In the UK there are adverts for the forthcoming “Red Nose” charity day, and one supermarket is saying that if you buy this or that, then they will donate money to help children in South Africa. Now, nothing wrong with that you might say, and there is no doubt that there are a lot of very poor kids in South Africa who need help.
However, at the very same time that the UK is being asked to find money to educate South African children, they are building football stadiums for the next world cup. The costs of this building work are enormous (17.4bn rand ($2.2bn)), for stadium and infrastructure that in many cases will have no real use after the competition, and in some cases have been built using green belt land that will never be reclaimed e.g. The Cape Town stadium is sited on land (Greenpoint) that was a golf course, and acted as a green belt around the mountain side city.
Apart from the fact there are considerable doubts that all of the work will be completed before the competition, we have to ask the question as to whether it’s morally correct to ask UK charities to provide, food, water and schooling for your poorest children, whilst you spend billions of Rand on what is essentially a showcase “white elephant” event. Interesting fact: According to the South African reserve bank, only 5% of government debt (around R17-billion) is foreign debt … oddly the cost of the world cup, and could relieve South Africa of all its foreign owned debts.
If a man spends all his wages on drink, and leaves his children to be fed by the social services, those kids are taken off him and he goes to jail, so why not a state? One of the African dictators (85-year-old Ivory Coast President for life, Felix Houphouet-Boigny) had built, an exact copy of the Vatican in the middle of the bush, in a country that was predominately non Catholic, and he was rightly condemned for it. I can see little difference between this, and with holding a World Cup in a country beset with poverty in large strata’s of its society.
No doubt there will be an argument that if you have a World Cup, there will be jobs created, so rather like the old adage that if you “give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you give him a rod, he can eat everyday”, they would argue that in the long term the stadiums, roads and tourists etc will bring long term benefits. Wrong, there will be millions made by some big international businesses, and some local firms will have a small bonanza at the time, but for the local community, a few thousand temporary part time jobs will last 5 or 6 weeks, and then be gone.
You could cite other examples like this, such as the Olympics in China, except that despite the undoubted poverty in China, they have pulled 500 million out of absolute poverty in 15 yrs, and the signs are that if they continue as they are, then many millions more will benefit in the next decade, and will therefore benefit from the infrastructure windfall that the Olympics will leave behind.
This brings us back to the morality of Western charities providing welfare in third world countries. Can we really think that it’s right giving money and aid to the poor, in a country that spends 25+% of its GDP on weapons, and 10% on its poor? Are we not just in fact rewarding feckless and morally bankrupt countries for ignoring their own poor, whilst protecting their regimes by buying weapons to suppress those same poor?
It’s an interesting fact that one of the best governed, but poorest governments in Southern Africa, Swaziland, which is democratic, never had a military coup, and has managed to keep on top of its debts, didn’t qualify for any international debt write off, whilst all the badly governed states did. So the moral appears to be that being corrupt and anti democratic pays, whilst being honest doesn’t…. what sort of message does that send out to dictators?
I fall neither one way nor the other, as humanitarian thought says it’s wrong to leave the poor to die, but on the other hand there is no pressure on bad governments to change if their poor are provided with aid by the West.
It’s kinda like the chicken and the egg argument about which comes first…. Does good governance come if we help their poor, or does that in fact end up reinforcing bad governance, by removing internal pressures to reform?
However, at the very same time that the UK is being asked to find money to educate South African children, they are building football stadiums for the next world cup. The costs of this building work are enormous (17.4bn rand ($2.2bn)), for stadium and infrastructure that in many cases will have no real use after the competition, and in some cases have been built using green belt land that will never be reclaimed e.g. The Cape Town stadium is sited on land (Greenpoint) that was a golf course, and acted as a green belt around the mountain side city.
Apart from the fact there are considerable doubts that all of the work will be completed before the competition, we have to ask the question as to whether it’s morally correct to ask UK charities to provide, food, water and schooling for your poorest children, whilst you spend billions of Rand on what is essentially a showcase “white elephant” event. Interesting fact: According to the South African reserve bank, only 5% of government debt (around R17-billion) is foreign debt … oddly the cost of the world cup, and could relieve South Africa of all its foreign owned debts.
If a man spends all his wages on drink, and leaves his children to be fed by the social services, those kids are taken off him and he goes to jail, so why not a state? One of the African dictators (85-year-old Ivory Coast President for life, Felix Houphouet-Boigny) had built, an exact copy of the Vatican in the middle of the bush, in a country that was predominately non Catholic, and he was rightly condemned for it. I can see little difference between this, and with holding a World Cup in a country beset with poverty in large strata’s of its society.
No doubt there will be an argument that if you have a World Cup, there will be jobs created, so rather like the old adage that if you “give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but if you give him a rod, he can eat everyday”, they would argue that in the long term the stadiums, roads and tourists etc will bring long term benefits. Wrong, there will be millions made by some big international businesses, and some local firms will have a small bonanza at the time, but for the local community, a few thousand temporary part time jobs will last 5 or 6 weeks, and then be gone.
You could cite other examples like this, such as the Olympics in China, except that despite the undoubted poverty in China, they have pulled 500 million out of absolute poverty in 15 yrs, and the signs are that if they continue as they are, then many millions more will benefit in the next decade, and will therefore benefit from the infrastructure windfall that the Olympics will leave behind.
This brings us back to the morality of Western charities providing welfare in third world countries. Can we really think that it’s right giving money and aid to the poor, in a country that spends 25+% of its GDP on weapons, and 10% on its poor? Are we not just in fact rewarding feckless and morally bankrupt countries for ignoring their own poor, whilst protecting their regimes by buying weapons to suppress those same poor?
It’s an interesting fact that one of the best governed, but poorest governments in Southern Africa, Swaziland, which is democratic, never had a military coup, and has managed to keep on top of its debts, didn’t qualify for any international debt write off, whilst all the badly governed states did. So the moral appears to be that being corrupt and anti democratic pays, whilst being honest doesn’t…. what sort of message does that send out to dictators?
I fall neither one way nor the other, as humanitarian thought says it’s wrong to leave the poor to die, but on the other hand there is no pressure on bad governments to change if their poor are provided with aid by the West.
It’s kinda like the chicken and the egg argument about which comes first…. Does good governance come if we help their poor, or does that in fact end up reinforcing bad governance, by removing internal pressures to reform?
The Band Aid arguments were always based on the thinking of a few millionaire rock stars and not on any logic. The thirld world has been getting charity money for years and never any improvement in governance standards. Its tome for "tough love" in the future if we want changes.
ReplyDeleteI heard that some of the African countries have sold off their debt relief to private companies and are now paying more in repayments then they were before the gleneagles conference.
ReplyDelete