“Oh, those awful, thieving western corporations. Just taking and taking and taking from the poor Africans who would be much better off if the foreign nationals had never set foot on their wonderful progressive continent. (snicker)”
In the few fertile and low-disease areas of Africa, you could probably agree with that statement. Except that it wasn’t “progressive”. Primitive man simply grazed the land like animals and the population stabilized over many millenia. I think that is better than artificial/unsustainable population growth in infertile/disease-ridden areas, the resulting AK-47 toting gangs, and industrial-scale destruction of the environment.
You think the corporations actually give a damn? You think they want Africans to be wealthy, educated and demand high pay for their time and resources? You think they want Africans to demand accountability for their environment? Hell no.
At best the corporations want to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with warlords who keep the mines wide open at a pittance and the people enslaved. Their contributions are nothing but bare minimum smoke/mirrors to cover up an inevitable PR nightmare and most are designed to eventually only benefit the warlords anyway.
It’s not only Western. The Chinese are doing this at en exponentially increasing rate.
And it get’s better. The same is slowly being done to us...
Your post made me think..
.obama is now our “warlord”