Foreign Policy & the Fund for Peace 'Failed State Index' project, still subscribes to the idea, that what Failed States need is external help (More $$ Aid from Whitey!), instead of some Tough Love: “Africans are Responsible for the F**k Up that is Africa!”: “If You Can't Feed Em; Don't Breed Em!”
The label "failed" remains a powerful way to describe those states that no longer serve their people. That harsh term sharpens the attention of policymakers and helps single out countries that should be of utmost concern. The threat of such state failure also focuses attention on the soon-to-crumble; it is those countries that need the most external help.
Yet for such a classification to be useful, it must be more objective, more precise, and more discriminating than the popular conception of a failed state is today. Rather than lumping countries together qualitatively, the title of failed state should surgically distinguish countries at risk. The term should tell us that the country in question demonstrates certain characteristics, rather than merely evoking an amorphous sense of dysfunction.
Failed states have two defining criteria: They deliver very low quantities and qualities of political goods to their citizens, and they have lost their monopoly on violence. Nation-states on the cusp of failure are either "weak" or "failing"—but not "failed." "Collapsed" ought to be reserved for geographical expressions without governments, such as Somalia.
Since 2004, I have asked citizens from all countries what they demand from their governments; these 57 deliverables are then measured systematically and aggregated into five overarching categories: safety and security; rule of law and transparency; participation and human rights; sustainable economic development; and human development. A government might fail badly, as South Africa does, in one of these categories. If it scores poorly across all five, then we have a palpable case of failure. But not otherwise. » » » » [Foreign Policy]
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The Failed States Index of 2009
Foreign Policy & Fund for Peace
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It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries—virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong—and who is to blame.
Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.
 # 10. PAKISTAN: Ground zero: The blast that left this hotel, the Pearl Continental in Peshawar, flattened, was just the latest in a string of escalations that has inspired some security analysts to call Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world. In early 2009, the Taliban extended its grip from the hinterlands of the country into the heartland -- pushing within a mere 80 miles of the capital, Islamabad. As the Army has fought back, the Taliban have promised to take their fight elsewhere - to the Pearl Continental, for example, and other high-profile urban targets in Pakistan. [Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images] |
It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.
Instead, the global recession is sparking fears that multiple states could slip all at once into the ranks of the failing. Now more than ever, failed-state triage could become a grim necessity for world leaders from the United Nations and World Bank to U.S. President Barack Obama’s White House. All of which puts a fine point on an old and uncomfortable dilemma: Whom do you help when so many need it?
 # 9. GUINEA: Leading by force: A coup in December 2008, which followed the death of longtime Guinean President Lansana Conté, put Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara at the helm of West Africa's least stable country. Although little was known about Camara when he declared himself president of Guinea, New York Times journalist Lydia Polgreen offers some insight: "The captain likes to sleep late. Most days he rises well into the afternoon. Sometimes it is not until after sunset. He governs in darkness, his aides whisper, because that is when coups happen, like the one he staged early one December morning." [Photo: Seyllou/AFP/Getty Images] |
This is a sober question for sober times, and it is the backdrop for the fifth annual Failed States Index—a collaboration between The Fund for Peace, an independent research organization, and Foreign Policy. Using 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance, compiled through a close examination of more than 30,000 publicly available sources, we ranked 177 states in order from most to least at risk of failure. The 60 most vulnerable states are listed in the rankings.
Figuring out which faltering states to help depends in large part on what they need. After all, as Tolstoy might have put it, every failing state is failing in its own way. Georgia, for example, jumped 23 places in this year’s index due to a substantial spike in that elusive indicator, “Invaded by Russia.” Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are failing because their governments are chronically weak to nonexistent; Zimbabwe and Burma are failing because their governments are strong enough to choke the life out of their societies. Iraq is failing, but its trajectory may be toward greater success, while Haiti is failing as well, and it is hard to imagine success around the corner.
