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grams that upgrade manpower training- education, health care, ag–
ricultural extension services, small business management skills,
etcetera - will be funded rather than state-orchestrated public works
policies.
In the past five years, innovative collaborations between non–
profit groups like Africare or Partners for Productivity and Western
corporations have had an immediate and extensive impact in areas
such as improving nationwide health care delivery services and ob–
taining local, grass roots food self-sufficiency in Africa and other
developing countries. In large part, these efforts succeeded because
they bypassed funneling capital through national state bureaucracies.
The success of these programs, and the failure of state-sponsored
projects in the past, have implications that go beyond the African
crisis. They suggest that enlightened capitalism is a more viable
method for achieving what, traditionally, would have been viewed
as socialist ideals than is applied socialism or its variant, the top–
heavy welfare state. Repeatedly, food lines and shortages become
the daily routine in socialist economies and, unlike the United
States, do not exist in demographic pockets of hunger, but nation–
wide. Moreover, because the economic engines have been throttled,
no nonprofit groups, which depend on private donations, can step in
to alleviate the situation.
This is not to imply that generation of private capital is a solu–
tion to a society's ills, but rather to suggest that both traditional
socialist and capitalist theories run amuck for the same reason. Both
confuse a symbolic means with an ideal end: state appropriation of
private goods is no remedy for human alienation, and unrestrained
pursuit of economic gain is a form of tyranny, not liberation, of the
individual. Whether one is speaking of relief aid to Africa or welfare
handouts here, capital alone will not solve the problem. By facing
the tragic outcome of such wrong-headed ideological intoxications
on a distant continent, we may learn, like the ancient historians,
something new out of Africa.
