Leila Djansi

BAFTA/LA winning director #MissHavishamEffect #WhereChildrenPlay #TiesThatBind #SinkingSands #LikeCottonTwines @40andSingleTV #ItsGrace! IG:leiladjansi 🍒

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

Savannah Film Festival Wraps With Prizes for ‘Like Cotton Twines,’ ‘The Freedom to Marry’ https://t.co/GYG8kCeox9 via @variety

[Kathleen Winchell ❤️🤍💙🇺🇸🇺🇸 @KathleenWinche3]

Oh really?!? Hypocrite! What happened? You changed your mind?

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

Thank you!

[Illinois Press @IllinoisPress]

In honor of @americanart Women Filmmakers Festival, we wanted to highlight an article in Journal of Film and Video 74.1-2 by Joyce Osei Owusu (@UnivofGh) that analyzes themes of gender-based violence in films by @yaba_badoe & @leilasparty. cc: @UFVAtweets
https://t.co/OUveNfVgmc

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@speaknsee @AfricanHub_ Well. White people HAVE done that to black people. Slavery, colonization, jim crow, civil rights era. Racial cleansings and more. Only difference is that the black man is bolder now.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@yaminwaleed @AfricanHub_ 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

🤣

[Mykhaïlo Golub @golub]

When an SNL sketch is less crazy than reality

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

If there was an election today, #Democrats would win. Landslide

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

The First African president of America 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Eric Feigl-Ding @DrEricDing]

New cover of Time magazine. Trump must hate this so much.

[Bright Simons @BBSimons]

1. I have been reluctant to discuss the ongoing US Aid Freeze and the dismantling of USAID despite many tempting offers all over WhatsApp.

2. I worry about coming across as trying to intellectualise a situation that for many millions involves real life and death stakes.

3. On reflection, however, I feel that the fear of humanitarian carnage due to the actions of a single president, albeit of the World's only superpower, creates the right mood for fundamental questions to be asked about the global aid system. I dare say that Trump is hardly the sum of that system's ills.

4. Frankly, I find some of what passes for pragmatism in this debate as rather naive. Someone said, for instance, that this will expedite the rise of the multipolar system in the aid arena. Whatever good and noble things that multipolarity is bringing, saving the classical humanitarian-development mould of aid is not one of them.

5. The rising powers - BRICS et al, the Gulf, etc - have no interest in the classical aid paradigm. In fact, on this score, Trump and Rubio are no innovators. Their push to align all aid more explicitly with US foreign policy goals is like a desperate scramble to catch up with the likes of China, the UAE, and Singapore. In those countries, there has never been a debate about whether international development cooperation should merely serve as an extention of foreign policy. Everyone assumes so.

6. The classical aid model features many anachronisms. Take Singapore, for e.g. On a per citizen basis, it is 3x richer than Greece and ~50% richer than Denmark. When Singapore invests in international cooperation, it does so on transactional grounds. The UAE, which is also 2x richer than Greece, does the same. The Chinese development cooperation system is set by the State Council to align directly with foreign policy goals, too. Yet, Greece, because it is part of the EU normative universe, has to have an aid system within the classical paradigm.

7. The classical paradigm of aid says that development cooperation must be MULTILATERAL and framed within global blueprints like the UN SDGs. Greece thus spends less than 5% of its development cooperation funds through the instruments of its Foreign Affairs Ministry, and the bulk of the rest through the multilateral system.

8. My view is that if the world is going multipolar, then the future of government-driven aid is more in the direction of the Chinese, UAE & Singaporean models. Of course, these countries won't have a legacy system to gut with all the gore we are seeing in the US.

9. In Ghana, I have been looking at a big dam in Pwalugu. The govt awarded it without tender to a big Chinese company on the basis that Chinese development funds would come. Five years on, after advanced payments to the contractor, the site has been abandoned. Why? Because the government of Ghana is failing to bring "counterpart funding", i.e. put skin in the game. Agency comes with responsibility.

