To be sure, dictators are crafty, evil geniuses with awesome firepower at their disposal. They are also brutally efficient at intimidation, terrorism, and mass slaughter. However, a force is able to dominate because the counterforce is either nonexistent or weak.

African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.

To be sure, dictators are crafty, evil geniuses with awesome firepower at their disposal. They are also brutally efficient at intimidation, terrorism, and mass slaughter. However, a force is able to dominate because the counterforce is either nonexistent or weak.

What Africa needs to do is to grow, to grow out of debt.

In the West, the basic economic and social unit is the individual; in Africa, it is the extended family or the collective.

In a banana republic, one might slip on a banana peel but things do work - now and then for the people, albeit inefficiently and unreliably.

You have to separate the humanitarian impulse from the record of aid itself. We all want to help. Many people would say that it's the moral impulse of the rich to help the poor, but the record of aid has been terrible.