"In Ghana we began that great ritual of the rich world, the weekly shopping trip. You know those United Nations tables that compare countries according to gross national product per capita or hospital beds per thousand people? Well, I'd like to offer a new, and just as meaningful, category: the number of shopping trips per family per year. Only relatively rich people can be sure enough of their income next week to blow a whole load of cash this week on food. Only people wealthy enough to have their own transport or to pay for a taxi can manage to get all these goodies back home. And only those with money will have fridges and freezers to keep what they've bought fresh enough to be consumed days later.""In global terms, if you have a roof over your head, food on the table, a doctor who will not charge you when you're ill and a school place that does not depend on your ability to pay, then, my friend, you are rich. That is what every British citizen has of right. So many of the civil wars and conflicts I have reported could be solved if the states concerned could deliver anything like the kind of life we in Europe take for granted. People who have the opportunity to make a living and to pass on the benefits to their children are unlikely to be seduced by the blandishments of class warriors or the peddlers of ethnic solutions to economic inequality."
-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001
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