posted July 04, 2005 05:11 AM            

As he heads into the Group of Eight summit meeting this week in Scotland, Bush seems almost to have a fixation with getting the troubled continent on the right track.

The administration said two weeks ago that aid to Africa has tripled since 2001; it plans to double the 2004 level to $8.6 billion by 2010.

"Helping those who suffer and preventing the senseless death of millions of people in Africa is a central commitment of my administration's foreign policy," Bush said recently, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at his side.

Blair has pushed the president to join with other G-8 leaders to attack Africa's suffering. In Scotland, he will seek agreement with his colleagues on an Africa aid plan.

The Blair-led Commission for Africa issued a report in March that called for doubling foreign aid from wealthy nations to Africa to $50 billion per year by 2010. It also recommended a second $25 billion increase in aid to Africa, to $75 billion annually, by 2015.

Bush has rejected the proposals, saying an incumbent government cannot tell a future government how to spend money. Blair's proposal, he said last month, "doesn't fit our budgetary process."

Nonetheless, Bush's own Africa aid targets are far higher than any previous administration's.

Generosity toward the less fortunate in Africa appears to play well among some important domestic constituencies; it is particularly welcomed by some conservative Christian allies of the president.

But there is a strategic component to the policy as well. The Sept. 11 attacks called attention to the way in which terrorists can thrive in unstable environments on any continent, and none has a greater stability problem than Africa.

Money alone will not eliminate poverty in Africa, said Andrew Natsios, administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Changes in how programs are managed and the rule of law also are needed, he said, citing corruption as an impediment to economic development.

"If you don't have those other conditions, you can put huge amounts of money into aid programs and they'll be ineffective," Natsios told CNN's "Late Edition" on Sunday.

Natsios said if the U.S. were to provide a portion of its gross domestic product, as some allies have suggested, it would be criticized for "imperial aid" and dominating the African assistance system. That occurred during relief efforts for victims of the Asian tsunami, he said.

"They were criticizing us for providing too much assistance," he said.

Conflict throughout Africa has created suffering on a mass scale, as well as the need for costly U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Six of the world's seven most at-risk countries are in Africa, according to a recent study by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.

Among them was Sudan, where tens of thousands have died and more than 2 million displaced since 2003 mostly as a result of a brutal counterinsurgency campaign waged by government-backed Arab militias against black African rebels. Bush has made peace in Sudan a high administration priority.

Energy is another component of Africa's growing importance to policymakers, given the increasing role of West Africa as a supplier of oil to world markets.

The AIDS pandemic in Africa also has the administration's attention. A U.N. estimate released on Friday said that AIDS claimed 1 million lives in southern Africa last year and that life expectancy in the region has plummeted by an average of 20 years.

Bush has sought $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS, mostly in Africa. On Thursday, Bush called for spending $1.2 billion to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010 in Africa.

Africa also is prospectively the largest beneficiary of a Bush foreign assistance initiative that rewards countries that are led by effective governments.

Of 17 countries deemed eligible for money from the program, nine are in Africa. But the program could suffer sharp congressional cuts from the administration's $3 billion request for 2006 because of the slow pace of the program's disbursements.

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On the Net:

posted July 05, 2005 02:11 PM            

The aim of the multimedia extravaganza was to raise awareness and also put pressure on world political leaders, meeting July 6 at the G-8 conference in Scotland, to relieve African poverty. Millions of persons were urged to sign an online petition demanding cancellation of Third World debt and double aid to these countries.

During the concert, event impresario Bob Geldof hectored his audience with sarcasm, "Eight people in a five-star hotel on a golf course are going to have to listen to us." Madonna, in between lewdly thrusting her pelvis at the audience and sprinkling the F-word around here and there, called for a "revolution to change the world." Sting ominously warned the G-8 leaders with newly found lyrics: "Every vow you break, every step you take, every single day, every word you say, every game you play ... we'll be watching you."
In spite of the incongruous posturing of multimillionaire rock and pop stars and lesser performers who simply savored the global platform for the publicity, a private charity such as this can raise millions of dollars for a worthy cause. Twenty years ago, Geldof organized the similar Live Aid concerts and reportedly raised $2 billion for African famine relief.

What is missing from this charity, however, is a clear understanding of the causes of the problem. Simply throwing more money at Africa – particularly at the government level – has never solved anything. What happened to the $2 billion from the Live Aid concerts? What happened to the other $25 billion given by other private and public largesse over the past decade? Why has total African GDP dropped 35 percent since the last Live Aid concert?

