Magatte Wade

"To me it's just not understanding the way the world works and not understanding economics. It's not really rocket science. And maybe that's why for people who are always looking for complexity, they fail to see that. I think for folks like him, there's something very unsettling about this idea that the market can take care of things."

"Jeffrey Sachs thought he could fix poverty and so forth, but then what he did is basically set up a village, what they would call the millennium development villages. And there they just went on to basically do a very top down type of approach to economics. Eventually what happened is they went nowhere and things started rotting all over the place. All of this stuff that they spent millions of dollars on. And by the way, an entrepreneur would've probably produced the same, better quality, cheaper, and still be able to sell it, but they had nothing to show for it. That's the mentality of people like that."

"Life is made of tradeoffs. But when it comes to foreign aid, I think people only look at supposedly the little wins in the tradeoffs. I had this woman, she was very upset with me. For her, she's sure the roads can only be helpful. Aren't they? You see road equals benefit."

"Let me talk about the costs. Because of this road, I have a culture of dependency that keeps on being ingrained in my people. That surely cannot be good for the entrepreneurial mindset that we need from them in order to really create wealth and value. A cultural dependency just doesn't go hand in hand with economic progress."

"This road came because of foreign aid. Foreign aid came to us because supposedly we're poor. Our governments are literally poor. They don't have enough money to cater to all the needs of what the government would need money for."

"Now, I would like to tell people, why do you think we are in that situation? Why do you think that we're poor in the first place so much that we need you to inject the additional cash so that we can build the roads that normally we should have built for ourselves with the money that we made? We are poor because we don't let our entrepreneurs work. If you just come and finance for me what I should have financed for myself and by myself and we keep doing this, nothing has changed since the end of so-called colonialism."

"So for that road, I get a generation of young people behaving this way, which cannot operate in the market. For that road I also got more violence and more violence as well as leaders who never want to leave."