The Leakages in Africas Beggsra Bowl

Hi my names josh and im going to talk today about the leaks in Africa’s beggars bowl now I as well as many had always had the view that Africa was a poor underdeveloped continent from the charity adverts to just the general consensus that this was the case so when I was told that we were going to visit Nigeria for a wedding 9 years ago I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, weddings to me were bad enough but in Africa? I couldn’t think of anything worse. On arrival I found that my grandparents “house” was no house it was massive with it being the only house on the road Mateola Way it had an uncountable number of cars and I soon realised that my grandparents had workers in the house drivers cooks cleaners gardeners and this left me confused this wasn’t what I had seen in the adverts  or the pictures and I remember lying in bed wondering if we had gone to the right continent let alone the right country. But the following day we left the property to go to my auntie and now uncle’s wedding and this Is where I saw what you could call the real Nigeria with people living in unthinkable conditions living in what would probably be described as slum conditions now at the time i obviously wasn’t an alevel economist so had no clue what inequality was but looking back at it now this was an extreme cause of inequality of wealth as shown in this graph here the percentage of Nigerians living in absolute poverty (earning less than a dollar a day about 65 pence) has increased to 61 per cent over the past decade, compared with 55 per cent in 2004 but why is this the case

This is what I’m here to talk about now the first question that you might ask ight be that Africa already are given a lot of aid and you’d be correct Africa are given massive amounts of aid with the UK giving 8.7 billion in 2012 alone so where is all of this money going and how has this money ended up worsening the inequality in the continent, the first thing that comes to mind is corrupt politicians and thinking about it this might be right so lets have a quiz can anyone give me names of prime ministers hat have done a good job for this country…….. MT DC TB WC Clement Attlee Harold McMillan the list goes on but the same unfortunately can’t be said for Africa can anyone name any good African leaders there’s one obvious one NM but I would’nt expect you to know anymore it’s not like we teach African history as part of the curriculam so I went to someone who should know African history my grandma and wityh 70 years of experinec in Africa I expected her to give me a long list of leaders but her response was that there was no such thing as a good African leader.  Now looking back to the traditional African times the leaders were not leaders but chiefs and they weren’t in control of a country they were in control of a village of about 50 odd people this meant that the leaders could cater to the people’s needs much more efficiently that someone having to do the same for millions of people. The chief would be accountable for everything that happened and the people weren’t bound to him by mandate like in our system so therefore if the village became unhappy with the leadership they would up sticks and move this meant that the chief had to work hard to keep the people happy. There was also massive decentralisation of power with councils having to give permission before the chief made any decisions. Fast forward to modern day African politics and the system has been changed to the point that the leaders can corrupt the system. Take Robert Mugabe probably the first name that comes to mind when you think about corrupt leaders