Private communication to John Shanahan, Founder of website: allaboutenergy.net
How Europe and the US can best help other countries Kelvin Kemm Director, STRATEK - Business Strategy Consultants Pretoria, South Africa October 7, 2022 Across the world, countries range from the most-developed to the least developed. At first one would imagine that this also correlates to mostadvanced to lesser-advanced. But this is not always the case. Some of the least developed countries have clearer/better thinking/working people than wealthier countries. The nature of individuals plus the geography and weather where they live determine how they view life. The nature and aspirations of people living in Finland are not the same as those living in Portugal. Some people in Europe and North America don’t know the goodness, kindness, knowledge and ingenuity of people in poorer parts of the world. South Africa had fully functional text messaging operational on cell phones two years before the United States. Cell phone banking was well established in Southern and East Africa before people of Europe started to use it at all. So now we come to the consideration of foreign aid supplied by developed countries to less developed countries. Sadly much of the foreign aid is very misguided and quite frankly is just plain dishonest. One sees that some country ‘donated’ say $100 million foreign aid to some
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recipient country. The donating country then wallows in the Press praise and it really capitalises on the publicity of this generosity. Then one finds out that the $100 million is mostly not money at all but is essentially ‘shopping vouchers’ which can only be redeemed in the country which made the donation. In addition to that one frequently finds that even the ‘shopping vouchers’ can only be used on what is dictated by the donating country. So for example the donating country will tell a recipient country that it can buy a cell phone communications system from the donating country, but a condition is that all spare parts, maintenance, etc will be controlled by the donating country. So what it boils down to is that the donating country gets all of its donation back, plus more, over the years as it bills the recipient country for decades’ worth of spares and assistance. So the foreign aid ‘donation’ often acts as a stimulus to the industry of the donor and does nothing for the fundamental economy of the recipient. By far the best form of foreign aid is to simply buy goods and services from the recipient country. If the donor really wants to help the recipient they can try to make that easy by streamlining the import and export pathways. But often, in reality, every possible obstacle is put in the way of developing countries exporting. An example of many is a case in South Africa where an electronics company worked hard to export electronic goods to Germany. A huge amount of work went into making sure that the electronic units complied with every specification. Everything was checked exhaustively over about a year. Then the day came when the first consignment was flown to Germany. Then a message came back a few days later that the consignment had been refused entry to Germany ‘because it failed to import specifications’. The notice instructed that the consignment would be returned to South Africa at the expense of the exporter. Then followed a desperate rush on the part of the exporter to find out why it had ‘failed to meet spec’. It turned out that the reason was that the large cardboard cartons that the boxed assemblies were packed into did not contain sufficient recycled paper to meet German paper recycling specifications. 2
So the electronics consignment was rejected due to the cardboard box supplied by the packaging company. One might say that it is difficult to find goods to import from a really very underdeveloped country. True, but there is always something. A country like the US could order $10 million of handmade wooden desks, even if the US is not short of such manufacturing capability themselves. It is a certainty that when a purchase order is offered, particularly if it is over a five or ten year period, that the local entrepreneurs will succeed in fulfilling it. This will develop businesses and jobs in the underdeveloped country. Unfortunately all too often the supposed donor countries go to other countries and just bully them in their own interests. For example with the case of so-called Climate Change. European countries want to look good to their own voters so they arrive in Africa to ‘help Africans’ by forcing African countries to install wind and solar electricity systems. The geographical conditions are so totally different to Europe, for example with distances. South Africa alone is the same size as the whole of Western Europe added together. The distance from Pretoria to Cape Town is the same as Rome to London. So considerations of interconnecting transmission lines; positions of substations; maintenance points; and so on are totally different. Many European solutions and gifts just don't work in Africa or certainly don't work as the donor claimed. The best way for European countries and the US to assist developing countries is to be honest. Don't use foreign aid as a mechanism to bully or bribe. Just plain and simply try to purchase something from them. The natural laws of free market economics will then come into force and the recipient country will progress by itself.
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