One of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read is Keith Richburg’s 1997 Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. In it, Richburg, who had a three-year stint as the Washington Post’s African bureau chief, explains why he’s so grateful that his long-ago ancestors endured the horrors of the slave ships and the dehumanizing indignity of slavery itself: If that hadn’t happened, he would have been born in Africa and that, he realized, would have been a terrible thing.

One of the chief problems Richburg describes about Africa in the early 1990s is government corruption. According to him, the corruption is so complete that government agencies are incapable of carrying out their mandates, since everything goes into the bureaucrats’ pockets. According to Elon Musk and his DOGE team’s analyses, our government is operating at almost the same level. No country with a government like that can thrive or even survive.

Here's the joke from Richburg’s book:

So endemic is African corruption—and so much more destructive than its Asian counterpart—that the comparison has even spawned a common joke that goes like this:

An Asian and an African become friends while they are both attending graduate school in the West. Years later, they each rise to become the finance minister of their respective countries. One day, the African ventures to Asia to visit his old friend, and is startled by the Asian’s palatial home, the three Mercedes-Benzes in the circular drive, the swimming pool, the servants.

“My God!” the African exclaims. “We were just poor students before! How on earth can you now afford all this?”

And the Asian takes his African friend to the window and points to a sparkling new elevated highway in the distance. “You see that toll road?” says the Asian, and then he proudly taps himself on the chest. “Ten percent.” And the African nods approvingly.

A few years later, the Asian ventures to Africa, to return the visit to his old friend. He finds the African living in a massive estate sprawling over several acres. There’s a fleet of dozens of Mercedes-Benzes in the driveway, an indoor pool and tennis courts, an army of uniformed chauffeurs and servants. “My God!” says the Asian. “How on earth do you afford all this?”

This time the African takes his Asian friend to the window and points. “You see that highway?” he asks. But the Asian looks and sees nothing, just an open field with a few cows grazing.

“I don’t see any highway,” the Asian says, straining his eyes.

At this, the African smiles, taps himself on the chest, and boasts, “One hundred percent!”

The joke was first told to me by an American diplomat in Nigeria who had also spent time in Indonesia. It carried a poignant message about the debilitating effects of corruption in Africa versus its more benign counterpart in Asia. (pp. 174—175.)

The book goes on to recount how, in Indonesia, the fix may be in—that is, nepotism or other favoritism may affect the flow of government money—but things still get done. In Africa, however, the government allocates taxpayer (and U.S. aid) money to the various departments, ostensibly to provide services for the taxpayers’ benefit, but overwhelming graft means that nothing gets done.

With that joke as the backdrop, consider what Elon Musk and his DOGE team describe in this video: Not only is the federal government allocating our money to projects that have, at best, only a very dubious benefit to American taxpayers, but most of that money is never leaving D.C.

DOGE KID: I think the Inter American Foundation, IAF, is one of the agencies we visited where, you know, they get $50 million a year—congressional money—to give grants. These are things like, you know, alpaca farming in Peru, and giving them—

MUSK: That’s a real example.

DOGE KID: Yes. That’s the real description, improving the marketability of peas in Guatemala.

JESSE WATTERS: Really.

DOGE KID: Fruit jam and (laughter) yes.

MUSK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

DOGE KID: And so, you might expect, you know, in the private sector, a nonprofit to give, you know, 80 to 90% of their money to grantees. In the case of IAF, that was 58%. So, the other half goes towards management, travel—

MUSK: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What you would find exactly, I mean to, as an example is that, even if you agreed with supporting alpaca farmers in Peru, well, actually most of the money never made it out of DC. It’s going into the pockets of people in the neighborhood and—

JESSE WATTERS: What percentage of—

MUSK: It didn’t get to Peru.

JESSE WATTERS: Right. So, what percentage do you think doesn’t even get to the destination it’s supposed to?

MUSK: I believe the GAO estimate—so this is not our estimate—I believe it was on the order of only 10 to 15 cents on the dollar actually gets to the end recipient, whether you agree with that cause or not.

JESSE WATTERS: So, they’re just stealing the money before it even gets anywhere.

MUSK: Yes. There’s layers of stealing. So, there’s, like, there’s the first layer of stealing, second layer of stealing, third layer of stealing.

JESSE WATTERS: Subcontractor, subcontractor, subcontractor.

MUSK: Yeah, just peeling the onion.

JESSE WATTERS: Subcontractor, subcontractor.

MUSK: Yeah, exactly. Contractors, subcontractors, subcontractors, like peeling an onion. And then maybe—and sometimes it’s zero, just flat—you get to the bottom of the onion, there’s nothing there.

JESSE WATTERS: So, maybe, no one got a sex change in Guatemala

MUSK: It’s possible that no one got a sex change in Guatemala.

One of the points Milton Friedman has made is that government corruption, more than anything, stifles economic growth. Money that should be in citizens’ hands and flowing through the marketplace sits in bureaucrats’ hands, and the greedy bureaucrats and their political cronies come up with more and more laws and regulations to funnel taxpayer money their way. The Deep State—the mostly Democrat Deep State—doesn’t want this to change, explaining its virulent animosity to Elon Musk and President Trump.

Finally, I find it wonderfully ironic that it’s an African man who is exposing the stygian depths of African-style corruption that is breaking our government and our economy.

Image: X screen grab.