Africa continues to be mired in poverty, as well as economic debt and squalid social conditions and unrest. Dominated by state terrorism and wanton carnage, countless thousands of its people have been uprooted by wars and genocide and have been made refugees in their own countries. Economic stability and growth cannot take root where brutality, oppression and political tyranny rule.

Out of 54 African countries, fewer than 15 are democratic. Africa represents 70 percent of the world's AIDS cases, and over 12 million people have already died from it. In a country that has a tremendous wealth of mineral resources, including gold, diamonds and precious metals, corrupt African political leaders have garnered it for themselves and their supporters, and consigned ordinary Africans to poverty, misery and even starvation by sloganeering, brutal repression and arrant plunder.

In a new book, "Africa Unchained: A Blueprint for Africa's Future," economist George B.N. Aittey argues that there are really two Africas. The first is the traditional, indigenous Africa, the country of the peasant majority who produce the nation's agricultural and mineral wealth, and who struggle to survive among their splintered tribes and societies.

Modern Africa is the second, Aittey says. This is where "functionally-illiterate elites and parasitic minority groups have created a bizarre politico-economic monstrosity that admits of no rule of law, no accountability, no democracy of any form, and even no sanity."

In their respective countries, power-hungry ruling gangster elites have debauched all the institutions of government – the military, the civil service, police and the judiciary – through intimidation, graft and murder. Aittey documents how these crooks and scoundrels have used the instruments of the state to enrich themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Nigerian scholar Ikenna Anokwute adds: "Imagine John Gotti or Al Capone as President of the United States. Well, welcome to the reign of thieves and vagabonds, welcome to our Nigeria today, a gangster's paradise."

Among the political and economic reforms needed to get Africa on track, Aittey says that the current corruption can only be eliminated by the creation of a continent-wide, independent judiciary, military, press and political infrastructure, where free markets can flourish.

Simply pouring money into the current rat hole, like the money from Live 8, won't solve these systemic problems, let alone eliminate sub-Saharan poverty. All it will do is funnel money into corrupt pockets. After which the rich rock stars can shrug their shoulders, walk away and say, "We've done what we could, but it didn't work."

posted July 05, 2005 02:21 PM            

Slaking a thirst with a fire hose
July 5, 2005

This must be Tuesday, because poverty in Africa ended Monday.

All it took were a few chords, a lot of screaming, several acres of dirty hair and a cloud cover of lethal body odor. When the last guitar strings snapped Saturday night at those Live 8 concerts across the world, promoter Bob Geldof's over-the-hill gang had the prescription: just stuff a few billion dollars down the bottomless holes on the Dark Continent.

"This is the greatest rock show in the history of the world," cried the announcer at the London concert. Gushed a disc jockey on XM Satellite Radio: "This is the single most important concert ever."

No one wanted to stop there. Shouted one of the "musicians" of a group called Coldplay: "This is the greatest thing that's ever been in the entire history of the world."

Since "the entire history of the world" includes the extinction of the dinosaurs, the eruption of Krakatoa, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the construction of the pyramids, the Resurrection of Christ and man's landing on the moon, Live 8 had to be impressive mush.

But this week the grown-ups take over, as grown-ups always must, when the G-8 economic summit commences in Scotland under the baton of Tony Blair, who not only wants to eliminate African poverty but to end global warming before Christmas.

The nations of the West must do something to ease the brutal pain of generations of unbridled greed, ignorant incompetence and rabid corruption in Africa. It's our Christian duty. But it will require discipline that is out of fashion in the 21st century, and it certainly isn't what the simple-minded noisemakers of Live 8 had in mind.

The example of Nigeria says it all. Figures released last month by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, as reported in the London Daily Telegraph, reveal that in the 45 years since Britain granted independence in 1960 a succession of despots squandered $387 billion (that's a "b," not an "m"), almost to the dollar the sum of all Western aid to all of Africa between 1960 and 1997. One of the despots, Gen. Sani Abacha, now safely dead, is believed to have looted Nigeria's vast oil reserves of more than $5 billion in just five years.

William Bellamy, the U.S. ambassador to neighboring Kenya, startled the guests at his Fourth of July garden party yesterday with just the kind of bluntness needed to keep African aid in realistic perspective. "Turning on the fire hose of international compassion and asking Kenya and other African nations to drink from it is not a serious strategy for promoting growth or ending poverty."

