Quarterly Bulletin

I want to start my article with the candid words of Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General who observed in his In Larger Freedom, (a book to be launched in September 2005 in New York during the Millennium Summit by the Heads of State and Government) that “Five years into

the millennium, we have it in our power to pass on to our children a brighter inheritance than that bequeathed to any previous generation. We can halve global poverty and halt the spread of major known diseases in the next 10 years. We can reduce the prevalence of violent conflict and terrorism. We can increase respect for human dignity in every land. And we can forge a set of updated international institutions to help humanity achieve these noble goals. If we act boldly—and if we act together—we can make people everywhere more secure, more prosperous and better able to enjoy their fundamental human rights”.

 Mr. Annan’s words--if we put them in the civil society common parlance simply--mean that “another and better world is possible for everyone”. But before we get to that better world, we need to diagnose carefully today’s problems, particularly those of Africa.

THE FIVE MAJOR CHALLENGES

If we took Africa in the doctor’s diagnosis room today, the continent will test positive to five major ‘illnesses’, namely, 1) huge external debts, 2) the rising HIV/AIDS pandemic, 3) unfair trade practices, 4) inadequate and heavily tied Official Development Assistance (ODA) and 5) the “brain drain” among the professionals. Each of these ailments has a different prescription for its cure. But some therapies and drugs in the form of policy dosages in the last forty to sixty years have proved to be less efficacious, judging by the high numbers of poverty levels on the continent.

It is also important to mention here that some of Africa’s despicable conditions can be traced back to the cruel era of the slave trade and the infamous “Scramble for Africa” meeting held in Berlin in Germany in 1884 that ushered in the unbridled colonialism on the continent. Both human and material resources were forcibly removed from the continent with the after-effects being felt in many pernicious and indirect ways to this very day and age! And the problems that the gross imposition of Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Arab cultures have inflicted upon the indigenous people make pan-Africanism nearly impossible to practise in terms of politics, economics and religion.

DEBTS

Let us take the case of the external debts first. According to the African Forum and Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD) based in Harare, Zimbabwe from 1970 to 2002 Africa had borrowed US$548 billion internationally. During the same period it has paid back US$568 billion but still owes $330 billion today. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state, has in the last 40 years borrowed US$9 billion from international creditors and paid back US$18 billion over the same period and still owes US$33 billion today! My own country Zambia borrowed in the range of US$5 billion since 1973 and has paid back US$11 billion and yet last year had a debt stock of US$7.1 billion.

Some of Zambia’s debts have now been cancelled after having struggled with the austere conditionalities under the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) programme since 2000. Zambia’s debts, as envisaged after full debt relief has been granted by 2023 under the HIPC framework, will decline to US$3.1 billion, other things being equal. The point I'm making is that Africa has paid more than its share and therefore debt cancellation is not a matter of charity for Africa but of social and economic justice.

Every year Africa pays US$15 billion in debt service and this amount is 4 times more than what the continent allocates to the health and education sectors combined. Many families in most poor African countries are struggling to meet the basic needs of life as many people are jobless. This was occasioned by creditor-dictated economic liberalisation programmes (the infamous structural adjustment programmes—SAP) that saw among other things, massive closures of formerly state-owned companies.

How can the continent move forward under such harsh conditions? Resources meant for development are being diverted into debt service. Thus children who should be in   school are now left on the streets as governments are stripped of their meagre resources through debt service. This is a gross violation of children’s rights! I call to your attention the words of Kofi Annan: “We will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development, and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights. Unless all these causes are advanced, none will succeed”. So what kinds of seeds are being sown in the minds of children through current global economic problems that deny them access to schools?

It is in this light that I cautiously welcome all forms of debt relief, including the proposal by the G8 countries in Scotland to relieve by 100 percent some African countries of their heavy multilateral debts, though the number is limited to 18 only and the period of delivery extremely long--40 years.

I am also aware of a very bold statement President George W. Bush of the U.S.A recently made on 30 June 2005 in the heat of preparations for the G8 Meetings in Gleneagles in Scotland that “economic development is not something that we do for others but something they achieve with us”. Clearly I decipher one thing from this subtle statement, that development should be mutually interdependent for it to make sense. But are the current global conditions fertile for such development to take root and grow?

Given the adverse impacts of debts on the African man, woman and child, I want to join the chorus of people that are urging the creditors and the donors on the need to move very fast towards full cancellation without harmful conditionalities. The international community can no longer afford to gamble with people's lives given the heavy toll that poverty is causing in Africa.

HIV/AIDS –A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION!

The HIV/AIDS pandemic now kills more than 3 million people each year and poses an unprecedented threat to human development and security. The disease is wrecking millions of families and leaving tens of millions of orphans. It is now said that of the 40 million global HIV reported cases, 70% are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Zambia registers as infected 16% of the adult population aged 15-49 years. Unless something is done and done very soon, we risk seeing large numbers of countries being heavily depopulated in the next coming years. Hence the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will not be met, as there will be no skilled labour to implement some of the strategies for development.

More than just a public health crisis, AIDS undermines economic and social stability, ravaging health, education, agriculture and social    welfare   systems.    While placing an enormous drag on economic growth, it also weakens governance and security structures, posing a further threat. There is therefore need to quickly mobilise both financial and human resources to fight this scourge.

The epidemic demands an exceptional response and for the donors they will definitely need to dig deeper in their aid budgets to finance provision of ARVs for those that are already infected and also scale up the prevention programmes.

Dr. Peter Piot of UNAIDS, during the 2004 Bangkok AIDS meetings, estimated that Africa will need not less than US$7 billion per year to effectively fight the   pandemic. Yet   current spending levels are less than US$4 billion per year. In Africa, because of high poverty levels coupled with inadequate health facilities for testing particularly in the rural areas, HIV is easily transmitted from one community to another.

