The bleeding heart of Africa

Christopher Dickson, Jakarta

Some thirty years ago, the legendary Monty Python comedy team wrote and performed a skit, which was set as a kindergarten classroom lesson. In a brilliant recreation of the simplicities of the pre-school learning environment ("Hello, children. Today we are going to learn how to play the Flute. First you blow into the little hole, then you run your fingers up and down, making beautiful sounds"), the Pythons also managed to also take a few digs at the then -- current world crises, and the attempts to address them. World Poverty was addressed as "first you get a very wealthy Industrial country to give lots and lots of money to the poor countries..."

If only the solutions were so simple. And, as we have learned over the past thirty years, the Flute is not an easy instrument to learn, and the issue of world poverty has certainly not gone away. If anything, poverty in the "developing" world has got far more serious. Particularly in the great continent that is Africa.

What staggers is the almost Biblical proportions of the crises that currently befall Africa. These are reflected in numerous tragic statistics. Some 6000 people die every day of treatable diseases. Every man, woman and child owes an average of $400 to international financial institutions.

The world's most devastating post World War II conflict has been occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past five years, in which some three million people have been killed. The current refugee crisis in the Darfur region of western Sudan has seen some one million displaced.

Why have these situations been allowed to become so critical? Obviously, there are myriad factors that have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the present apocalyptic dimensions of the African misery.

The catch cry that is often heard from the lips of NGO representatives is that of debt, debt reduction, debt relief, debt repayments, and third world debt. Call it what you like, but it simply means that African nations currently owe a hell of a lot of money, to international financial groups such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And in order to qualify for such "loans", many nations have often been required to comply with the needs of the neo-liberal, globalised rules of the trading game.

This has seen nations such as Ethiopia and Ghana having to remove tariffs and trade barriers, to sell off state-owned industries, to slash government spending on welfare and education, and to open up their markets to multi-national giants of the Western world.

As well-intentioned as the World Bank and the IMF may be, their policies have undoubtedly exacerbated rather than alleviated the poverty trap. The debt owed by these African nations is crippling, and almost self-perpetuating. Africa is believed to overall be 25 percent more impoverished than it was 30 years ago. With the reductions in welfare spending, the standards of education and medical care in many nations have dramatically plummeted, and the AIDs epidemic is more aptly described as a pandemic, as the 'Black' Death of the twenty-first century.

Premature market liberalization has resulted in previously protected local industries being subject to the whims of the international market. While coffee giants such as Nestle make some 26 percent annual profit, the Ugandan coffee trade has virtually collapsed. Local coffee farmers there cut back on their children's education and medical care.

Yet while Western nations proclaim the glories and potential benefits of a free trade, unrestricted market, they themselves maintain subsidies for their own farmers and industries to protect local trade and, dare I say it, possibly secure those vital votes at the upcoming election (?).

But of course they are faceless figures over on the far side of the planet, so why should it concern us? Remember that Globalization works in many ways. Barriers have been removed in many areas. With the spread of poverty come many resultant consequences and associated effects. The spread of diseases, among them AIDs, the movement of disease, peoples and drugs across borders, the desperation of peoples who have all but lost hope and resort to extremist, even terrorist actions, the pressure of the movements of masses of peoples in search of "something better"... Problems that seem far away and not of our concern could soon come to haunt us.

The solutions are no less complex and difficult. After all, if they were simple, and if leaders of the West were genuinely committed to poverty solutions, the goal of the eradication of world poverty by the year 2015 would be very possible. It is not as if the West is preoccupied with other issues right now. The "democratization" of Iraq? Afghanistan? The War on terror? If even a fraction of the costs of the Iraqi adventure were diverted to just as worthy, and longer lasting issues such as poverty, the threat of international terrorism would be substantially reduced. An entire swathe of potential recruits and regions to the ranks of the al-Qaedas of this world would probably be avoided.

There are those who may state that this is not currently a "hot" topic, that there are far more serious crises to address (e.g. International terrorism, the rising price of oil, the size of Britney Spear's breasts), but one surety is that the problems of poverty, debt, and the myriad associated effects, will exist, and be far more serious, long after Iraqi sovereignty has been established. So perhaps the time to act is now?

Sir Bob Geldof advocates a "Marshall Plan" for Africa, Omar Gaddafi promotes the idea of African solutions for African problems, Bono of U2 simply states that all third world debt should be wiped. And just a few days ago, elder statesman and African legend Nelson Mandela spoke of the "prison of poverty", as this year's Make Poverty History campaign stepped up a gear in London's Trafalger Square. Kwame Nkrumah, the father of modern African nationalism, would probably have called for an economic version of his "United States of Africa" idea, in which Africa would establish itself as a trading block in itself, ala the European Union. Why not a combination of all? Or is that too simplistic?

Or, there is always the Monty Python theory...

The writer is a teacher of Social Studies at Jakarta International School, and can be reached at mistadeee@yahoo.co.uk.