Another considered verdict from Class Worrier this week: Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa is a bunch of wank.
Actually, it’s a great deal worse. It’s precisely the kind of unctious toss that we’ve expected to spurt from Labour’s glands. And, now that they’ve released this sticky little report, we can only hope that Blair will roll over, fart, and go to sleep. Not likely that he will though. More than anything, the Commission for Africa looks like it’s a manifesto for yet more fiddling about with Africa, once again in the name of ‘development’. Consider:
“This world in flux has brought great opportunities along with confusion, change and anxiety. But such change poses great possibilities for us all and especially for Africa, that great giant finally beginning to stir itself from its enforced slumber.”
Ahem. Africans have been wide awake throughout all these changes, and been yelling for the boots to be lifted from their necks. The only confusion seems to be in the minds of the authors of this vile little document. Check the history here:
“The world is vastly different to that of 20 years ago when we forcefully acknowledged the pity of the Great African Famine of 1984-85. The world, then locked into its Cold War political stasis, remained rigid in its competitive ideologies. The breaking of this deadlock, and the increase in global trade that followed, allied to new technologies and cultural shifts, have created a more fluid, less predictive yet more interdependent world.”
Less predictive? “Pity”? It’s widely acknowledged that the majority of African countries are worse off than they were 20 years ago, and this because of the economic policies to which they’ve been subjected by their erstwhile colonisers. Armed with this bit of information, it’s a particular kind of masturbatory imagination that can see ‘more fluid’ as a good thing.
Wankers.