President Mwai Kibaki, the Kenyan president, was off at the African Union summit in Libya, helping other despots draw up their gimme list. In his absence, a deputy fired back at Ambassador Bellamy, complaining that Kenya had been singled out for criticism just because it doesn't take terrorism seriously. Aid for Africa, he told the ambassador, "should not get entangled with the politics of your dissatisfaction with a regime, unless you have decided on a regime change."

Nobody has, unfortunately, and that's exactly why aid for Africa is as close to hopeless as anything can be. Regime change all across the continent is sorely needed, even more than another concert by unemployed service-station attendants whanging away on electric guitars and other noisemakers.

Tony Blair's No. 2 man, George Brown, talks giddily of a Marshall Plan for Africa, but Nigerian despots alone have already pocketed the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. George C. Marshall's miracle scheme for rebuilding Europe worked because mature European leadership was determined to rescue the continent from the ravages of World War II. There's scant evidence that Africa's "leaders" want anything more than to drink from the fire hose.

Live 8 concerts are nice, and the photographs of starving children will break the coldest heart, but unless Europe and the West accompany aid with the kind of supervision nobody has the courage to impose, the aid will wind up in the usual Swiss banks, and 20 years from now another generation of children will die while naive hearts bleed.

Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm

posted July 05, 2005 03:48 PM              

What more would you expect from a republican news source.

posted July 05, 2005 04:08 PM            

In the meantime, the adults will decide how to make sure the money allocated for food, medicines and other necessities for Africans doesn't wind up in the bank accounts of the thoroughly corrupt African dictators...like the prior food aid money and all the other money thrown at the problems in Africa have in the past.

posted July 05, 2005 04:45 PM            

Frasier Nelson

PRIVATE American citizens donated almost 15 times more to the developing world than their European counterparts, research reveals this weekend ahead of the G8 summit. Private US donors also handed over far more aid than the federal government in Washington, revealing that America is much more generous to Africa and poor countries than is claimed by the Make Poverty History and Live 8 campaigns.

Church collections, philanthropists and company-giving amounted to $22bn a year, according to a study by the Hudson Institute think-tank, easily more than the $16.3bn in overseas development sent by the US government. American churches, synagogues and mosques alone gave $7.5bn in 2003 - a figure which exceeds the government totals for France ($7.2bn) and Britain ($6.3bn) - according to numbers from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which deal a blow to those who claim moral superiority over the US on aid.

Carole Adelman, the author of the Hudson Institute report, has discovered that a further $6.2bn a year is donated by independent US organisations, $2.7bn by US companies and $2.3bn by US universities and colleges, mainly through scholarships, to reach an overall private US donations total of $22bn.

In stark contrast, in separate exploratory work for the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Adelman found that the maximum EU figure was a mere $1.5bn in private sector donations, 14.6 times less than the comparable US figure.

In addition, the US economy's large immigrant population, which makes up 12% of its population, almost twice that of Britain, allows $40.1bn of wages earned by developing world workers to be sent to their home countries in the form of remittances.

Adelman said this transforms the picture on aid to the developing world, showing how America's stronger economic growth and lower taxation is giving indirect aid to the Third World which dwarfs the government's donations. The benchmark for state aid is the United Nations goal of devoting 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) in government aid to developing countries. Ireland has pledged to do so by 2007; Belgium and Finland by 2010; France by 2012 and the UK by 2013.

The US is the largest overall donor with its $16.3bn in 2003. But this works out as 0.15% of its GNI - the lowest of any G8 member and less than half the 0.35% EU average. Britain stands at 0.34% and Norway is the highest, with 0.92%.

But this model ignores the private donations made possible by the lower tax burden in the US of 31.8%, against the eurozone's 45.6%. Figures for philanthropic donations have been collected for the first time by the Hudson Institute.

The 2003 figure counted money pledged by the Clinton administration, Adelman said. Since then President Bush has pledged to take aid to Africa from $1.2bn-a-year to $8.7bn a year by 2010.

posted July 05, 2005 05:24 PM              

quote:

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Enjoy your little yellow ribbon TP. That does make you feel like you're really doing something for the people of Africa...doesn't it? Enjoy your delusions.--jwhop

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posted July 05, 2005 05:55 PM            

I don't know what's wrong with Bush. He just doesn't get it. I never see Bush wearing a colored ribbon. He actually thinks budgeting 8.7 Billion dollars, more than quadrupling the funds allocated in Clinton's budget for Africa is a better solution to the problem than displaying a ribbon.

posted July 05, 2005 06:32 PM              

Give up old fart. Not everyone is gonna be an a** licker like you.

posted July 05, 2005 06:32 PM            

First Gentleman, Bill Clinton...I don't think so.

