version of their own sanctimonious social order, but with better weather and fewer of those little meatballs on toothpicks. By the beginning of the 1990s, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were sending Tanzania more than $320 million a year—nine times the amount of American aid. Then there is the aforementioned World Bank, financed by the United States, Japan, and other wealthy nations. Its purpose is to loan money to underdeveloped areas, and I can’t understand why it won’t loan money to me, as I am in many areas as underdeveloped as it gets. The World Bank charges interest rates like your dad does when you borrow a twenty. Thirty-three percent of the projects funded by the World Bank are considered failures by the bank itself. The World Bank thus operates on the same business principles as a Reagan-era savings and loan.**** And apparently on the same moral principles —because villagization was just fine with the World Bank; in fact, it had already proposed something on that order in the reams of busybody economic advice with which international organizations pester the globe. How would we like it if the Organization of African Unity told us to get out of our suburbs and move downtown? The World Bank loaned Tanzania oodles of money. Further oodles were loaned by other kindly aid agencies. Tanzanians now have a total foreign debt equal to almost two years’ worth of everything produced in the country. Tanzania is $7.4 billion in hock. The money will be repaid . . . when Rush Limbaugh becomes secretary general of the UN. But don’t worry, the International Monetary Fund is on the case. If a country gets in trouble by borrowing too much from places like the World Bank, then it qualifies for an IMF loan. As long as Tanzania promises to abide, more or less, by free-market guidelines and doesn’t print more worthless paper money than it absolutely has too, the IMF will “help.” Tanzania has been smothered in help. It’s received loans, grants, programs, projects, an entire railroad from the Chinese government (running 1,200 miles to nowhere in particular), and just plain cash. In 1994, by World Bank tally, foreign aid made up 29.1 percent of the Tanzanian GDP, more than the budget of the Tanzanian government. Whatever that government does, we better-off citizens of the world foot the bill. And we’ve been doing it for thirty-seven years. Tanzania is said by Africa scholar Sanford Ungar to be “the most-aided country in all of Africa.” In the period immediately after independence, Tanzania was getting half a billion dollars a year in aid. Between 1970 and 1989,
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