Rebuilding Africa

Stephen Ellis in Foreign Affairs proffers solutions on how to repair failed and failing states in Africa. "...a better approach to dysfunctional states in Africa would begin with a diagnosis that takes full account of their individual characters and does not assume that the same therapy will work on all of them...A new approach will also require new institutional frameworks that draw in all interested parties, including some of Africa's more capable states and regional institutions. International financial bodies, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), must also be brought onboard...In some cases, a form of international trusteeship will be required. This idea, anathema since the end of colonialism, deserves rehabilitation. Done properly, it need not involve the wholesale dismantling of national sovereignty, a precedent that would rightly worry many parties. Instead, trusteeship should entail a new, enhanced form of international responsibility...Instead of more money, what Africa really needs is governments that are responsible to their own voters, that are largely self-financing, that are internationally respectable, and that can attract home some of the hundreds of thousands of talented Africans who currently live in the West. New infusions of aid would likely just perpetuate the kleptocratic regimes that have slowly strangled the continent since independence..."
via NYTimes