Dambisa Moyo. DEAD AID: why aid is not working and how there is a better way for Africa. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. Pp. 188. $24.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-374-13956-8.

“The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth,” Dambisa Moyo writes in her polemic. Pop stars like Bono and Bob Geldof may attract millions of donors and dollars while singing for aid and debt relief, but Africa continues to lag behind in every aspect. Moyo explains that the Marshall Plan, which re-financed a badly damaged European infrastructure after World War Two, is the wrong model for assisting Africa, which lacks infrastructure altogether. Emergency humanitarian aid notwithstanding, systemic aid is encouraging corruption, bureaucracy and dysfunction. Expansive loans engender expansive debt. Read the rest of this entry »

Buy me

Helene Cooper tells us pre-revolutionary Liberian society rivaled Victorian England when it came to matters of social correctness, as she describes a privileged 1970’s childhood at her family’s main residence in Liberia, a twenty-two room behemoth over-looking the Atlantic, called Sugar Beach. Cooper is a direct descendant of the freed American slaves whom sailed from New York to Monrovia in 1820. Unwelcome in both the United States and Africa, these free men of color founded Liberia with blood, sweat and firearms. After the free men subjugated the indigenous tribes, they installed themselves as the ruling class, their new tribe called ‘the Congo’, until two brutal revolutions destroyed Liberia one hundred and fifty years later.

Cooper’s mother takes in a local impoverished girl, Eunice, from the Bassa tribe as a foster daughter. Fostering was a common idea for Liberia’s elite ruling class. At first we see Eunice habitually running away—Eunice’s Bassa mother dutifully marching her back to the Congo Coopers, knowing Eunice can only move out of poverty by living at Sugar Beach. Eunice becomes a sort of doppelganger to Cooper, passim: what if Cooper had instead been born into a lower class? Read the rest of this entry »

Crude World: the Violent Twilight of Oil

 The thought that our world may currently be at peak oil production is an idea widely debated. Irrespective of political and social belief systems, mathematically and pragmatically, a time of peak oil will certainly happen. Known quantities of existing mineral deposits are considered national secrets to oil producing countries, so accurate estimates have not been readily availed. Hard data on remaining oil reserves are elusive, and the speculators can only proffer an educated guess on what is left.

While the US imports more oil from Canada than any other nation in the world, implying a sense of security due to friendly relations, Maass does not see the Alberta tar sands as a viable solution to impending oil shortages. Further, these Alberta hydrocarbon extraction programmes are considered an environmental disaster. Nor do Venezuelan deposits of heavy oil appear likely to succour the ache of exerted supergiant oil fields in the Gulf nations. It’s running out. Saudi Arabia, with twenty-one per cent of the world’s known oil reserves, may have sufficient quantities to last several more generations, but problems related to shortages will start long before the last few drops of petroleum are extracted from the Arabian Peninsula. Read the rest of this entry »