Uganda: In need of lasting solutions
The Scotsman Online
13 June 2005
THE so-called debt relief for third-world - mainly African - nations announced at the weekend will be paid for by Western taxpayers. African interest payments to the World Bank, which lends cash for infrastructural development, will be taken over essentially by British and American taxpayers. Another financial sleight of hand, involving profits on gold sales, will write off debts to the International Monetary Fund, which lends hard currency to allow African countries to finance imports. Gordon Brown and the G8 leaders are also planning a tax on airline tickets to pay for the Chancellor's planned increase in aid to Africa, which will mean dearer holidays and higher business costs in Britain.
Many in the West will consider this extra tax burden worthwhile if it helps Africa and the Third World. The question remains, however, whether or not this charity will be any more effective today than it was in the past. In 1998, Uganda received $650 million in debt relief from the World Bank and IMF (paid again by western taxpayers). Uganda was supposed to use the money saved to invest in education. Instead, it used the budget leeway to double its foreign borrowing, and to purchase arms to invade neighbouring Congo. Last year, Uganda scored less than three out of ten in Transparency International's 2004 Corruption Perceptions Index, a level that indicates rampant political corruption. Yet on Saturday, Uganda was forgiven another $1.9 billion in World Bank and IMF debt.
Charity is sometimes only too necessary to relieve suffering. More than 300 million people in Africa desperately need food aid. But charity is only ever a stopgap - it does not create sustainable prosperity. To create prosperity requires stability, the rule of law, good governance and an end to corruption. Western aid is useless unless the genocide stops in Darfur; unless the government of Zimbabwe ceases to drive hundreds of thousands of its citizens from their homes to starve in the countryside; and unless the government of Ethiopia stops machine-gunning democratic protestors as it did on Friday, the day before it received $1.5 billion in debt relief.
There is a serious danger that Africa's problems of governance will be ignored in the focus on debt relief or increased aid. Government-to-government financial aid in Africa has comprehensively failed over two generations. Such funding has merely underpinned corruption and established a debilitating dependency on the West. Nothing in the new aid package changes this relationship. Africa needs trade, not aid; business investment, not state charity; and free access to Western markets, not sops designed to hide the fact we tax African goods out of our markets.
Urbane Analysis: Nice to see that just as predicted here yesterday, the dictators' are already getting raked over the coals in response to the G8 accord on third world debt relief. It is time for us to unite in RAGE against these tyrants - only a concerted showing of sustained consternation - directed at them personally by us outside of Africa can make change happen there - absent violent civil conflict. Memo to Bob Geldof: get your talent fired up about this at Live8! As it pertains to the cause of freedom, good people in the United States and Europe need to scream about it, so that good people in Africa need not bleed because of it. The intimacy of communication created by the web (and, frankly, cheap long distance) implicates all of us personally in the ethics of struggle. FDR's "Four Freedoms" are your (and my) responsibility, the Anglo-American world view is all there is to protect it. The United Nations? As if!
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