Those subsistence farming villages are a part of geopolitical governments
Oof, tell me you’ve never been to one without telling me you’ve never been to one. These are people who depend entirely on rain-fed agriculture and other than roads to get between towns, have almost zero interaction with even local government, let alone national government. You’re sort of inventing a story of people that don’t exist to fit your narrative.
And I’ve sadly spent a lot of time dealing with IMF loan terms and conditions, and labor laws across Africa and Eastern Europe, and things like giving up land or public works are either not entirely accurate, or specific and individualized conditions based on what a country wants an IMF loan for in the first place, and it’s often gross mismanagement that leads to things like that.
Here’s an example: when I lived in a large coastal city in West Africa, the city water ran one day a week, on Sunday afternoons. Why? Because the Japanese government paid for and built a desalination plant that worked great for years. Then the local government demanded it be fully handed over to them, and within a year it was no longer working because someone’s unqualified cousin was made manager and spent the entire budget on things other than the plant. So in a city of 2.5 million people, we had to dig a well and spend $8,000 on a water filtration system because otherwise I have to pay some guys once a week to bring a truck full of milky-white water they clearly pumped from a trash-filled stream 2km away. And so, sure enough, look who needs a loan to unfuck the desalination plant the last government fucked up? And why, exactly, do you think they won’t loot the cash and let the same thing happen? Because that’s typically the cycle that plays out for all sorts of things like this. It’s why most state-owned power and telecom companies are a mess, it’s why nearly every passenger railway is wothless when it does rarely and slowly run. And yet, it’s not just the IMF, it’s also China and the Afrexim Bank that also do this. Even other governments on the continent do this same stuff for each other!
And labor laws…a lot of post-colonial countries wrote themselves labor laws that are intended to make it expensive for foreigners to do business there. Which, hey, go for it, defend local production. It’s more than labor laws that function that way, for the record. However, local labor laws are often entirely different for locals, and you wouldn’t believe how badly wealthy locals treat poor locals. I once saw a gate open to a known local guy’s fancy house, and an old lady in a housekeeper uniform was using a big hotel tile buffing machine - polishing the fucking driveway. A cement driveway. That’s not colonialism, that’s a fucking decision someone made to pay some old woman probably minimum wage to polish a driveway. And culturally, opulence as trappings of wealth is a thing, but I’ve never seen a senior traditional leader be so exploitative as that. Then again, I doubt you even read most of any of this.
You’ll blame colonialism and international finance for everything and anything, and it’s not entirely wrong some of the time. But holy shit, people have agency and make decisions, too. And tens of millions of people across Africa alone live lives entirely removed the effects of the IMF or national government, so you have to know when and where to apply blame to stay grounded in reality.
Oof, tell me you’ve never been to one without telling me you’ve never been to one. These are people who depend entirely on rain-fed agriculture and other than roads to get between towns, have almost zero interaction with even local government, let alone national government. You’re sort of inventing a story of people that don’t exist to fit your narrative.
And I’ve sadly spent a lot of time dealing with IMF loan terms and conditions, and labor laws across Africa and Eastern Europe, and things like giving up land or public works are either not entirely accurate, or specific and individualized conditions based on what a country wants an IMF loan for in the first place, and it’s often gross mismanagement that leads to things like that.
Here’s an example: when I lived in a large coastal city in West Africa, the city water ran one day a week, on Sunday afternoons. Why? Because the Japanese government paid for and built a desalination plant that worked great for years. Then the local government demanded it be fully handed over to them, and within a year it was no longer working because someone’s unqualified cousin was made manager and spent the entire budget on things other than the plant. So in a city of 2.5 million people, we had to dig a well and spend $8,000 on a water filtration system because otherwise I have to pay some guys once a week to bring a truck full of milky-white water they clearly pumped from a trash-filled stream 2km away. And so, sure enough, look who needs a loan to unfuck the desalination plant the last government fucked up? And why, exactly, do you think they won’t loot the cash and let the same thing happen? Because that’s typically the cycle that plays out for all sorts of things like this. It’s why most state-owned power and telecom companies are a mess, it’s why nearly every passenger railway is wothless when it does rarely and slowly run. And yet, it’s not just the IMF, it’s also China and the Afrexim Bank that also do this. Even other governments on the continent do this same stuff for each other!
And labor laws…a lot of post-colonial countries wrote themselves labor laws that are intended to make it expensive for foreigners to do business there. Which, hey, go for it, defend local production. It’s more than labor laws that function that way, for the record. However, local labor laws are often entirely different for locals, and you wouldn’t believe how badly wealthy locals treat poor locals. I once saw a gate open to a known local guy’s fancy house, and an old lady in a housekeeper uniform was using a big hotel tile buffing machine - polishing the fucking driveway. A cement driveway. That’s not colonialism, that’s a fucking decision someone made to pay some old woman probably minimum wage to polish a driveway. And culturally, opulence as trappings of wealth is a thing, but I’ve never seen a senior traditional leader be so exploitative as that. Then again, I doubt you even read most of any of this.
You’ll blame colonialism and international finance for everything and anything, and it’s not entirely wrong some of the time. But holy shit, people have agency and make decisions, too. And tens of millions of people across Africa alone live lives entirely removed the effects of the IMF or national government, so you have to know when and where to apply blame to stay grounded in reality.