Africa is urbanising without globalising
By Daniel Knowles, normally of the Economist. A perceptive piece, of a sort rarely seen in the rags these days; the truths of the cities which blow-ins from N America, Australia and Europe, on their way to/from a meeting with the Minister to negotiate another tranche of royalties, won't look up from their spreadsheets to see as they blast past on the way to the airport and a comfy Learjet. That's where your 'aid' money goes, folks; gated communities on Victoria Island or the cooler parts of Luanda. Recommended.
Y'know, during the period 1996 - 2000 I was working as a senior EOD consultant for the EC (European Community Humanitarian Organisation).
We put place some brilliant plans and procedures in place to support and improve the national demining infrastructure in Cambodia and included a high level four man mentoring and monitoring team of excellent guys for a year as well as funding.
Other agencies pumped money and equipment in there for years and what happened. Fraud and corruption happened, not with our guys but within the UN and national organisations. We might as well have spent all the money on a massive piss up, because there is f
uck all to show for it now.
All of the demining that was done from 1989 to, I think 2004 had to be re surveyed because the records were unreliable. Yet from 1995 I was there banging on about safe lane marking, minefield marking, cleared area marking etc etc and it was even published in the UN Mine Action Standards from 1996 onwards, but to no avail. Cambodia should have been largely cleared by now, but it isn't.
I don't know the date of this website and couldn't be bothered to check, but it and a hundred like it are still holding the hand out for more dosh "to clear landmines and UXO" in Cambodia:
Landmines in Cambodia
If you look at the demining figures for Cambodia since 1989, it seems to me that they have a factory somewhere that is manufacturing landmines as quickly the existing ones are destroyed.
In Bosnia the World Bank lost a rumoured 7 million US dollars in demining and I stopped a massive cartel from operating there in 2000.
These basket case countries are all the same. Fraudulent!
And the reason it happens is that the international pinko liberal policy is that the recipients of aid have to deal with it themselves, so time after ******* time millions of our taxpayers money gets shovelled into offshore bank accounts belonging to despots and scamsters and nothing ever gets done about it.
In the case of the UN Cambodian Mine Action Centre back in 2000, there was widespread fraud going on, so the CMAC Director held an "internal investigation" and declared that there was no case to answer.
In 1999 I was the only person in Bosnia who raised the question of how did Mr. Pusic (head of the demining commission) go from wearing second hand Jesus boots and donated jeans and riding a motorbike to work, to wearing Armani suits and driving a new white Mercedes to work - in 9 months and on a salary of about 1000 use a month.