 # 8. CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: The middle seat: A man squats in a refugee camp in the northern Central African Republic (CAR), after a rebel raid sent refugees fleeing. CAR is surrounded on all sides by conflict -- and the small country of just 4.5 million has suffered greatly as a result. In addition to CAR's own homegrown rebellion, Sudan and Chad's conflicts have pushed both refugees and fighters into the country's north. In the southeast, Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army has made incursions into CAR as it flees Ugandan and Congolese attempts to expel it from their own territory. [Photo: Emmanuel Braun/Reuters] |
It is also a harsh fact that a greater risk of failure is not always synonymous with greater consequences of failure. For example, Zimbabwe (No. 2 on the index) is technically failing more than Iraq (6), but the geopolitical implications of state failure in Iraq would be far greater than in Zimbabwe. It’s why we worry more about Pakistan (10) than Guinea (9), and North Korea (17) more than the Ivory Coast (11).
Then take the paradoxical case of Iran, which jumped 11 spots in the rankings this year. With an already faulty economy, a vampire state mismanaging it further, and a global recession on top of all that, it is no surprise that Iran is faltering. But the state is not failing—indeed, it is succeeding quite well—in one rather important respect: the pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it is this “success,” more than Iran’s myriad failings, that keeps it above the fold of other worrying news.
 # 7. AFGHANISTAN: Scraps of hope: A man digs through trash in central Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. Since U.S. President Barack Obama came to office in January 2009, Afghanistan has garnered increasing attention as the new central front in the "war on terror." Vowing to make the country's peace a priority, Obama promised to deploy another 17,000 troops to stabilize the situation. Perhaps of greatest concern, though, is the nuclear-armed country to Afghanistan's southeast -- Pakistan -- where Taliban militants find ready safe havens. [Photo: Balazs Gardi/VII] |
Answering the question of which failed states demand attention might well come down to which are deemed to pose the biggest threat to the world at large. But even the widely presumed linkage between failing states and terrorism is less clear than many have come to assume since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sounded the alarm about the consequences of governments not in control of their territory. Take Somalia, once again the No. 1 failed state on this year’s index. A recent report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, drawing on captured al Qaeda documents, revealed that Osama bin Laden’s outfit had an awful experience trying to operate out of Somalia, for all the same reasons that international peacekeepers found Somalia unmanageable in the 1990s: terrible infrastructure, excessive violence and criminality, and few basic services, among other factors. In short, Somalia was too failed even for al Qaeda.
Which failed states are global security threats and which are simply tragedies for their own people? This is one question that will matter most this year of living dangerously, and there are others we present in the following pages: Which countries might blow up next? Are there pockets of success within states of failure? And who (or what) is to blame when things go bad—corrupt leaders, dysfunctional societies, bad neighbors, a global recession, unfortunate history, or simply geography itself?
The Failed States Index does not provide all the answers, nor does it claim to be able to. But it is a starting point for a discussion about why states fail and what should be done about them—a discussion, sadly, that we might be having even more frequently this year.
Blame Game: Why do states fail, and who’s helping out?
Elizabeth Dickinson, Foreign Policy
 # 6. IRAQ: Mission not accomplished: Six years after Saddam Hussein was violently deposed, Iraq remains an enormously violent and dangerous country. Despite the military success of the U.S. troop "surge," which dramatically decreased violence in Baghdad and Anbar province in 2007, the country faces sustained and often intense fighting between sectarian groups and coalition forces. Refugees are a problem as well; around 2 million Iraqis have fled abroad since 2003, and a further 2 million are still internally displaced. As many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died since the start of the current conflict -- 20,000 of whom were abducted and executed, one recent study found. [Photo: Franco Pagetti/VII] |
Few states fail by chance. Accidents of geography and history play a certain part, but so do corruption and mismanagement. Why, for instance, has Zimbabwe's annual gdp growth plummeted from 14 percent to at least negative 5 percent during Robert Mugabe's nearly three decades of rule? Is it really a coincidence that immunization rates in Equatorial Guinea fell 10 points over the last 30 years as the country became a petrostate? How come the percentage of paved roads in Yemen and North Korea is still in the single digits?
Asked to explain their governments' failings, representatives of many of the world's most fragile states often passed the buck, if they responded at all. After countless faxes, phone calls, meetings, unanswered requests, and stood-up meetings, nearly all the worst-performing states hotly contested their scores ("Bangladesh is the most undervalued stock in town," said the country's ambassador to the United States, M. Humayun Kabir), and many blamed external sources—from the media to neighboring countries—for their troubles.
