Apparently, ‘caveat emptor’ means something completely different as far as the Guardian is concerned. Meera Selva seems to be very confused when it comes to what Africa’s major problem is when it comes to employing its mineral resources.

Apparently:

China has been quite rightly criticised for exploiting Africa, buying up mining concessions and primary goods in opaque deals that benefit African leaders but not necessarily their people.

And that’s the fault of the African governments, not of the Chinese companies. May this be a very timely warning to the lefties that populate the hills and vales of Guardiland: sometimes (read: “always”) government’s objectives aren’t the same objectives as their peoples. Maybe smaller government is the answer?

Elsewhere, Chinese self-interest is genuinely helping African economies. This week, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China bought a 20% stake in the Standard Bank group, Africa’s largest bank. The deal helps China diversify its financial services and sends a signal that Africa’s nascent investment banking and insurance industries are worth investing in. The deal also treats Standard Bank as an equal, not an institution that needs to be lectured by a more powerful group.

That’s because Standard Bank, unlike the other investments the Chinese are making, is a private company. Chinese self-interest helps Africans in this case because the Africans are interested in helping themselves. The invisible hand only works to the benefit of all when there’s a profit motivation.

If the regulatory system is such that there is illegitimate profit to be made, as is the case with “l’État c’est moi” dictators siphoning off billions to their own bank accounts, the invisible hand leads to illegitimate profit. The only way one can avoid such illegitimate profit is by privatising industry and guaranteeing private property rights more effectively than is the case in most African countries.

Africa is still being lectured to by western institutions that offer aid with one hand and put up trade barriers with the other. China on the other hand, sweeps in offering to do business. Guess which side Africa would rather deal with?

They’d rather deal with the sanctimonious Western governments that feel they have to spend their taxpayers’ money to soothe their guilt over slavery. However, since we don’t ask for anything in return, the Africa governments can deal with the Chinese at the same time. It’s not either-or; because of our ineptitude in forcing institutional reform in Africa, the Africa leaders can give Western aid to their people, and funnel Chinese investment into their Swiss bank accounts.

On the plus side, at least she supports free trade, right? Actually, she probably doesn’t understand what it even means, because that implies just as much institutional reform in Africa as it does in Europe. There are more barriers to trade between African countries than between Africa and other continents, and trade between African countries is derisory 10.5% of the continent’s total trade. Another example of government failure in Africa.

The fact of the matter is that Africa is the poorest continent in the world, the continent hit by the most debilitating military conflicts, and the most afflicted by the health and social problems that afflict it because it is governed by bad people doing bad things. The way to combat all the ills of the continent is to combat its tinpot dictators. If Meera Selva is truly interested in helping the world’s neediest, she’ll help them, rather than help their oppressors.

News stories about civil liberties in Africa seems to come along like buses: grouped together in waves, and very bad when they hit you. From only a little perusing of the Internet, here’s the Top Five Bad News Stories from Africa.

5) Mozambican archbishop alleges condoms are a tool of genocide - The head of the Roman Catholic Church in Mozambique has attacked the use of condoms, asserting that they, and the anti-retroviral drugs that combat AIDS, are deliberately infected with HIV “in order to finish quickly the African people”. He alleges that this condoms have replaced colonialism as whitey’s way of keeping the African man down.

At the moment, over 16% of Mozambicans are infected with HIV, making it one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. That 16%, over 3m people, are only kept alive by the production of anti-retrovirals, and the pandemic is only kept in check by the use of appropriate contraception.

The anti-retroviral drugs and condoms are distributed for free, or at heavily discounted rates, by Westerners that feel it is the White Man’s Burden to cure Africa of its maladies. If the African leaders think we’re trying to kill them, they can stop helping themselves fight the pandemic, and they can see how long it is before they all drop dead.

4) Nigerian corruption plumbs new depths - Nigeria’s parliament has reported that $5m has been acquired by the new Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives illegally. Patricia Etteh, the first female Speaker, is accused of taking that money in bribes from companies tendering offers for government contracts. And it’s understandable that she’s suspected. In the six months since taking up the position, Etteh has bought twelve cars and rebuilt her house. She hasn’t tried to explain where she got the money for all that.

More than anything, the one factor that cripples Africa’s development is corruption, and no country in Africa is worse-affected than Nigeria. Since 1960, $220bn of Nigeria’s fabulous oil wealth has been stolen by politicians, leaving tens of millions of Nigerians destitute as victims of state thievery. Nigeria was right to renew its anti-corruption drive, but, if the old habits displayed by Patricia Etteh die hard, there can be no progress towards a better future.

3) Kenyan Church gets homophobic and belligerent - Kenya’s branch of the Anglican church has rejected moves by the US Episcopal Church to compromise over the ordination of gay priests. “That word ‘halt’ is not enough,” said Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi. Kenya has led the African churches in the belligerent line taken over the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain, amongst others, Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003.

This indicates the moral mess that most African authority figures, particularly churches, are in. Their American brothers and sisters offered to cease ordaining gay priests - permanently and totally - and it was rejected out of hand by the Kenyans. The Americans were conciliatory in pandering to the Kenyan church’s bigotry and hatred. The Episcopal Church’s reward is not only a slap in the face from the Kenyan archbishop, but a loss of its own liberal common sense of which it was once proud. Now, no member of the Anglican Communion can truly claim to represent compassion.

2) Zimbabwean government steals white farmers’ land. Again - The Zimbabwean ‘parliament’ has rubber-stamped Robert Mugabe’s plans to expropriate businesses owned by Zimbabwean civilians (colloquially known as ‘whites’) and give them to his cronies (colloquially known as ‘freedom fighters’).

Just as Zimbabwe is suffering from one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world today, Zimbabwe has now decided to take farms from farmers, who know how to grow crops, and give it to militiamen, who know only how to kill white farmers.

1) Four African countries teeter on the edge of war - Two old wounds have reopened across Africa. Soldiers from DR Congo and Uganda have exchanged fire across the border, the dispute over led to the last Congolese war (known as “Africa’s Great War”) and left 3m dead. Meanwhile, in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea and Ethiopia are continuing to exchange accusations that they breached the terms of the peace treaty that ended a decade of intermittent war in the 1990s.

The two crises, the likes of which tend to be regular occurrences in the respective regions at the best of times, have come about because the countries’ governments have been pig-headed to the point of not caring about their own people.

The fight in central Africa is over oil rights: an issue that shouldn’t matter to the state, as the oil rightfully belongs to the company that discovers it, not the government that oppresses the local inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Eritrea-Ethiopia ding-dong is over good old-fashioned national pride: Ethiopia’s government thinks Eritreans should sing a different national anthem, whilst Eritreans are quite happy singing their own and think it’s so good they want a few Ethiopians to sing it, too. These four governments clearly think that shooting foreigners makes their people happier than letting them get on with their lives.

The problems that affect Africa are simple and recurring ones: intolerance and bigotry, oppression and belligerence, corruption and theft. They are underpinned by an ignorance and anti-intellectualism that belittles opponents and makes political debate curt and moot. Lots of problems blight Africa, but these are the most important. They are of their own making, and they are easily remediable.

PS This ain’t gonna become a recurring feature. Piss off.