Not altogether surprising - but rather reassuring - that all those sandals in Jo'burg got into a ferocious lather about the possibility of private enterprise becoming involved in projects to bring water to the billions who haven't got it. Not surprising because sandals don't care for people, not real people: they prefer abstract humans, living in morally superior collectives where they obey some third-way sandalogical rules in which personal greed and individual ambition have been excised, writes Kevin Myers
I say excised, rather than genetically modified out of existence, because sandalogues don't approve of GM, even though it could feed the hungry of the world; which is further proof of how sandals despise real people, and prefer their own imaginary world populated by eco-natives, eking out their uplifting existence with frugality, modesty and environmentally friendly personal habits.
Such people, of course, don't exist, any more than did the idealised working classes who were so venerated in Marxist-Leninist theory of an earlier generation of sandalogy, and who were so utterly pauperised, brutalised and ultimately butchered by its practice.
Pious prating
M-Lism is now dead ,of course; and the sandals, having fetishised the proletariat, are doing something similar towards the environment - and well might the environment tremble at such attentions. Theirs is a caress which spells pious prating, mad ideas and poverty. But pious prating is what sandals do best, and what they're giving us from Jo'burg is actually proving to be worse than expected.
I might have said "enjoyably" worse, but there's nothing enjoyable about the €50 million eco-prate of Jo'burg. It is a disgrace, an appalling and monstrous waste of money, which will allow meaningless environmental targets to be set by the combination of doctrinaire sandalistas and the professional supra-ocular wool-pullers with their suited svengalis. The targets are unrelated to any intended behaviour. They simply sound good.
There is no reason why there should be a single country in the world that cannot ensure clean water for its citizens - no reason, that is, apart from bad government and pathological criminality. When US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill toured Uganda, the recipient of billions of dollars in aid over the decades, and found community after community without clean water, he rightly raged at how so much US-donated money could have gone missing.
Manipulative dependency is not an African monopoly. India is asking the rest of the world to help it provide water to its most backward regions, yet it has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and at least 200 million of its people live in first world conditions. It spends vast fortunes on armaments: its military exceed in numbers and deadly capabilities those all of European countries combined. Yet it steadfastly refuses to invest the money needed to install the wherewithal for those 200 million people who live in permanent, structural drought.
Combat aircraft
India wants the world to help it install water systems in tens of thousands of villages, because it would much rather spend millions of lakhs on Mig and Sukhoi combat aircraft and modern battle tanks than on its own people. So it expects us to do that for it. The message from Jo'burg seems to be that we will.
The sandalistas are even laying down conditions on who supplies water to such backward villages: it must either be charities or governments, but not free enterprise. Why not free enterprise? Because free enterprise will use the projects to make money, and moreover, free enterprise was responsible for wrecking the climate in the first place.
Firstly, advanced free enterprise economies are clean economies. Compare Sweden or the US with China or India. Secondly, does it matter if someone makes money out of charity? Isn't paying for the best usually worth it in our own lives? What's better - a first-class well which someone made some money out of installing or an unreliable third-class well which was installed cheaply by inexpert, though well-meaning, hands? What names are guaranteed to make the sandalistas sneer? Coca Cola and McDonalds. Both companies are willing to get involved in aid projects in the developing world; and they have been with met indignation, derision and scorn by the sandalistas in Jo'burg.
But what better organisations to do such work? One is the most successful food company in the world, the other the most successful drinks company. There's hardly a country in the world where they haven't come to terms with local market conditions, in the case of McDonalds because its highly flexible franchise system rewards local entrepreneurs. Translate the adaptive skills of the marketplace to the supply of well-water and to sewage disposal systems, and you pretty soon get aqueous solutions.
Multinational capitalism
Sandalistas don't want solutions. They want to experience the warm feelings of Lady Bountiful delivering soup to the deserving poor. When those NGOs so angrily denounced the involvement of multinational capitalism in aid projects, what they were really saying was that doing good in the world counts only if it makes you feel good at the same time. In other words, NGOs exist for the sake of the feelings of their members, not for the results which they can actually bring about among the poorest people on earth.
The supply of clean water is the basic requirement of civilisation. That there is a single country in the world which still hasn't achieved that is due to bad local government and grand theft on an institutional scale, not to the exploitative first world. African villages live in semi-permanent drought because successive African governments have chosen to spend their money on guns and girls, not wells and water.