Africa Moves to the Front

Expect to see a lot of news regarding Africa in the runup to next month's G-8 conference. Already President Bush has declared his determination to focus on the continent [here] and newly-installed World Bank President, Paul Wolfowitz has promised to make Africa a Bank priority [here]. Meanwhile, Tony Blair has launched an important initiative, the International Financial Facility [IFF], that would channel approximately 25 billion dollars into African poverty and health programs over the next five years. And, of course, he has declared that Africa, unlike Europe, is "worth fighting for."

So there is a general agreement on the part of the UK and American leadership that something major must be done to address the staggering problems of Africa. What is more, the EU leadership has signed on to the idea. But the general initiative faces major probems.

The first is public support. Africa hardly registers on the American radar screen -- witness the contemptible responses to Rwanda and Darfur in recent years. In Britain, the Telegaph reports,

A huge majority of Britons believes that pumping billions of pounds into Africa would be a waste of money, a verdict that is a major blow to Tony Blair's crusade to rescue the continent.
....
[The poll] also shows that 79 per cent of voters believe that corruption and incompetence were to blame for Africa's problems.

Read it here.

Then there is the problem of how to fund such a venture. Blair wants to borrow against future pledges and is soliciting money from EU countries. Gordon Brown [Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer] has asked all the oil producting countries to contribute to the effort. Jacques Chirac has suggested an international tax on jet fuel. This is all up in the air.

Meanwhile Bush and Blair seem to have come to an understanding on part of the aid package -- debt relief [mainly owed by poor African countries to the World Bank]. The two men will meet today in Washington to hammer out the details.

There is also the problem of accountability. African aid programs have been plagued by massive corruption and inefficiency. Blair and the EU are willing to trust the African States to police themselves. They want to institute a peer review system implemented by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an association of African states. Bush is unlikely to sign on to that, and Wolfowitz at the World Bank has already stated that his organization will in the future enforce strict accountability both on aid recipients and on the programs themselves.

There has been a lot of negotiation going on in recent months on this idea of a "Marshall Plan" for Africa. Tomorrow's Blair/Bush meeting will mark the beginning of a major effort aimed at securing public approval of the still to be finalized plans. Blair clearly sees this as a legacy project. Bush dosn't give a damn about legacies [good for him] but has from the beginning of his first administration had a continuing interest in Africa. Remember, the US has already instituted a 15 billion dollar program aimed at eradicating malaria, AIDS, and other diseases that plague the dark continent. [For a critical view of this effort see Slate's commentary here.]

Stay tuned..., things are starting to get interesting.