Foreign Aid

Terminate Foreign Aid

Mark Noonan1 Comment

Over on X I saw one of the Lefty accounts post the assertion that Trump’s termination of USAID had denied this particular little African boy (adorable picture included in post) the 12 cents a day he needs for his AIDS medicine. What a rat Trump is!

Let’s see…12 cents a day times 365 is $43.80 per year, $43.92 in a leap year…looked up the country in question and its been independent since 1960…and in 65 years of independence they can’t come up with less than fifty bucks a year for one of their own children.

Do you see the actual problem?

Another thing I saw was clips from this documentary being made about the Chinese doing a construction project in Congo. The parts shown dealt mostly with the Chinese needing to get two truck loads of gravel delivered so that they could repair the road and thus actually get on with the main project (don’t recall what that is – and its not important for this). The road had been built in 1950 by the Belgians when they were the colonial rulers of Congo. Through the clips what you find is that the Chinese are frustrated that the Congolese never spent a cent maintaining the road after the Belgians built it, that there is so much theft of material that they have to check inventory over and over again (like checking the gas tanks on trucks after driving between point A and point B because the Congolese were stopping along the way and having gas siphoned out), that the Congolese would pretty much stop working as soon as someone wasn’t directly watching them work…and that the contractor for the gravel kept on lying about his ability to deliver the goods.

First off: welcome to colonial overlordship, China! Enjoy. The Brits and French had to deal with this way back when.

Now, why is this failing? Why, ultimately, did the Chinese need to go through a whole dog and pony show to get gravel to repair a road which had been built 75 years previously by the Belgians?

Because neither the Belgian road nor the new Chinese construction project means anything to the Congolese people. Nothing organic, that is. As a means of robbing the Chinese blind, the construction project is awesome for the Congolese…and I’m sure they robbed the Belgians blind when the road was built. You can do that, you see? When you have complete outsiders butting into your little area of the world they are fair game…that is how it goes all across Africa and Asia. That is the rule and always has been…Out East your primary problem is going to be the locals seeing you as an ATM. But as a road or construction project, what the heck do the Congolese care about it? They didn’t need either before the Europeans or Chinese showed up and they aren’t going to make the ultimate profit out of whatever it is the Chinese or Europeans are trying to do.

And this is where I think the world went wrong in the post-colonial world: it is still colonial. Just without the responsibility.

Do note that the Brits pretty much gave up on Africa at the first hint of local resistance but they fought for 12 years in Malaysia to get an exit satisfactory to them. Why? Because there was really no money to be made in Africa at the time but Malaysian rubber was (and remains) an exceptionally valuable global commodity (side note, the rubber of Malaysia was created by the Brits starting in 1877). The colonial powers tried to make their colonies pay but most of them never did – they were economic and strategic liabilities for the most part. I mean, sure, India had been exceptionally valuable to the British but by the 1930’s it was just a drain on the treasury. Trying to insert yourself into someone else’s life is enormously difficult. In the world of settler-colonialism, only the settler society works long term – like the Europeans come to America or the Boers to South Africa. The bottom line is that post-WWII, the world tried to maintain a colonial control of the Third World – and here we are; the Chinese repairing the road the Belgians built.

To be sure, just like in the older colonial period, there is some money to be made – and, in fact, probably more money. If you’re not responsible for the colony but can still extract the valuable materials, ka-ching! But it isn’t actually helping the Third Worlders…except those who are juiced in and able to transfer the bribes to a Western bank.

I’m not sure what exactly to say about Africans, themselves. They, being Africans, are not Americans and so I’m unfamiliar with their actual views except what crosses the TL of Life (as it were), and that might be just bits and pieces served up to the Western audience by Africans who have their own agenda. Why haven’t they gotten rich? The people of Singapore did. I realize it is a small country but it also has a large population and no natural resources…they do show that if people apply themselves diligently they will get ahead. The most successful mainland African country – Botswana – is about as rich per capita as Mexico. But most of them exist in quite grinding poverty with people just working to get their next meal. Sure, the ruthless exploitation of Africa by outsiders causes great harm (and the French have been the worst offenders here)…but, hey, it is still on them. Why not build rule-of-law societies and let people get to work? They don’t. I don’t know why.

