Ayaan Hirsi Ali says America should invest in African industries.

I think we should be doing business with them. I don’t believe in aid because it has been proven for the last 50 years that it doesn’t work. But trade. Invest in Africa. Let Africans change their own destiny. I lived in Kenya for a long time, and when a mass uprising expressed in the form of demonstrations comes about against the government, the government then violently puts that down. Now a number of the Africans that I spoke to and knew at the time would say if Daniel Radmore did not have all this money that he is getting from Britain and other western countries in aid, he would not be able to buy the weapons to crash us. But in many African countries, because of aid, the authoritarian figures there can afford to get the weapons and the money to oppress their own people. That’s an issue that aid workers simply don’t want to deal with, and I think it’s a shame.

Recorded on: 8/15/07