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Savage debt burden and economic nationalism
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It goes without saying that our politicians and their planners have systematically failed to harness ample of natural resources Nepal is blessed with.
This sustained failure can be attributed to their lack of vision caused primarily by their extreme aid dependency, a result of their neo-colonial mindset, inferiority complexes and the rent benefits accruing to them from aid.
The chronic mal governance we are facing is also a severe output of the overarching aid dependency. As politicians, planners and policy-bureaucrats continue to be spoon fed with alien ideas, money, material and machinations, the foreign aid goes to serve the global interests of foreigners not ours.
Despite the flow of billions of dollars on development assistance over the long period, it has pathetically failed to provide sufficient impetus to overcome the strong forces that keep people poor.
Our politicians are very much less concerned about their duties to national tax payers as they happily surrender to populist, vote banking politics that has eventually become the root causes of crime, violence, insecurity and the breakdown in the rule of law.
No doubt, Nepal is also a merely a clog in the wheel of development being propelled by the western industrial nations in their mission for universal liberal democracy, human rights and security from radical social movements, international migration, terrorism, and global warming.
This is the ideological weapon being unleashed upon the developing countries by the westerners to maintain the cultural dominations. The fact is underscored by the savage debt burden imposed in the name of tied aid.
Multilateral aid agencies are indulged in colonization through aid as they comfortably bypass the foreign ministries of the concerned countries and are not accountable in any manner or form to national parliaments.
Aid driven by its mission for liberal democracy and human rights has the distinction of creating inefficient state and semi-state institutions that have weakened individual liberties and choices. It is the market mechanism that makes the spirit of enterprise possible not the ever expanding roles of political parties, governments and foreign donor agencies.
Foreign aid has robbed Nepal of its competitive advantage through padding of costs and chronic delay mainly in the infrastructure sector.
In the quest for human rights the industrialized nations resort to non-governmental organizations, created and funded by them, to protect and promote human rights under the guise of “civil society” so as to ensure meek, compliant state.
To make the matter worse, it completely destroys the developing nations’ social capital as traditional voluntary organizations are annihilated from the national socio-political scene.
As such, it is imperative to act as per the “economic nationalism” if we are to preserve democracy and sovereignty of Nepal in a real sense.
The first act to start with economic nationalism is to set limits to foreign aid by developing one’s won development and growth strategies.
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