10. It is not only "skin in the game" logic that will rise with the fall of the classical aid paradigm, the emphasis will also shift away from multilateral coordination, long the coveted holy grail of the classical aid era. In 2021, there were 565 major global actors in this arena, almost triple the number in 2000. The areas of interest for international development cooperation have also multiplied multifold. In 2019, there were nearly 223,000 transactions. When scholars model the interactions among aid actors, countries, and focus areas, the resulting network has billions of nodes. What I am saying with all this is that the multilateral system is sagging under its own weight and bewildered by its own complexity. The incentives for countries to focus on their own foreign policy priorities are growing rather than declining. Yet, we know that coordination is essential. Now, more than ever, that coordination has to happen within countries and not in hotel rooms in Geneva and DC.

11. Sadly, too many developing countries have unaccountable political systems and weak prioritisation mechanisms. A world where development projects are not subject to any universal governance criteria would not necessarily be a world where development funds are spent efficiently. Those of us who live in developing countries that are dependent on development finance in any form must bear this in mind.

12. Country-level actors must actively take up the responsibility of watchdogging development spending to ensure coordination, prioritisation, and waste elimination. Sitting on our behinds cheering the possible emergence of a new, post-imperial, agency-driven, multipolar aid system won't do much for the success of our countries.

The classical aid system is tottering. But it is naivety to think that its fall would be pretty.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@XAVIAERD @prageru It actually takes 3 months IF you do it the legal way with the right lawyers and/or supporting documents. Its taking longer because the system has created so many loopholes that allow for corruption and that takes really long to sort through.

[VOZ @Voz_US]

"The Democratic Party's actions had left many U.S. citizens feeling humiliated. Signs of a Trump victory were proclaimed well before Biden withdrew from the race. The voters had had enough."

📝 @KarinaLMariani

https://t.co/8oAtNcf98R

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@elonmusk stop doing politics and go focus on that seeing eye. I have an 8 year old blind girl who needs it. 😎 You’re just creating political confusion with your privilege. From apartheid diamonds to American politics.

[/Film @slashfilm]

Over the years, James Bond actor Daniel Craig has revealed his favorite films in the entire Bond franchise. Here are his top three. https://t.co/XwYhXd99kG

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

This is what maturity looks like

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

Welcome to California, President @realDonaldTrump. Looking forward to working together to deliver aid and ensure a fast recovery for Los Angeles.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@Bubblebathgirl Therefore no black people are competent?

[Tomi Lahren @TomiLahren]

Agree and disagree here.

Nothing wrong with being a jock or a prom queen. We don’t need to be a nation full of socially awkward nerds, either. It takes all kinds.

What we could use more of is: parenting, work ethic, tenacity, ambition.

We don’t just need more engineers or brainiacs, we need people who know how to build and create things with their hands.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@n__amira That’s not right unfortunately. It’s not a scholarship scheme. Parents whose kids are getting 6-15 are usually well off! Ghana’s free shs should be INCOME based. Where parents with limited income have access to it for their kids. While parents who can afford, pay their way.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@WarlordDilley @VivekGRamaswamy No, he said the 90s - now crowd want to work 2 hours a week, earn 150k a year and be hedonistic.

[Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods]

There's a lot of Vivek hate today, all of it unjustified.

I am not saying that the problem demands replacement immigration. So get that out of your head.

But come on. Who can deny that he's right about this, and that this absolutely, 100% does describe American society?

"A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers."

I defy you to show me a single school district in America of which this is not true.

Are we going to be petulant children who need to be flattered all the time, or are we going to face facts?

Look at the subcultures in the United States and rank them in order of how much they care about those lesser things, and I will show you a list, in precise order, of who is producing the engineers.

Vivek isn't a dumb politician. He knows that telling you things you don't want to hear is going to make you angry. Ron Paul was the same way. He told you those truths anyway.

Again, this has nothing to do with immigration. These are facts, and we all know they're facts.

When you love an old car you fix it up to be the best it can be. You don't shout at people who point out that unsightly dent.

I happen to love this country and I would like to fix it up. Politics can take us only so far.

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

@Heartcryptos @MajestyRia 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Leila Djansi @leilasparty]

Lay it allllll out!

[Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy]

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it. 🇺🇸 🇺🇸