This is entirely vile from The Guardian
It’s difficult for us to constrain our anger at this suggestion:
An alternative African strategy would see governments spending on public services and on increasing food and renewable energy sovereignty, while cracking down on corruption.
This provides a way out of the current development trap. In their book Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla suggest that, instead of importing food and burning through foreign reserves, African states should produce food at home, as land, work and knowhow are abundant. “If they financed the development of their agriculture, they wouldn’t reduce their foreign exchange reserves; on the contrary, they would save money.”
State-owned enterprises and a competitive domestic private sector would help Africa evade activities demanded by the global north. As African countries become increasingly digital, data will be power in economic governance – and local entities must be its custodian, not transnational corporations. Trade agreements between countries of similar income levels are more beneficial for them compared with the World Trade Organization’s framework.
This is just the old idiocy dressed up in new clothes.
This used to be what was recommended for all of what was then called the “Third World”. Don’t trade with the richer capitalist places, aim for autarkic development. It didn’t work. Then we tried it the other way around, that global neoliberalism. Which worked, astonishingly well. This past 40 years has seen the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of our species.
Now, when we’ve the one more heave to go - that absolute poverty is largely still concentrated in Africa - the argument is that we must abandon what provably works and return to the policy failures of the past.
Just how racist is The Guardian against black Africans? That they must be condemned to longer and deeper poverty to conform to fashionable metropolitan ideas?
It’s simply vile to be insisting on the policies that have been tried, have been seen to fail, once and yet again. How dare they?