More Parallels

I've written about Dambisa Moyo before. What she has to say about Africa has parallels with the issues on First Nations in Canada. The interview in the video below hits on a few of the parallels between the two. Perhaps "parallels" is not the most accurate description, though, as there are many things that are different as well, differences that only make the problems more intractable.

Specifically, at the 58 and 6:57 minute marks Moyo talks about the effects of massive amounts of free money transferred from government to government without accountability to the citizen. She also states: "We need to start having the discussion of how Africa is going to wean itself of aid and become an equal partner on the global stage." Indeed we do and we also need to have the same conversation about funding for First Nations in Canada.

During the 1950s and '60s many First Nations people looked longingly at the independence movements that were reshaping Africa and other Third World nations. George Manuel, leader of the National Indian Brotherhood (the precursor of the Assembly of First Nations) even wrote a book about the issue of non-Western peoples surrounded colonizers and controlled by colonizer governments. The Fourth World he called it. Indian people today would do well to look at the results of those Third World independence movements and to study what Moyo has to say.

The barriers in the Fourth World are probably higher and more difficult to overcome, reaching, as they do, directly into our constitution; imbued, as they are, with a revisionist and grossly distorted interpretation of treaties; and hamstrung, as they remain, by outdated and patronizing legislation that should have been scrapped decades ago.

Anyway. Food for thought.