Posted on 12/01/2016 10:07:57 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Africa is still battling “transitional periods,” from slavery and colonialism, to neocolonialism and eco-imperialism. Its wars, diseases and suffering will never end until we stop having greedy leaders who only care about their families, cronies and tribal members.
The continent has enough natural resources to bring peace, health and prosperity to nearly everyone. And yet 90% of Africans still lack electricity and basic necessities, while corrupt leaders who could help transform our nations embezzle billions and leave parents and children starving and poor.
From Rwanda and Liberia to the Sudan and Uganda, we see every day the horrible effects of war – crippled men, widowed women, orphaned children and frail old people, without hands and legs, with slash marks all over their bodies. They struggle as scavengers, collapse and perish from hunger and disease, while politicians get rich.
Meanwhile, environmental activists, western powers and UN agencies dictate what issues are important – and use them to keep us poor and deprived: manmade climate change, no GMO foods, no DDT to prevent malaria, using wind and solar power and never building coal, natural gas or nuclear power plants. This is a criminal trick that denies us our basic rights to affordable energy, jobs and modern living standards.
Earlier this year, in South Sudan, I saw thousands of starving people suffering from war wounds, malaria, meningitis, hepatitis, vitamin deficiencies, cholera and other diseases. Here in Uganda, I see hundreds trying to survive and recover from these diseases, heart attacks, diabetes, kidney failure and cancer, receiving little or no medication and terribly inadequate care in hospitals and clinics that are falling apart and don’t even have window screens or safe running water.
In January 2015, I was in Kampala’s Mulago Hospital caring for my friend and mentor, Cyril Boynes, who was dying from a stroke and kidney failure. The doctors and nurses tried to save him, but they had old, broken equipment and constantly battled electricity failures. Many times, the power went out, the lights and equipment stopped working, and people died before the electricity came back on.
For those who cannot fly to Europe for care, death does not distinguish between rich and poor, Ugandan or foreign. The same terrible facilities and lack of medicine affect everyone. In a world with so much money, technology and knowledge, there is no reason this should continue, year after year.
Before war broke out in South Sudan in 2013, there was some stability and a lot of nongovernmental organizations, companies like Ford Motor Company, private investors and other people arrived to do business. Many thought they could earn good profits, and some succeeded.
Some East African people in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, the Republic of Congo and other countries around South Sudan received new opportunities and skills. They were able to feed their families, send their children to school, pay medical bills and cover other expenses.
But today there is war and economic recession, oil prices have collapsed, and Ford and other companies closed their operations and left. Some 80% of the people again have no jobs. Their families are again impoverished and starving.
In South Sudan, most people still practice primitive subsistence farming. A UN Development Program report says 90% of the land in South Sudan is suitable for agriculture, but less than 5% of it is cultivated. This is because oil was the primary source of income for the country, the economy has collapsed, and few farmers have modern equipment, fertilizers or seeds to make any profits.
If South Sudanese people have electricity at all, it is from small diesel-powered generators for homes, businesses and hospitals. It is not sufficient, it’s available only some of the time, and there is almost no electricity outside of Juba and other big towns. Few people have motor fuels either, for cars or farm machinery, and the land is too vast to be cultivated by hand hoe or animals.
Calls for us to live “sustainably,” use wind and solar and biofuel power, and never use fossil fuels, are a demand that we accept prolonged starvation and death in our poor countries. They mean desperate people will do horrible things to survive, even just another day.
In 2006, I met a lady in Mulago Hospital whose son was dying from malaria. The Congress of Racial Equality people I was with asked her if she knew that DDT could help prevent malaria, by keeping diseased mosquitoes from coming into their homes. She said, yes, “but DDT is bad for the environment,” so she opposed using it.
It is crazy how lies about this chemical have made mothers willing to let their children die, rather than spray it on their homes. Malaria has killed millions of people in Uganda and is still the number-one killer disease in Africa. Over 1,000 babies and mothers die every day from this disease. We protect the environment from imaginary problems and die from environmental diseases.
What good is having an environment without people, without me and you?
In 2010, 32 coal miners where shot dead in South Africa. They were protesting for salary increases, which the mine owners and South African government said they could not afford, because of the terrible world economy and low coal prices. Meanwhile, the miners’ families are starving.
Our government is planning to construct a pipeline from western Uganda to Tanzania. The project could employ over 15,000 people. Along with other oil operations, it will boost our economy and give us more critically needed energy. But some agencies and organizations oppose it because it would “contribute to global warming,” and they would rather see us remain poor beggars to the West.
Like these “environmental” activists, African leaders do not care about the well-being of our citizens. They are incompetent, greedy, callous criminals, driven by ideologies and a love of power over people.
They love their armies and fast cars, treat their own people like terrorists, and have betrayed our continent. They pay no attention to the most critical and fundamental needs and concerns of people who are jobless, poor, hungry, and at the mercy of diseases and the environment. They do not care that most of their people never have clean water, a decent home, enough food to live, or electricity for even one light bulb and a tiny refrigerator.