 # 5. DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO: Fatal neglect: The magnitude of crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is staggering. Some 45,000 people die every month, the International Rescue Committee estimates, putting the total dead since 1998 at 5.4 million -- more than in any conflict since World War II. All but 0.4 percent of the deaths come from preventable diseases and malnutrition -- a phenomenon that has arisen due to horrid conditions in displacement camps that lack infrastructure, basic supplies, and proper medical care. The displaced children seen here, in a camp in eastern Congo, are among the 1 million displaced from North Kivu province alone. [Photo: Lionel Healing/AFP/Getty Images] |
"Our country is a victim of much biased propaganda and biased pressures from outside," said Fatahelrahman Ali Mohamed, a top official at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. Representing the views of Sudan's neighbor, Chad, Ambassador to the United States Mahamoud Adam Bechir said, "It is not strange to be placed on this list. Sudan is sinking and it wants to drag us down with it." Haitian Ambassador to the United States Raymond Joseph blamed unfair expectations: "Because we focus so much on the macroeconomic aspect just to meet international standards, not much has been done for the average citizen."
Only Zimbabwe's finance minister, Tendai Biti, acknowledged his country's failure and the challenges ahead. "We're basically coming from a situation of a failed state, where for 15 consistent years we have had negative declines in gdp," he said in a recent speech.
 # 4. CHAD: Feuding neighbors: A Chadian soldier looks on as protests fill the Chadian capital of N'Djamena on May 13, 2009, where President Idriss Déby denounced his eastern neighbor, Sudan. Just a few weeks earlier, the two countries had agreed to end years of proxy battles on each others' territories. But two days later, Chad accused Sudan of attacking its forces along the border. The neighbors' spat has helped exacerbate conflict that has now spread from Darfur into eastern Chad and the Central African Republic. [Photo: Georges Gobet/AFP/Getty Images] |
There is, however, something to the idea that foreign meddling contributes to state failure. A fresh influx of weapons, for instance, is one of the surest ways a conflict can reach new levels of violent intensity. As international negotiators flooded Kenya in early 2008, hoping to end post-election violence, 40,000 Kalashnikov rifles were reportedly entering the country via Ukraine in a legal transaction. Last year, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Yemen also purchased weapons from willing suppliers in China, Ukraine, Italy, and Belgium, despite strapped government budgets and pressing humanitarian concerns. China and Russia, which together represent 27 percent of the global conventional weapons market, made 40 percent of the major arms sales to the 60 worst-performing states in the index, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Weapons designed in the West and licensed to manufacturers in countries such as Pakistan, Egypt, and China are a proliferating source of small arms worldwide. The numbers are already staggering, but they might well be an underestimate, experts say, because they include only officially recorded transactions. And weapons dealers are, of course, just some of failed states' many enablers. There's much more blame to go around.
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Under the Influence
 # 3. SUDAN: Life on the run: Conflict in Sudan has left 4.9 million of the country's 40 million people internally displaced; another roughly 400,000 have fled beyond the country's borders. Most, like this woman, have arrived in neighboring Chad, which borders Sudan's Darfur region. The security of refugee camps both within and outside Sudan remains tenuous. Rape and abduction have been widely reported in Darfur, where refugee women must travel miles from the camps for firewood and other supplies. Peace negotiations between government and Darfur rebel forces came in stops and starts in 2008, leaving little hope that the conflict would abate. [Photo: Phillippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images] |
For some failing states, the big prize is clout in Washington, where many governments hire elite lobbying firms on big-dollar contracts to get their message across. Over the last two years, Nigeria's Bayelsa state has employed the Carmen Group to lobby for U.S. partnership opportunities; Chad was advised by Patton Boggs on how to improve its relations with the U.S. executive branch; both Ivory Coast and Ethiopia paid DLA Piper for legal advice; and Pakistan contacted congressional staffers with the help of Cassidy and Associates. Pakistani Prime Minister Asif Ali Zardari lobbied through Locke Lord Strategies for an inter-national investigation into the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto. And spending nearly $10 million, Iraq employed various lobbyists to help navigate the corridors of Capitol Hill, influence media coverage, and arrange favorable long-term strategic relations with the United States.
