The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting visits a new bore-hole in Africa, funded not by official development assistance but by voluntary efforts.

She asks in some despair:

"But the question that keeps coming back is: where is the state investment in Katine? Why isn’t Kampala finding the money to drill a borehole for this community?"

Anyone who has seen the results of Western development assistance in Africa over decades will not take long to answer that question for her. Later in the piece she mentions Chinese contractors hard at work building a new road. Who is paying them? And why are African contractors themselves not hard at work in that area?

This too is a bit odd:

These are people whom history has served badly, and Britain has played no small role in that. We cobbled Uganda together … Furthermore, the damaging western legacy is no longer seen as just political: it is increasingly also environmental. Last year, Katine was one of many sub-counties in the Soroti district devastated by nine months of flooding, which destroyed roads, homes and crops on which thousands depended. No one can remember comparable floods, and the fear is that climate change is to blame.

On a point of sneaky drafting technique, note how Ms Bunting effortlessly slips from the Subjective (" …is seen as just political") to the Objective ("it is increasingly environmental".

Is she suggesting that if the colonial-legacy borders were different there would have been less flooding?

In Europe we have adjusted many earlier borders peacefully (and not so peacefully) in the past 20 years as communism ended.

Time for Africa do the same, if the different communities find it so hard to live together?