[American Thinker] One of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read is Keith Richburg’s 1997 Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. In it, Richburg, who had a three-year stint as the Washington Post’s African bureau chief, explains why he’s so grateful that his long-ago ancestors endured the horrors of the slave ships and the dehumanizing indignity of slavery itself: If that hadn’t happened, he would have been born in Africa and that, he realized, would have been a terrible thing.
One of the chief problems Richburg describes about Africa in the early 1990s is government corruption. According to him, the corruption is so complete that government agencies are incapable of carrying out their mandates, since everything goes into the bureaucrats’ pockets. According to Elon Musk and his DOGE team’s analyses, our government is operating at almost the same level. No country with a government like that can thrive or even survive.
Here's the joke from Richburg’s book:
"So endemic is African corruption—and so much more destructive than its Asian counterpart—that the comparison has even spawned a common joke that goes like this:
An Asian and an African become friends while they are both attending graduate school in the West. Years later, they each rise to become the finance minister of their respective countries. One day, the African ventures to Asia to visit his old friend, and is startled by the Asian’s palatial home, the three Mercedes-Benzes in the circular drive, the swimming pool, the servants.
"My God!" the African exclaims. "We were just poor students before! How on earth can you now afford all this?"
And the Asian takes his African friend to the window and points to a sparkling new elevated highway in the distance. "You see that toll road?" says the Asian, and then he proudly taps himself on the chest. "Ten percent." And the African nods approvingly."
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