Still Free

Yeah, Mr. Smiley. Made it through the entire Trump presidency without being enslaved. Imagine that.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Where do we Settle the World Refugees

Title being the question from a Fast Company article on the refugee situation in East Africa:

Perhaps the answer is closer at hand. If famines are ultimately a failure of governance rather than crops--as Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen argued in his landmark Poverty and Famines--then what Somalia needs isn’t aid, but good governance. Or at the very least, a pocket of good governance willing to take refugees in.


I've made this point in the past that the frequent famines in this part of Africa has little to do with nature but is rather a result of a perfect storm of bad governing and allowing cultures to not adapt to a changing environment because generally, in my opinion, flying in to help the backward natives is a cute thing for rich, mostly white, people to do. I've asked before, who in the US would tolerate having a nice well dug for them if they had no water. Yet well digging is what a lot of NGO's do in Africa.

Also I reported many years ago that a lot of governments are of the opinion that taking care of the poor is the business of NGO's and not of the government. What is the government's job then? To facilitate tax collection, world "aide" and, I suppose a location for the UN to show that it is doing something other than holding meetings.

At some point these refugees will have to come to a point where they are no longer satisfied with living in the situations where they are. I suppose when tent living and standing in line for handouts from the closest NGO with plumpinut, rice and distilled water comes to constitute daily life the idea of doing anything else even if one had the energy and the relative safety to do it doesn't enter the mind.