The debate continues.
Unfortunately, when the son of the President of an African nation, who is also a Minister, in a court affidavit, admits that government ministers are allowed to set up companies enabling them to partner with multinationals in local investments, taking the required commission and that son has property worth many millions and then buys a 16 acre pad worth $35 million in Malibu, California. All on his $5,000 monthly salary, oh, and on his commissions.
The same country that in 2004 had revealed US$700 million of its oil revenues in a secret account in Riggs Bank in Washington.
That is what is going on with Teodoro Nguema Obiang, Minister of Agriculture and Forestry of Equatorial Guinea.
Onésimo Alvarez-Moro
See article:
William Easterly vs Hilary Benn - Is Britain's international development department raising expectations it cannot meet? A prominent aid critic takes on the secretary of state
We share a concern for the world’s poor and the tragedies they confront every day. However, I must respectfully disagree with the approach that your department for international development (DfID) takes to world poverty. I have similar concerns about other aid agencies, but the flaws I discuss below are exemplified perhaps even more in DfID than elsewhere. Let me use your recent white paper on international development to illustrate my concerns.
In your introduction to the white paper, you spoke of keeping promises and taking responsibility. Both are critical to making foreign aid reach the poor, as it has so often failed to do. However, I don’t see how the idea of “promises” or “responsibility” offered by DfID are at all meaningful.
First, whether you keep your promise to “eliminate world poverty” depends on many factors beyond the control of DfID. And DfID’s promises are breathtaking in scope. As you put it in the introduction: “millions of our human family are living imprisoned: by economic poverty, by political tyranny, by sickness and disease, by ignorance, and by oppression and violence. But now, we have the capacity to free our fellow human beings, once and for all, so that each one can enjoy freedom’s ‘thousand charms.’”
See full Article.
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