Victory Soap v. 2.0

Seriously. Africa doesn't need small-scale poverty handouts, it needs concrete -- in the form of roads, factories, bridges, etc.:

Africans are not suffering because of climate change. We’re suffering because of underdevelopment. The fact is we simply don’t have the infrastructure that has enabled the West to subdue nature. If we are at the mercy of the climate, it is because our societies remain under-industrialised.

I've read a lot of "oh, Africa is hopeless, give up on it, the people there are just fundamentally broken somewhere in their psyche." The idea is that all we do is waste money on them and it gets piddled away on booze and cars for their leaders, or Marxist adventuring, or whatever. That's as may be. But once my own country was hopeless -- its previous population depleted by disease and warfare, its new colonists consisting for the most part of Europe's dregs and castoffs (at least as judged by Europe at the time). Look at us now.

Maybe what Africa needs instead of us treating them like children -- handing out pittances of money like giving a preteen a weekly allowance, and worst of all, treating Africa like some sort of pristine nature camp -- is for us to send them a few industrialists with big pockets. But too many of our leading industrial lights, I am afraid, have bought into the whole climate-change, development-is-bad, back-to-the-soil hoax that Dr. Andrew is fulminating against.

(Via a commenter on Tim Blair's site.)