And, in the end, I don’t really care. Sounds cruel, but it is just another step into the Real World. It is not my concern if Africans are poor or rich, free or slave. It is their concern. And I figure they can eventually sort it all out. Or not. Doesn’t matter. But what does matter is that my country pouring in aid clearly isn’t helping. If foreign aid made people rich then after nearly 80 years of it there shouldn’t be a nation in Africa that can’t pony up 12 cents a day for a kid’s AIDS medicine. I do want the kid to have his medicine…but it is the responsibility of his people to get it for him, not mine. I’m all-in on emergency aid – some country gets whacked by an earthquake or tsunami, I want us to be Johnny-on-the-spot…but this idea that I can send untold billions of dollars into the treasuries of African nations and it will magically turn Lagos into a copy of San Diego? Not happening. Apparently can’t happen, no matter how hard we try. I will be delighted if the people of Lagos eventually live like the people of San Diego…but if it is to happen then the people of Lagos will have to decide to make it happen…and if they do decide, they won’t need my help doing it. After all, the people of San Diego didn’t need foreign aid to make San Diego like San Diego.

And I can hear shrieks from the Neo-Con Globalists: if we don’t intervene in Africa then the Chinese will! Sure. So? The Chinese are finding out that intervening in Africa isn’t easy. I mean, sure; they will be able to extract resources after they’ve carefully bribed a lot of African officials but unless they continually pour in the money to maintain the infrastructure their resource-extraction will be useless. And, because of how things are, always subject to the next African civil war/coup/revolution as the out party tries to get in so they can get the bribes in return for resource extraction. There isn’t much in Africa that we need. What we do get from there we tend to get because the ruthless exploitation of cheap labor makes things like African uranium cheap…but I don’t see the moral aspect of getting a discount on our uranium that way. Better to pay a little bit more and not be morally responsible for some 12 year old kid working in a uranium mine to enrich Chinese and French businessmen.

I do want us to do business in Africa – but not exploitative business where we perpetuate a corrupt and clearly stupid African Ruling Class just so we can either extract resources or make ourselves feel good by providing running water to some African village…which will not be maintained and so collapse a few years later. If we can obtain something from Africa or if Africans want to obtain something from us, fine. Have at it! But only with honest deals; we buy from them, they buy from us. Cash on the barrel or goods for goods. And just leave the Africans alone to sort themselves out.

The Stupid Failure of Foreign Aid

Mark Noonan34 Comments

In an attempt to make us all feel bad about MAGA, a Democrat operative pointed out that a 71 year old Burmese refugee in Thailand died the other day because the NGO providing her oxygen ceased service because Trump shut off the USAID funds. There were a couple problems with this:

  1. @Oilfield_Rando pointed out that the CEO of the NGO makes $2.2 million per year. You’d think he could have kicked in for an oxygen tank or two.
  2. An American lady in North Carolina died of hypothermia on January 6th, 2025, after FEMA failed to help her. No Democrat rose to condemn Biden over this. Bottom line: they don’t care about people dying. They only care about political power and the dead lady in Thailand, they think, helps them gain power. Think of how hard they had to look to even find this out?
  3. The conflict in Burma (called Myanmar by the current pack of thugs running the place) has been ongoing since 1948. It is an entirely senseless ethnic conflict that no civilized people would tolerate – and we note, with great care, that under British rule these conflicts were suppressed because killing someone on account of their ethnicity is barbaric and stupid.

As we are now closely reviewing all the foreign aid, we must also address the underlying reason for foreign aid. Why, at the end of the day, do we do it? After all, outside sporadic international help in response to natural disasters, until the mid-20th century foreign aid just wasn’t a thing. A couple reasons are given for it:

  1. Humanitarian. Can’t let people die. This, of course, is true. If we can in any way prevent an unnecessary death, we should do so.
  2. Global power. If we don’t provide the aid, then someone else will and we’ll lose influence over crucial areas of the globe, placing ourselves at a disadvantage.

We’ll start with number 2 here: global power. If we don’t, someone else will, to our detriment. Ok. Between 2012 and 2022 the United States provided about $2.8 billion per year in aid to Tanzania. That’s equal to 3.4% of Tanzania’s annual GDP. They should love us, right? I mean, if someone handed us a sum equal to 3.4% of our GDP every year, we’d probably like that guy. I know if someone handed me a figure equal to 3.4% of my annual income, I’d be grateful. So, how has this love worked out?

