Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Bandwagon Jumped

I could watch Dambisa Moyo all day... no, really, there's over 40 different interview videos of her on Youtube by every possible network. I'm embedding Riz Khan's interview from Al Jazeera cuz, as a radical Salafist, it's my favourite. Well, mostly I just like his intro music. Plus this one has that Bottom Billion dude on it too.

3 comments:

  1. I find her arrogant and out of touch... yes, she makes some interesting points on aid, but selling Zambia to China is not working either. Where is the middle ground?

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  2. I'm going to have to read her book before making any judgments, but her argument that aid hinders development seems truthful enough and, in a way, brave.

    Living in Lusaka with its crush of "white SUVs", fly-by-night children's charities, young foreign volunteers, massive corruption, nepotism and poorly managed NGOs is enough to make me very distrustful of the Bono orthodoxy.

    Every UNZA student's goal (and don't get me wrong this is the best guarantee of a secure future) is to become an aparatchik in a donor-funded government money sink or to be an NGO administrator.

    Where are the entrepreneurs and innovators?

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  3. Not sure, but they ain't coming from China, who is more interested in effectively stealing natural resources and bribing it's way into national road building contracts than creating meaningful jobs for Zambians. Corruption is certainly rampant in the aid community, but it's just as bad in the free market. In my mind Ms Moyo's solutions simply don't add up.

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