Andrew Mwenda Quotes

The essence of Africa's crisis is fundamentally its extreme poverty.

Poor countries are poor because they are wasting their resources.

Brazil has a lot of issues that are similar to a lot of countries in Latin America, but the dominant issue Brazil is dealing with is poverty and political corruption.

Unlike 30 years ago, people now admire the wealth of the West and lament the poverty of China; they stare awestruck at the power of the Western armies and scorn the cowardice of the Imperial troops; they enjoy the fairness and ease of the Customs and detest the fault-finding of China’s own tax collectors; they praise the orderly governance of the Western-Administered cities, and resent the harassment of our officials, big and small.

Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.

Everybody keeps saying that India's a poor country. Yes, we have poverty. But I blame the government of India, the political establishment, for their failure to educate and therefore their failure to control the poverty.

In my view, Africa's real problems are cultural.

I would not apply the strategy of Calderon. I would look at the causes. Violence in Mexico has its origins in the lack of development and corruption.

Too many African countries have already hit rock-bottom - ungoverned, poverty-stricken, and lagging further and further behind the rest of the world each day; there is nowhere further to go down.

Capitalism has only hurt Latin America.

I like globalization; I want to say it works, but it is hard to say that when six hundred million people are slipping backwards.

The countries of the Middle East have been losers in the age of globalization, out of step in an age of free markets, free trade, and democratic politics.

Remove poverty from politics.

The reigning model of economic globalization threatens earth’s life systems, undermines cultural integrity and diversity, and endangers the lives of many who are poor in order that some might consume exorbitantly and a few accumulate vast wealth.

One wonders whether the ethnic categorization effort at finding solutions to problems that cross ethnic boundaries. Poverty is poverty is poverty. It does not have peculiar ethnic characteristics.

Most of the oil rich exporting countries were not really helped in the long run by their oil resources. Oil wealth distorted the development of the country. Corruption, the concept of something for nothing, the lack of development of a manufacturing or agricultural base, the resources to keep a dictator in power without depending on the people—all were problems.

Poverty, discrimination and ignorance decrease growth.

Poverty is a corrosive brew, capable of eating away at the underpinnings of democratic life itself.

The Secretary General has endorsed a propaganda exercise for international finance institutions whose policies are widely held to be at the root of many of the most grave social problems facing the poor all over the world.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be war, corruption, and imperfect institutions.

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia, had been devastated by neoliberal economic policies.

Many developing nations have such severe debt and budget problems that the money given by developed nations will never be spent the way it is intended.

How we live our lives in the Western world has impacts on the rest of the world.

Corruption is a cancer that steals from the poor, eats away at governance and moral fibre and destroys trust.

Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on.