Andrew Natsios Quotes

In this financial year we will be spending at least $1.5 billion on foreign aid and we cannot be sure that this money will be properly spent, as corruption and mismanagement in many of the recipient countries are legend.

Not any amount of aid is going to move Africa forward.

One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.

Saddam spent 35 years stealing and wasting money, and all of these systems are very fragile and brittle, and you try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble.

Aid can work where there is good governance, and usually fails where governments are unable or unwilling to commit aid to improve the lives of their people.

The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations.

Development donors ... put a positive spin on awful recipient governments by asserting that while things are bad, they are getting better.

Most Russian programs and policies had had just the opposite effect of what was intended. The reason is hyper-centralization of power.

After 43 years and $568 billion in foreign aid to the continent, Africa remains trapped in economic stagnation.

It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power.

There is little doubt that our guarantee fund system is seriously mismanaged and compromised.

Corruption is a problem in almost all developing countries.

I believe there is nothing which can be done to restrain these frivolous Presidential expenditures because Mobutu has apparently risen in soufflé-like grandiloquence…. to call his attention to the dangers of this type of thing … would be to incur instant wrath…. It is the most serious problem facing Congo at present time and the fault is that of the President [Mobuto] and the uncontrollable spending is coming from him.

International aid as a means of development is a major failure, and not just in Haiti.

What typically happens in government is the exact opposite of how things should work.

Overly concentrated power, whether in public, private or even in civic hands is an invitation to abuse.

I underestimated the low level of capacity. I also underestimated the cultural roots of corruption.

We are strong country with weak leadership.

I would replace most foreign aid with a tax credit for businesses to invest. I think U.S. bureaucrats giving foreign bureaucrats money is a guaranteed failure. And we've had about 50 years' experience at failing with foreign aid.

Big problems usually come from big sources.

What happens when you get any kind of entrenched power is that it just becomes kind of corrupt and self-serving.

One of the most frustrating things is to see a country in which you had elections, the elections were a success, but then you have to say to people nothing can be improved in the next few months, even in the next few years, in infrastructure, in water, in sanitation, in health, in education, in jobs.

The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.

There never was a democracy yet where the people didn't vote themselves into oblivion.

Chidamabaram has ruined the economy. He has turned out to be a third-rate failure as finance minister.