This isn’t about the G-8’s committing massive new aid increases. It’s about continuing present investment and making it smarter. Beyond food, Africa’s vast oil and mineral reserves can be a pipeline to investments in health, education and roads. Mineral extraction is an expensive enterprise, and those who invest in it deserve to make a profit. But they should pay what they owe to governments. Transparency is the vaccine to prevent the biggest disease of them all—corruption, which any African will tell you is killing more kids than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.
With such an underwhelming record in office, how does the ANC win elections? By invoking its legend. The centenary celebrations, like so many other ANC events, hammer home how much black South Africans owe the party. Using such a “powerful legacy” only makes electoral sense, concedes DA leader Helen Zille. “When you’ve fought a liberation struggle and suffered so much and a party is perceived to have given you back your dignity, that party becomes who you are. How are you going to turn your back on that?” On his street corner, Lekhooe says, “I don’t know why we still vote for them,” then corrects himself. “It’s our grandparents. They say we are here only because of the ANC.”
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2103767,00.html#ixzz1kKWKUIOh
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Innovation is as American as apple pie. It seems to accord with so many elements of our national character — ingenuity, freedom, flexibility, the willingness to question conventional wisdom and defy authority. But politicians are pinning their hopes on innovation for more urgent reasons. America’s future growth will have to come from new industries that create new products and processes.
