the awfulness.

I am not trying to sound clever and I certainly don’t have even the beginnings of the answers to the problems and maybe there aren’t any. As has been said in above thread I would question, for example, the West’s (especially USA’s) attitude to Saddam whose is a declared target for “elimination” whilst Mugabe seems intent on recreating the African equivalent of the holocaust without any serious challenge. However I do feel that we can’t simply give up on our fellow human beings. Apologies for going on ….

WRX Baker

Been to South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe & Zambia what beautiful countrys but being very much fcuked up by thier own people. I was told by a tour guide when travelling through a native village that had no running water etc, that all the money we send gets spent on new Merc's for the people in power!!!

Molds

>>>Molds - of course these people only think of today and bugger tomorrow. If you grew up with their life expectancy, their political system, and their level of corruption, you wouldn't exactly put all your money in a trust fund, would you?<<<

Agreed a trust fund won't help someone in Zaire when their currency gets devalued by 1000% over night etc. However, how do they ever expect anything to change if they never give a single thought to tomorrow, their neighbour, their friends? The problems they have now just pass on from generation to generation - viscious circle. Perhaps I am further embittered by a number of instances where I was told point blank it didnt matter if the local well got polluted or the crops werent worked and failed as they would just ask for more aid!! That is true, and from poor people. Black Africans need to re think their attitude if they ever want things to change.

Gordo

food for thought:

- there are already too many people in the world
- many environments cannot support the existing populations, never mind the ever expanding populations of the poor (who figure 'I can't eat and don't have a job, best have another child instead')
- natural selection is rightly in play here
- a world with a balanced ecosystem and a very happy/ healthy population would be a better place than an ever expanding population further buggering up the environment (the law of diminishing returns)
- charity is often an excuse for governments (including our own) to ignore their social responsibilities. e.g. would it become an election issue if there were homeless people on every corner not being fed by charity soup kitchens? of course it would
- a lot of charity donations are a way of the giver easing their conscience and trying to feel better about themselves rather than doing any good. e.g. cancer research - a) no one dies of old age any more and b) do these do gooders believe that a cure that would earn a fortune isn't already being vigorously researched by a large pharma?


this is not to say all charity is bad. my point is that a lot is ill-thought through, does little good and in some cases causes harm (e.g. my God-fearing grandmother knitting hats for the orphans in Bosnia - until I pointed out that with the bright colours it would make it easier for the snipers to spot them!).

every high street seems beset with charity do-gooders, bible bashers and survey takers, all breaking the law by making direct approaches down the street. time to stop the lot of them.

G

Claudius

Gordo,

thanks for explaining what I meant to say in detail using English

However, next time you steal my thoughts, I will have to pull my tongue at you

Luke

Some excellent replies ton this post..

mj

RB5SCOTT,

"**** em' let them starve"

a bit radical, but also very true. i realize the poor people are being brutalized by Mr mugabe, but is it not just a symptom of the third world mordern day life cycle, i.e:

1. Sh1tbag dictator lines his pockets at the expense of the nation.

2. people start to starve and die.

3. the west steps in.

4. loads of food, water and money.

5. everybody's happy again, so make lots of babies.

6. lots more mouths to feed, not enough food etc...

7. repeat step 1.