Danger Ahead
While problem countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan have been mainstays on the top of the index for years, 2008 found several newcomers moving closer to failure. These countries—call them "failing" rather than failed—could be headed for disaster in the coming months. "Failed states are often easier to deal with than failing states," warns Alan Doss, the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unlike with anarchic Somalia, "you'll have all the trappings of power and sovereignty" in these failing states, "and they don't need to take your advice."
 # 2. ZIMBABWE: Burden of disease: On top of the flurry of political turmoil that followed Zimbabwe's contested presidential elections in the spring of 2008, another crisis soon erupted. Cholera, a preventable water-borne disease, broke out as thousands fled their homes, many trying to emigrate. Not surprisingly, the epidemic struck with particular strength near the refugees' destination: the South African border. By January 2009, 57,702 people had been infected, leaving more than 3,000 dead, according to the World Health Organization. The family here buries a relative who died of the disease 25 km from Harare in December 2008. [Photo: Desmond Kwande/AFP/Getty Images] |
- Cameroon
Usually quiet Cameroon had a turbulent 2008. Rising unemployment became unbearable when food prices skyrocketed in the first half of the year. When the president, Paul Biya, changed the constitution to prolong his half century of rule, protests and riots rocked the commercial capital of Douala. The violence has since leveled off, but that might be only temporary with Cameroon's economy in free fall. Declining prices for timber and other commodities have resulted in $630 million in corporate losses since the downturn began, and most of the country's planned mining, hydropower, and agriculture projects are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, refugees are flooding over the northern border with Chad, straining already squeezed resources. Although no real political opposition threatens the president's growing grip on power, more street protests and homegrown discontent could certainly make 2009 unpleasant.- Guinea
Guinea's unhappy rise in the Failed States Index follows a late 2008 coup d'état, the country's first since its long-ruling president, Lansana Conté, took power by the same method in 1984. Conté died in December, and a group of military leaders seized the reins. The new military president, Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, has since consolidated power—though elections are promised for later this year. All this has changed little for the average Guinean, says Michael McGovern, an anthropologist at Yale University. The country's people still contend with the same lack of services and abusive security forces. Human Rights Watch accuses Guinean soldiers of rampant thievery, with raids on citizens' offices and homes disturbingly common. Drug trafficking has picked up and holds an ever tighter grip on the country's economy, and prices for the country's few legal exports are falling.- Yemen
Refugees and extremists were perhaps Yemen's most noteworthy imports in 2008. More than 50,000 migrants from Somalia are thought to have made the trip by boat across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen last year. Although many left to work in the Persian Gulf, thousands more languish in the country with few rights or protections. Saudi al Qaeda members, viewing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh as too weak to prevent them from organizing and training, have also poured in. "Everyone in Saudi knows that when you get in trouble, you go to Yemen," says Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In January, the two countries' al Qaeda branches announced a merger, and a Shiite rebellion near their border has flared on and off since 2004. Yemen's economy, meanwhile, is in dire straits. The government depends on fast-shrinking oil reserves for 80 percent of its budget. Population growth is pushing unemployment through the roof. Many wonder how much longer the country can merely muddle through.- Ethiopia and Eritrea
Ethiopia and Eritrea, bitter enemies whose borders are still militarized from conflict a decade ago, both jumped dramatically in their index scores this year. In Ethiopia, government clampdowns on opposition and NGO activity raised political tension, and an influx of Somali refugees exacerbated the low-level conflict in the Ogaden region. The drought-prone country was also hit particularly hard by skyrocketing food prices in the first half of 2008. Over the border, the Eritrean government is "truly in control to a frightening degree," says Human Rights Watch's Christopher Albin-Lackey. Because of young migrants fleeing the military draft—and the dismal internal conditions that have left 15 to 20 percent of children malnourished—Eritrea is now one of the largest exporters of refugees in the world.- Guinea-Bissau
With convenient access to Europe's vast illegal drug market and state institutions too weak to get in the way, Guinea-Bissau is fast becoming Africa's first narcostate. The street value of cocaine seized there in 2007 equaled a whopping 25 percent of the small country's GDP, and state security forces are believed to be complicit in the trade. "When drugs arrive with a lot of money, [the traffickers] find it easy to secure the services of Army people," claims Antonio Mazitelli of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Unfortunately for the country's ranking, 2009 hardly looks more stable: In March, the president and the Army chief of staff were assassinated.
» » » » [Foreign Policy & Fund for Peace]
The Green Zones: Where failed states work.
