This weekend (Sat 27-8-2016) one of my newspapers gave me a four-page plea from World Vision about providing more water for Africa.
And I have a policy on this, sorry World Vision, but the project is obviously beyond private charity, I have been seeing these kind of pleas all my life (I was born in 1948) and pleas are still being made to give African countries relevant sets of a decent water distribution systems.
My policy is this: real men don’t let children die from drinking filthy water, so if children are dying, what is wrong with the real men of Africa? What is wrong with the UN which is not ordering the rulers (they hardly deserve the word “governments”) of Africa to provide clean water for their people? And so on.
So I want to know when we are going to see some water-action from the real men of Africa. As a historian once said, many years ago, famines don’t bother well-run, democratic countries. It’s true enough. But famines, droughts and the victimhoods of climate vagaries still recurrently visit Africa more tragically than anywhere else in the world, we need to ask, why is this?
What is so special about Africa that it suffers more than anywhere else in the world from climate and other problems that are thousands of years old? And so, World Vision, the problem you work on won’t be solved by my private charity (it hasn’t yet been solved by private charity in my lifetime), so it’s time for you to work on a broader and presumably different front. World Vision supports bringing clean water to the world? Really? I’d like to see some action on this.
