This history of a Congo road built using German aid money is quite depressing:
A part of it gets built and then the aid workers go elsewhere. Soon the first potholes form and the jungle begins to gnaw away at the shoulders of the road. Ultimately, it will disappear completely.
Welthungerhilfe is now building a section of road heading south from Lubutu and has committed to maintaining this new, flawless red-earthen highway until 2016. But what happens after that? Dörken hesitates. “Honestly, I wouldn’t dare to venture a guess.”
Originally, he and his colleagues had set up a system to maintain the road. They established “road committees” in the villages which then installed barriers to collect tolls. Revenues were to go toward maintenance work. The system worked well, Dörken says, but then the Congolese government in 2006 revoked Welthungerhilfe’s mandate for maintaining the road. Since then, tolls have continued to be collected, but the money is no longer reinvested in the road and it is slowly disintegrating as a result.
Isn’t that frustrating? “Yes, of course!” says Dörken, losing his ironic distance for an instant. Then, once again under control, he summarizes the entire problem with development aid in a single sentence: “We are waiting for the state to begin fulfilling its duties.”
Average IQ 70 or so. No future orientation. Impulsive, violent. No written language. No civilization. Families consisting of women and their children, r-adapted.
The horror, the horror.
“Let’s start a project that intimately requires state cooperation!”
“Cool, will the state cooperate?”
“Meh. Who cares?”
…
“O noes, the state did not cooperate. Truly, what an injustice.”
Basically a bunch of contractors are upset because there will be delays on their next pork shipment, while new excuses are dreamt up.
Revocation is an action, being derelict is inaction. Once again the Prussian schooled kid struggles with accurately describing a government.
Africa needs to outsource law and order to people actually capable of providing it. See how Uganda and Kenya prospered when they had a tiny English ruling elite, a managerial/business class imported from India, and a native working class.
The simplest solution is to allow entrepreneurs from other continents to raise private armies, colonize Africa, and extract profits from it. They shall thus be paid in proportion to the productivity of their fiefs, whereas aid organizations are paid in proportion to the misery of theirs.
The solution that dare not speak it’s name; Colonialism. It’s necessary, and it will be back, although it will be called something else…