No one has to starve in Africa. Hunger there results from the failures of unscrupulous rulers -- and their friends in the West. Paradoxically, it is the aid workers who are standing in the way of progress.
If you follow the reasoning of the United Nation's World Food Program, then Kenya is a unique region when it comes to hunger catastrophes. In this east African country, a popular vacation destination with 32 million inhabitants, UN workers hand out more food on an annual basis than they do in southern Sudan, which civil wars have ravaged for decades. But is Kenya really dying of hunger?
If that were the case, Africa's prospects of ever being able to feed itself would look really dismal. Take a look at a map and you'll see that Kenya lies on Lake Victoria. The lake got its name from its British "discoverer," John Hanning Speke, who named it after the British queen at the time. It's really much more like an ocean than a lake, despite a constantly sinking water level. This inland sea connects Tanzania and Uganda with Kenya. Covering an area of 68,000 square kilometers (26,250 square miles), it's Africa's largest lake. And it is full of freshwater.
For Kenya, the question -- which also applies, incidentally, to Malawi, about which there are regular reports about hunger emergencies -- is really this: Can you starve if you live right next to such a gigantic freshwater reservoir?
Sure, Kenya is large. It has savannahs, highlands, arid lands in the north, mountains and sultry regions, such as the 480-kilometer (300-mile) east coast on the Indian Ocean or the Kakamega rainforest in the west, which is a virtual greenhouse. If you got things only halfway right in such a country, it seems that nobody should go hungry -- and especially if it is getting assistance from the philanthropists of the world community.
Whatever surplus is produced in the western part of this blessed country only needs to be to be delivered to the north and sold. That would give the farmers more incentive to produce more. And producing more means earning more, which in turn also means that more tax money would pour into the government's coffers and could be used to make improvements to the country's disastrous infrastructure.
What is going on in Africa ?
Of course, Kenya would be far from thrilled to take the money it brings in and put it into improvements in the road network. It was just recently that Kenya's minister of finance, Amos Kimunya, announced that it was urgent for him to reduce infrastructure spending because otherwise he wouldn't be able to pay the government cabinet. Kenya currently has 94 ministers and assistant ministers, each of whom earns more than $20,000 (€12,940) a month on top of having their own state-funded compound. As a result, Kenya's budget now has a huge deficit of nearly $300 million, and it will soon have to announce to the international community that the world's rich countries need to foot the bill. If they don't, the Kenyans will starve and the peace that was so painfully won -- primarily by creating this enormous cabinet (more...) -- will be in imperiled.
