How NGO Money Corrupts African Legal Systems

© Andrey Burmakin - Fotolia.com All rights reserved.

The self-righteous moral hubris of the Western missionary now expresses itself in the form of the NGO.

Overfunded save-the-women NGOs have descended on African legal systems like a swarm of eager ambulance chasing lawyers after a multi car pileup. The result has been a host of wrongly convicted "rapists" who have never even met their supposed victims, as well as inflated statistics that the NGOs use to claim high success rates and solicit more funds from their Western enthusiasts.

Here's how the legal system works: Joe is suspected by his employer of some petty crime, such as stealing a mobile phone. This being Africa, the legal system is so dysfunctional that the crime will get no resources for investigation, much less a successful prosecution.

Knowing this, the employer has his wife claim that Joe assaulted her sexually. Sex crimes get legal expenses for prosecution funded by Western do-good NGOs. Joe's boss may get a couple of witnesses to corroborate his wife's claim, but usually such a step isn't even necessary in a legal system all too willing to please its Western benefactors.

For those benefactors, this particular scam feeds on the familiar stereotyping of African men as sex fiends who need Western NGOs to get their genitals cut back and their libidos subdued.

Everyone is happy with this state of affairs except poor Joe, who, like many others, is sitting out a long sentence in an African prison for a crime he didn't commit. Needless to say, his family is destroyed and his children now go hungry, having lost their future along with their father.

Like so many of his compatriots and their ancestors, Joe serves the needs of Western missionaries now rebranded as NGOs. Having learned nothing from the mistakes of the past, today's Western true believers feel compelled to act and do so with absolute confidence in their superiority. As always, the resulting devastation is simply viewed as collateral damage.