 # 1. SOMALIA: A window into failure: Children peek through an artillery-battered wall of Mogadishu's Bakara Market, the country's largest open-air forum. Sellers and buyers used to be well-stocked with food staples and other daily essentials. Today, the strongest product line is weapons -- everything from handguns to rifles to rocket-propelled grenades. Such arms have been the quickest means to power and subsistence in Somalia since chaos erupted 18 years ago. As Somalia claimed the No. 1 slot on the Failed States Index for a second year in a row, militant attacks had forced the country's fledgling transitional government literally into a corner; by December 2008, it controlled merely a few blocks in a country of 627,000 square kilometers. [Photo: Jose Cendon/AFP/Getty Images] |
In the cool air-conditioning of the Silverbird Galleria mall in Lagos, Nigeria, it is hard to remember that you are in the 15th-most failed state in the world. The chic coffee shops and designer clothes oddly befit Africa's newest financial hub, where business suits and talk of the latest market returns are ubiquitous.
This elegant enclave on Lagos's Victoria Island—less than an hour's plane ride from the rebel-infested creeks of the oil-producing region—is no anomaly, either for Nigeria or for many failed states. Many such countries have shining capital cities or thriving commercial centers, while festering pockets of instability lurk elsewhere. Ethnic separatists might set rural areas ablaze while coastal elites build office parks. Even the worst failed states have enclaves that thrive.
» » » » [Excerpt: Foreign Policy]
Failed States Index: The Twelve Indicators
 Population Growth Rates, measured by the annual percentage increase in a country's population, are highest in Africa and the Middle East. Growth rates are relatively flat in the United States, Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. |
Social Indicators
1. Mounting Demographic Pressures
- Pressures deriving from high population density relative to food supply and other life-sustaining resources
- Pressures deriving from group settlement patterns that affect the freedom to participate in common forms of human and physical activity, including economic productivity, travel, social interaction, religious worship
- Pressures deriving from group settlement patterns and physical settings, including border disputes, ownership or occupancy of land, access to transportation outlets, control of religious or historical sites, and proximity to environmental hazards
- Pressures from skewed population distributions, such as a "youth or age bulge," or from divergent rates of population growth among competing communal groups
2. Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons creating Complex Humanitarian Emergencies
- Forced uprooting of large communities as a result of random or targeted violence and/or repression, causing food shortages, disease, lack of clean water, land competition, and turmoil that can spiral into larger humanitarian and security problems, both within and between countries
3. Legacy of Vengeance-Seeking Group Grievance or Group Paranoia
- History of aggrieved communal groups based on recent or past injustices, which could date back centuries
- Patterns of atrocities committed with impunity against communal groups
Specific groups singled out by state authorities, or by dominant groups, for persecution or repression- Institutionalized political exclusion
- Public scapegoating of groups believed to have acquired wealth, status or power as evidenced in the emergence of "hate" radio, pamphleteering and stereotypical or nationalistic political rhetoric
4. Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
- "Brain drain" of professionals, intellectuals and political dissidents fearing persecution or repression
- Voluntary emigration of "the middle class," particularly economically productive segments of the population, such as entrepreneurs, business people, artisans and traders, due to economic deterioration
- Growth of exile communities
Economic Indicators
 Gross National Product Per Capita |
5. Uneven Economic Development along Group Lines
- Group-based inequality, or perceived inequality, in education, jobs, and economic status
- Group-based impoverishment as measured by poverty levels, infant mortality rates, education levels
- Rise of communal nationalism based on real or perceived group inequalities
6. Sharp and/or Severe Economic Decline
- A pattern of progressive economic decline of the society as a whole as measured by per capita income, GNP, debt, child mortality rates, poverty levels, business failures, and other economic measures
- Sudden drop in commodity prices, trade revenue, foreign investment or debt payments
- Collapse or devaluation of the national currency
- Extreme social hardship imposed by economic austerity programs
- Growth of hidden economies, including the drug trade, smuggling, and capital flight
- Increase in levels of corruption and illicit transactions among the general populace
- Failure of the state to pay salaries of government employees and armed forces or to meet other financial obligations to its citizens, such as pension payments
Political Indicators
 Transparency International World Corruption Index Map: Global Corruption Report 2009: Corruption and the Private Sector |