Saturday, July 2, 2005 10:58 a.m. EDT
Bill Clinton: Americans Stingy With Foreign Aid

On the eve of the G-8 Summit, ex-president Bill Clinton is telling European audiences that the U.S. is stingy with its foreign aid dollars - and that Americans think they contribute more than they actually do.

"In America, for example, we have always been hampered in getting adequate budgets for international assistance by the fact that the American people believe we give much more than we do," he told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday.

"They think we give about 3 percent of GDP," the ex-president continued. "They think we give 10-15 percent of the budget. They think we ought to give about 5 percent."
But Clinton claimed: "We don't give anywhere near that. We don't give anywhere near 3 percent but they think we do."

Clinton blamed the GOP Congress and the Bush administration, which pledged $15 billion in aid to Africa in 2003, for being shortsighted when it came to foreign assistance.

"President Bush and the Republicans, when I was president, 100 members of the new Republican Congress after the '94 election did not have passports," he recalled. "They thought all foreign aid was wasted. They did not believe in anything."

He took credit for fostering a different attitude toward foreign aid while he was president.

"By the time I left, we had dramatic consensus across parties for the massive debt relief we did for the millennium in 2000," he told the BBC.

posted July 05, 2005 06:41 PM            

In case you haven't noticed TP, it's Republicans who control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.

posted July 05, 2005 07:14 PM            

Though I do realize that no major event that involves a great mass multitude of civilian spectators to witness the event to ever be entirely successful(unless of course it's being ran by the ruling government of that country where the event is taking place), I do realize that their were some major "quirks" of Live 8 in general that I find pretty disturbing.

As Jim Morrison has once mired, that all members of the audiance must find they're place and then take they're seats, I do find Live 8 to be very steriotypical in alot of ways and though I didn't think about it at the time, now I'm starting to wonder whether or not I've signed my name on "they're" list for other reasons rather then a "Make Poverty History" campaign!

Needless, the only two things that I found that was strikenly "astounding" and "shocking" out of the whole event was that most of the bands that have played in the Live Aid event 20 years ago, have avoided Live 8 like as if a new generation of "The Black Plague" has just outbroken on the Western Hemisphere(namely mentioning Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin of all others)and second, that Roger Waters is playing with the rest of the members of Pink Floyd, but you better take a picture folks, for if any one the Floyds start to get into the subject of contracts again, rest to sure Pink Floyd will stop talking to eachother and be out of the "loop" of things for another 20 years or so! You can't tell all that to the people that have made attendance in front of the stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this past July 2 however, most of them probably think that they were just some underground garage band of four old men living out they're possibly "childhood" dreams of someday being famous musicians by copying off of the artistic works of somebody like of Snoop Doggy Dog!

And so, this(as I have mentioned so far) is via to one of the rants that I like to make and it is the fact that this time around, it wasn't Paul McCartney that started off Live 8 in London with his "St. Peppers", it was the Japanese band Rize that started it all off right from the very begining and even though they might be fairly new in comparison of the former Beatles member and U2 covering all of the background sound for him and Bono singing duet with Sir Paul, I still regret not able to see Bjork doing the Live 8 in Tokyo either, I feel that she makes a better artist then Paul and all that they have given her was one song's worth of airtime, the song "All is full of Love" is the only thing that made recognisable through all of Live 8 and that is due to the video works of Chris Cunningham of the song! Indeed, that was one hELL of a video, but I like alot of her avant-garde quality music too!

What a shame!
What a waste!

...of one great artist and entertainer!

It's like, just because I might be from the US, doesn't mean that I'm in the category of tastes either one or two of four music styles, Country Western, Hip-Hop, R&B and/or Heavy Metal, I think that I demand more than that!

So, call me "un-American"!

posted July 06, 2005 01:26 AM            

Now the joke is going around about...

Question: What is missing in Live 8 to help fight poverty in Africa?

Answer: Africans!

Johannesberg got bumped-off over they're part of the Live 8 tribute too!

What's wrong with them, don't like African music or something?

Moscow was also to be apart of this event, but I guess that they weren't "western" enough for that silly crazy Yankee stuff! And to think that Russia should trust the west? I don't think so!

I wouldn't if I were them!

But Snoop Doggy Dog is telling us that he's Africa in his MTV interveiws! Gee, I wonder why?!?