In 2007, Cyril Boynes organized a 332-kilometer (206-mile) people’s march from Kampala to Gulu, Uganda, to support using DDT to eradicate malaria. This year, I participated in a march from Gulu to Kampala, to remember those who suffered during the long war with Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army, to honor my mother, who walked 20 km every day so that her children could eat and live – and to promote health and prosperity for our country and continent.
When will that day come? When will politicians and activists who say their care about the world’s poor stop worrying about global warming, pesticides and GMO crops – and start helping us get the energy, food, medical facilities, technology, jobs and economic growth we need to improve our lives?
When they get an ugrade to their IQ. Hate to say it because nature is cruel.
Brought to you by the same people who decry the advancements in western civilization
Actually if you read the article ( the author is African), it isn’t their collective IQ’s that is the problem.
The relatively well off environmental activists in rich countries use exaggerated, imaginary or phony environmental concerns and fake disasters to justify laws, regulations and excuses not to let poor countries use fossil fuels or nuclear power or develop their economies.
They tell Africans that they should only use renewable energy. They say nuclear power is dangerous, and oil, gas and coal are dirty and cause dangerous climate change.
They don’t seem to think or care about the poverty, diseases and starvation that Africans suffer because they do not have fossil fuels.
And when they talk about renewable energy, they mean the very limited energy – and economic growth – that come from wind and solar power, or from growing crops for energy instead of to feed our hungry people. They even oppose hydroelectric power for poor nations.
They are rich and well fed, enjoying amazing homes and jobs and technologies in their modern countries. But they tell poor Africans (and other people) that they must limit our energy and dreams to whatever can come from expensive, insufficient kinds of energies to serve our large and growing populations. This is greedy and selfish, the kind of attitude of people who only think of themselves.
I hate to sound callous, and in a world of richness, those who have more than enough should care if others are starving. But as long as Africa can’t produce one invention or development-one better mousetrap-which will have the world coming to their door, instead of always being in the position of being the petitioner, their plight will never end. It’s how the world is.
Never. They have the best interests of the Africans at heart and will never be dissuaded, despite the disastrous results. And when you get right down to it, the victims are almost all black, so their loss does not matter to the liberals.
Hey Steve,
Africa is returning to it’s roots. Animal level subsistence and violent tribal interactions...Add islam and china to that mix and it’s time to nuke it from orbit.
Nature is cruel. I know the problem. It is fundamentally unsolvable and any open discussion about the problem is a one way street to societal purgatory.
I believe this is a lot of the problem in Africa too. This article was posted on FR last night:
http://nypost.com/2016/04/16/how-saudi-arabia-undermines-the-united-states/
Some of the problem is due to the artificial borders that were drawn by the European powers during colonial times.
Different - and often warring - tribes were thrown together in the same country. Each tribe had its own culture, with its own leadership, and no melting-pot traditions. That’s a recipe for constant conflict.
No matter what the libs might say, there is not strength in diversity.
Surprised that the author didn’t also point to a certain cult that seeks to drive society to 12th century lifestyle complemented with violence, fear, suffering and death.
Shameful to see what the continent is vs. what is could/should be.
Exactly. And those who might give a damn are put in an untenable position-one of being forced to pretend to an across-the -board “equality” of human resoucefulness, while at the same time always having to succor those who are their supposed equals in every way, including desired outcomes. I’m not equal to Donald Trump in smarts, and I don’t expect to force him to pretend that I am while at the same time demanding that he support me.
How many thousands of years did humans live on earth before they organized themselves to build cities and organize themselves into autocrat-led societies in the Levant and China? How many more hundreds of years passed before elements of democracy were tested? How many more hundreds passed before private property was allowed? And one’s own labor on one’s own private property was allowed to be exploited for one’s self? And the nation-state? And rule by consent of the governed?
We live in anomalous times. The history of man’s social and political affairs is one of a long period of being solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, and a very short period where only a minority experienced decent health and wealth and freedom.
I don’t know if Charles Murray’s Bell Curve is the biggest culprit here, but it does give one pause.
Never
IQ ? They need DDT. The West is refusing it to them.
After the first paragraph, a really good read. This guy “gets it”. What a surprise.
Modern environmentalism is the cruelest form or racism, inflicting hunger and disease on poor people to advance the cultural values of the rich.
Yes, IQ is a big factor but not the only one. There’s little hope for a population not motivated enough to put screens on their windows.
It’s very sad. The continent is rich in natural resources. Unfortunately, the gene pool isn’t one of those resources.
The original anti-Semites used to say Jews were filthy and stupid. It's amazing what a couple of generations good nutrition and competent education can do for a race's average IQ.
The jews precarious existence across europe for hundreds of years elevated their IQs in a big way.
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