Monday, September 21, 2015

LEARNINGS FROM EU IMMIGRATION WOES


In recent weeks thousands of immigrants have been streaming into the European Union. The recent upsurge has accentuated ongoing waves of Africans and east Europeans.

A civil war in Syria that has razed the middle eastern country to the ground is the trigger for the current explosion in immigrant numbers. That and the fact that many of it's richer neighbours are unwilling to take in even a single fleeing Arab.

Its impossible to detach the politics of it from the economics and speaks volumes to the issues of the blow back from colonialism and neocolonialism, governments' role in translating economic growth into development and the future reality of a centralised global government.
"No one wants to leave home. We are compelled to do so because we are insecure where we live for political or economic reasons.
Immigrants are a failure in the management of our society, more specifically the management of our economics....

The relentless flow of immigrants to Europe since the independence of many African states has as an underlying factor the global economic inequalities that have continued, even widened in the last half century.

The west by plundering Africa during colonialism and maintaining those exploitative systems after colonialism have grown rich on the continent's back.

The UN estimates that up to $1.4 trillion has flowed out of Africa illegally between 1980 and 2009. A lot of this money can be attributed by organised crime -- smuggling, drug and human trafficking but more than half of it, some estimate about 60 percent of it is due to multinationals through tax evasion and avoidance among other dodges. A system the west has cordoned but only now moving to minimise as it threatens their economies and politics.

The net effect of this is that the rich have grown richer and the poor have grown poorer. To the point that it is doubtful whether the word has the resources to sustain us all at the standard of living the west has grown accustomed to.

So its a simple equation there will always be motion from high pressure to low pressure areas, in this case from high economic stress areas to lower economic stress areas. The movement will be stopped when balance is attained. There are no shortcuts.

For this obviously two things have to happen.

One, the prodigious economic growth figures that many in the third world have been posting should be translated into meaningful improvements in general welfare. Secondly, that the developed nations severely cut back on their consumption to allow the third world catch up.

The first cannot happen without the second, which explains why poverty maybe here with us to stay.
That being said what needs to be done to ensure meaningful development for the third world?

To begin with there has to be a near universal appreciation among ourselves that we have all the resources -- human, natural resources and even capital to dig ourselves out of our predicament.

Across the border from us in the DRC the extent of their mineral wealth is estimated at $12trillion, at par with the US economy. And we haven't even started factoring the economic potential of its 70 million people.

The same can be said for Uganda where recent surveys have showed if we were to fully exploit our mineral wealth we would have to relocate everyone out of the country.

The trick to unlocking these embarrassing riches at our feet is to improve the quality of our human resource, through quality education and health care and to create a conducive environment for the private sector to thrive. 

And that doesn't mean living capitalism to run around unfettered, because the market is the most effective wealth creator we know its the worst distributor of wealth.

It is important that we tap into our well documented entrepreneurial abilities to harness the market for our benefit. All the aid in the world cannot do that for us.

"In fact aid has stalled rather than helped our progress. Getting aid is easier than building durable, transformative companies. In the last half century, billions of dollars have been pumped into Uganda but during the same period we have only a handful of companies with a national presence, nor do we have billion dollar companies....


A country is only as viable as its private sector. That is the more durable measure of development, with a string private sector your poverty issues will be sorted out, as will be your governance issues and therefore your service delivery issues.

The "crisis" the EU is facing has the same qualities as the rural-urban migration.

Its not an insurmountable challenge but a restructuring of the world economy -one way or another, will have to come first before things change.

There is a more apocalyptical vision but we will keep that for another day.

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