Tanzania has signed a $2.2bn deal with two Chinese firms to build a standard gauge rail link between the port of Dar es Salaam and a nickel mine in Burundi, Business Insider Africa reports.

Looked into who owns that nickel mine in Burundi and it appears to be a company called East African Region Group which is headed up by some sheik from the United Arab Emirates. We gave Burundi $69.7 million in 2024.

To nutshell, in return for $28 billion to Tanzania over the past ten years and nearly $70 million to Burundi just in 2024 we got…nothing. China gets to build the railroad and the Emirates get to mine the nickel. Oh, I mean, sure: there are more healthy workers in Tanzania and Burundi than there would have been without US aid and that’s nice…helps the Chinese and Emiratis a lot. I’m sure they’re grateful.

But at least we did provide the humanitarian aid, right? We can feel good about that!

Well, maybe not.

Not trying to pick on Tanzania here – in fact, I literally picked the country at random for the example here, figuring in advance that any African nation would have the same basic arc over the past 60+ years – but the bottom line is that it became independent in 1961 and in 2024, 63 years later, got $2.8 billion in aid from us. And a lot more from elsewhere (though I suspect that a lot of the non-US aid is actually just more US aid funneled through non-US NGO’s). Just what the heck have the people of Tanzania been up to all this time? In 63 years of American post-colonial development we went from an agricultural backwater to a significant industrial power (that would be 1776 to 1839) about to break out into major power level. And we didn’t get a dime in foreign aid.

Oh, wait. Perhaps that is it?

Americans are no smarter than Africans – people is people. Genius is rare and the average run of us are…average. Americans are not harder working than Africans. Americans are not morally superior to Africans. On the grand scale of things, a space alien examining an African and an American wouldn’t find a dime’s worth of difference between them. So, what gives?

The basic African story: independence granted by an exhausted Imperial power which just didn’t want to bother any longer (though people pump up the leaders of independence movements in Africa into some sort of super-human heroes); a colonially-educated, socialist-minded strong-man takes over and rules for ages (Tanzania was run by Julius Nyerere from 1960 to 1985) suppressing political dissent and trying to graft Marxist twaddle onto a subsistence-agriculture, tribal society. Debt, inflation and general misery results (in the best cases – the worst go Rwanda and genocidal murder)…along with buckets of foreign aid money. And don’t get me wrong here, as far as post-colonial strong-men went, Nyerere was pretty good…at least he doesn’t appear to have looted his treasury and he did (eventually) give up power (though basically to the one-party State he created and which persists today via bogus elections). It should be noted that Nyerere the anti-colonialist firebrand who is hailed to this day as one of the Liberators of Africa…died in a London hospital. All that time in power all that money spent…couldn’t even build one first-rate hospital in his homeland.

All we can really say here is that the aid is the problem – that it actually props up what is wrong in the recipient countries. Think about it: Nyerere’s policies were basket-case bad right out the gate…what kept his people fed sufficient to prevent bloody revolution was the foreign aid. The gifts of the First World. And so it goes in one Third World nation after another – a lousy, stupid and usually corrupt post-colonial Ruling Class makes a mess of things and then begs for aid to put a band aid over the failure. And we give and give and give and nothing really ever improves and on top of all that, we here in the USA don’t even get to exploit the material resources and cheap labor…the Chinese get to do that. How is this good? How is this considered moral?

I don’t want us to leave people to just die – but if people are just dying then we can’t just pass out the cash. We have to address the underlying problem…and that problem is going to invariably be the Ruling Class of the country where people will die if they don’t get aid. They’re either too corrupt or too stupid (or a combination of same) to run their country. I don’t care about offended patriotic sensibilities…if you will starve without my food, then when I send the food, I send my control over you. Because I can’t trust you’ll fix the problem. If we send aid, it comes with strict instructions not just on how the aid is used, but how the recipient country will organize itself going forward. And, hey, they can refuse the conditions…and the food. Their choice. Let the local strong-man rant and rave about American imperialists…I don’t care. But if he wants food rather than his people rising up to kill him, then he’ll do as he’s told.

As I’ve said on many occasions of late, it is time for us to enter the real world. To take things as they actually are, not as we might wish them to be. It is the only way anything is going to get fixed.