We therefore urge the United Nations and the donor nations in the spirit of a genuine global partnership as promulgated at the Monterrey Conference in 2002 to come to Africa's  aid  and save the continent from imminent extinction! Yes, the pandemic is a weapon of mass destruction and must be stopped in its tracks. I join Kofi Annan in his clarion call, “Therefore, I call on the international community to provide urgently the resources needed for an expanded and comprehensive response to HIV/AIDS, as identified by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and its partners, and to provide full funding for the Global Fight to AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria”. But in making this call we should also guard against misuse of resources meant for HIV/AIDS and other pressing problems that are already flowing into Africa if lasting impacts of development aid are to be realised.

UNFAIR GLOBAL TRADE AT THE CORE OF AFRICA’S POVERTY

It has been argued in many fora that Africa does not necessarily need aid but realistic prices for its products. The performance of developing countries in the trade sector has not been impressive, especially when judged in terms of their ability to earn larger amounts of foreign exchange to finance their debt burdens.

In many cases the opposite has been achieved: rapid liberalisation of trade and investment combined with a retreat from the economy by the state has led to de-industrialisation and losses for the productive sector. It is therefore important for the developed countries to urgently begin to level the “playing field” through removal of all trade distorting subsidies that have hitherto been robbing the African rural farmer of his/her income. All trade barriers such as restrictive market access in form of quota systems, tariffs and technical barriers need to be dealt with as soon as possible. In fact these issues should form part of the agenda for the Ministerial Meetings scheduled for Hong Kong in December 2005.

The developed countries spend on average US$100 billion annually in subsidies and this amount is twice what Africa receives in ODA per year.  I strongly believe that unless Governments and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) can deal with these issues pragmatically it will be difficult to overcome poverty in the rural areas of Africa where over 70% of the populations subsist on agriculture. Nelson Mandela, during his speech at Trafalgar Square, London, England on 3 February 2005 aptly sums up the African situation when he said: “Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times… that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.”

FOREIGN AID

One of the most encouraging shifts in recent years as noted by Kofi Annan and others has been the increase in ODA, after a decade of steady decline in the 1990s. Expressed as a percentage of developed countries’ gross national income (GNI), global ODA currently stands at 0.25%--still well short of the 0.33% reached in the late 1980s, let alone the long-standing target of 0.7% that was reaffirmed in the Monterrey Consensus in 2002. On the basis of recent commitments to future increases by several donors, the United Nations observes that annual ODA flows should increase to about US$100 billion by 2010—nearly double their levels at the time of the Monterrey Conference.

However, the question of ODA needs to be cast in its proper perspective. As progressive Africans, we are alive to the fact that doubling aid on its own will not solve all our problems. If it were just ODA that was needed to solve Africa's problems, then Uganda, Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, among many others would be  developed countries  by now because they have been receiving generous aid for over 40 years.

Thus this ODA should be anchored on specific reforms in recipient countries that enhance good governance socially, politically and economically.  For instance, my organisation Jubilee-Zambia believes that economic, social and cultural rights should be enshrined and protected in national constitutions. This is also consistent with the other demands Jubilee-Zambia has been placing on the Zambian Government to embrace open, accountable and transparent mechanisms and constitutional reforms as a basis for debt cancellation so that money realised from debt relief can go to the intended targets, the poor. There is also need to ratify and implement all international instruments that promote the dignity of the human person. On the part of donors/creditors, there is certainly need to drop all harmful conditionalities, e.g., fiscal austerity in national budgets that results in a reduction on social spending tends to affect the poor adversely in our countries. Africa needs more and better aid but with conditionalities from below, i.e., from the recipients themselves.

BRAIN DRAIN:A LEAKING TAP IN AFRICA!

As you know, it takes time and money to train an educated labour force. For instance, it takes 19 years to train a doctor and 16 years to train an economist (i.e., 7 years at primary level, 5 years at high school and another 7/4 years at the University). Yet in the last few years the continent has experienced an unparalleled exodus of educated Africans leaving their countries for the developed countries in search of greener pastures.

Currently, Zambia is experiencing a critical shortage of doctors and nurses as many of them have left for the neighbouring states while others have gone overseas. Britain and America are guilty of poaching skilled personnel from Third World countries. Africa needs the best of brains to push forward the development programmes, yet these brains are domiciled outside the continent. This means that poor governments in Africa are “nursery beds” for professionals whose skills are benefiting developed countries. Hence Africa is subsidising the rich world with highly trained labour. Some people have argued that there are benefits to be realised from migrant workers through family remittances but this is more at a micro level (family level) than macro level (national level). There is need to quickly put in place stop-gap measures in order to stem the brain drain if Africa is to realise its dream of a new economic, political and social “renaissance” in this 21st century.

CONCLUSION

Certainly 2005 is a unique year for world leaders to make a positive difference for the millions of people that suffer extreme poverty and needlessly go hungry every day. The just ended G8 Meetings in Scotland, the Millennium Summit in New York in September, the September IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington DC, and indeed the Trade Ministerial Meetings in Hong Kong in December are among the several opportunities open to world leaders in which they can mobilise global support to effectively operationalise the MDGs in   poor countries  across the world. Therefore, governments, civil society, the private sector, and the international community face a crucial challenge this year to take prompt action to ensure commitments will be met and to remove roadblocks that frustrate the eradication of poverty and the achievement of greater global justice. I want to end with the wise and strong words of Victor Hugo, a social activist, who said, “There is one thing stronger than all armies of the world and that is an idea whose time has come.” I believe promoting a just world anchored on a clear set of human values and ideals is the IDEA whose time has come!

Jack Jones Zulu
JCTR Staff
Lusaka