7. Criminalization and/or Delegitimization of the State
- Massive and endemic corruption or profiteering by ruling elites
- Resistance of ruling elites to transparency, accountability and political representation
- Widespread loss of popular confidence in state institutions and processes, e.g., widely boycotted or contested elections, mass public demonstrations, sustained civil disobedience, inability of the state to collect taxes, resistance to military conscription, rise of armed insurgencies
- Growth of crime syndicates linked to ruling elites
8. Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
- Disappearance of basic state functions that serve the people, including failure to protect citizens from terrorism and violence and to provide essential services, such as health, education, sanitation, public transportation
- State apparatus narrows to those agencies that serve the ruling elites, such as the security forces, presidential staff, central bank, diplomatic service, customs and collection agencies
9. Suspension or Arbitrary Application of the Rule of Law and Widespread Violation of Human Rights
- Emergence of authoritarian, dictatorial or military rule in which constitutional and democratic institutions and processes are suspended or manipulated
- Outbreak of politically inspired (as opposed to criminal) violence against innocent civilians
- Rising number of political prisoners or dissidents who are denied due process consistent with international norms and practices
- Widespread abuse of legal, political and social rights, including those of individuals, groups or cultural institutions (e.g., harassment of the press, politicization of the judiciary, internal use of military for political ends, public repression of political opponents, religious or cultural persecution)
10. Security Apparatus Operates as a "State Within a State"
- Emergence of elite or praetorian guards that operate with impunity
- Emergence of state-sponsored or state-supported private militias that terrorize political opponents, suspected "enemies," or civilians seen to be sympathetic to the opposition
- Emergence of an "army within an army" that serves the interests of the dominant military or political clique
- Emergence of rival militias, guerilla forces or private armies in an armed struggle or protracted violent campaigns against state security forces
11. Rise of Factionalized Elites
- Fragmentation of ruling elites and state institutions along group lines
- Use of nationalistic political rhetoric by ruling elites, often in terms of communal irredentism, (e.g., a "greater Serbia") or of communal solidarity (e.g., "ethnic cleansing" or "defending the faith")
12. Intervention of Other States or External Political Actors
- Military or Para-military engagement in the internal affairs of the state at risk by outside armies, states, identity groups or entities that affect the internal balance of power or resolution of the conflict
- Intervention by donors, especially if there is a tendency towards over-dependence on foreign aid or peacekeeping missions
» » » » [Fund for Peace]
Barack Obama tells Africa to stop blaming colonialism for problems
President Barack Obama has told African leaders it is time to stop blaming colonialism and "Western oppression" for the continent's manifold problems.
By Alex Spillius in Washington, Telegraph
Published: 12:28AM BST 09 Jul 2009
Ahead of a visit to Ghana at the weekend, he said: "Ultimately, I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa.
"I think part of what's hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance, that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism – I'm not a big – I'm not a believer in excuses.
Mr Obama, the son of a Kenyan, added: "I'd say I'm probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's occupied my office. And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism.
"And yet the fact is we're in 2009," continued the US president. "The West and the United States has not been responsible for what's happened to Zimbabwe's economy over the last 15 or 20 years.
"It hasn't been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we've seen elsewhere in Africa. And I think that it's very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable."
Mr Obama told AllAfrica.com that he chose Ghana for his first trip to the continent as president to highlight the country's development as a democracy.
Providing glimpses of a speech to be delivered in Accra on Saturday, he explained: "Ghana has now undergone a couple of successful elections in which power was transferred peacefully, even a very close election."
Mr Obama made it clear that Kenya's ongoing instability had ruled out his father's homeland as an initial destination, despite the euphoria it would have produced.
» » » » [Telegraph.UK (PDF)]
» » [Telegraph.UK: Barack Obama tells Africa to stop blaming the West for its woes (PDF)]
» » [Africans to Bono: “For God’s sake please stop!”]
» » [“For God's Sake, Please STOP the AID to Africa!” - James Shikwati]
» » [Why Africa is Hell: What is the Difference between a Tourist & a Racist?]
» » [Charity & the Savage: Africa is Giving Nothing to Anyone - Apart from AIDS]
» » [Choking Africa on Racist Liberal AID Money: Feeding Greed, Corruption & Dependency]
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