We're all right without your money, Jack

Unlike our neighbors, we're free to choose our destiny, says a Somaliland government official;

Somaliland; former British protectorate which declared independence from Somalia in 1991 cannot access foreign aid because it has not yet been recognized internationally as a state, and that suits it just fine.

"That is a blessing in disguise. Aid never developed anything," Hussein Abdi Dualeh, Somaliland's minister of energy and minerals, told media on the sidelines of an African mining conference.

"Aid is not a panacea, we'd rather not have it ... How many African countries do you know that developed because of a lot of aid? It's a curse. The ones that get the most aid are the ones with the problems," he said.

And those who have been ministered to by Jeffrey Sachs, let's not forget;

“I wanted to write about Africans who live in extreme poverty,” she [Nina Munk] explains. “I wanted their stories to be heard.” Above all, she told her publisher, she wanted to write a story of hope.

The story she wound up writing is quite different. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty is a devastating takedown of Mr. Sachs’s technocratic fantasies. It is essential reading for anyone who thinks that brilliant people with the right interventions can save the world.

Which doesn't, apparently, include Mr. Dualeh of Somaliland.