July 4, 2005

Interesting discussion at Rajan and I agree with Rajan that the Africans need to help themselves to overcome poverty but NOT until you have people like Swazi king, Mswati II (picture source: BBC News) who actually make his people poorer by living on foreign aid and lavish spending.

About a quarter of Swaziland’s one million people risk starvation from the famine sweeping drought-hit southern Africa.

Whilst most of us think that African lives only on maze and corn (well I did once – watching too much of National Geography), you will be surprised how common some of the foods are in Ghana with Malaysia. When I was there for an assignment last year, we were living mostly of nasi goreng (“fried rice”), Chinese noodles and Indian tandori chicken.