NEWSWEEK.COM 19
the landlord wants to raise the price
or make me leave, he does that. Amer-
ica is heaven. It is paradise. America
is wonderful, I know that! I will find
some job to do. Even cleaning floors.”
For those of us in the U.S., it’s hard
to get our heads around how bad the
lives of those in developing nations
are. And how desperate they are. Des-
perate enough for college graduates
to dream about jobs scrubbing floors.
For someone who’s lived in a stinking
tenement with no plumbing in a dan-
gerous shantytown, an ICE detention
camp is no big deal.poor nations are metastasizing
sores that will eventually consume
the better off. Aid hasn’t worked. Nor
has containment. If two oceans and a
desert aren’t enough to keep develop-
ing world problems out, it’s unlikely
a beautiful wall will.We don’t have a lot of time. Ebola
is under control, but because of poor
sanitation and sexual practices, the
next HIV or Ebola may be just around
the corner. Top military and police offi-
cials are quietly worried about another
civil war. Sierra Leone has a lot of fault
lines running under it—religion, race,
gender, tribe, class, age. The one thatruptured was young vs. old, and it’s
getting worse. Unemployment among
youth is 70 percent. One international
security consultant told me there were
concerns that Boko Haram was getting
a toehold in the country. The details
vary, but each developing nation faces
its own doomsday countdown.
Despite its dismal track record to
date, many like Columbia professor
Jeffrey Sachs, still insist the answer
is aid; specifically, he calls for devel-
oped nations to dramatically up their
aid commitment. I think that’s the
wrong answer. The right answer has
to be creating strong and robust pri-
vate-sector based economies. Making
those countries better places to live
reduces the pressure to migrate, and
creates the conditions for addressing
other developing nation issues like
the birth rate and pollution. And it
can be done. But it’s not going to be
done by aid workers or bureaucrats.
The current U.S. administration has
proved that businesspeople don’t
know much about running a govern-
ment. The inverse is true. Govern-
ment people don’t know much about
business. Part of Rwanda’s success
has been because Kagame has sought
out and embraced U.S. business lead-
ers, like Jim Sinegal of Costco, Jamie
Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and How-
ard Schultz, the Starbucks founder. As
Paul Collier pointed out, the Marshall
Plan was led by a businessman—not
an academic or an aid agency.
But change will be a long time
coming. As I was packing to leave,
Jeniba pulled me to one side and
asked me to take her to America.
Instead, I did what the West has been
doing for centuries. I pressed a hun-
dred-dollar bill into her hand. I doubt
that will help much.Ơ Sam Hill is a Newsweek contributor,
&^2 consultant and a best-selling author.
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