STWR - Share The World's Resources

The International Monetary Fund expects production in Sub Saharan Africa to increase by almost six percent in 2006. The growth rate is higher than at any time in the last thirty years, and the performance is not isolated but continues a trend towards accelerating growth. It is, moreover, not solely the poorest economies who are growing rapidly, or oil producers, although both of these groups are benefiting. It is also countries such as South Africa and Kenya for whom the largest economic management problem is not just ending civil conflict, a problem all too common in the continent.

Although it is of secondary importance to the absolute level of economic growth, the stability of economic performance has also been laudable. Growth exceeded three percent in every year from 2000 to 2004, which is the first time in the post independence era that such a five year run has been achieved. Stability in economic performance is a condensed economic expression meaning that people can plan their futures more easily, that their jobs are more secure, and that they face fewer uncertainties in their income, compared with environments where instability rules.

No amount of aid will bring development unless conflicts are ended

2005 was supposed to have been the year for Africa. But whilst the generalised promises were being promulgated, in Darfur 300,000 people were being slaughtered and 2 million displaced from their lands.

This is the world's latest outburst of genocidal killing, designed to drive people from their lands. We have seen an increase in this phenomenon since the end of the Cold War; we have even coined a new phrase for it, we call it "ethnic cleansing". And just as in Rwanda and the Balkans, the world has failed to take action to prevent it.

In September 2005 at the UN World Summit, with vociferous support from the UK, it was agreed that the world should recognise that sovereignty entailed a responsibility to protect one's citizens, and that in consequence if any government either could not or would not, that responsibility should transfer to the international community. But at the same time this grand declaration was being agreed, the government of Sudan was failing to protect the people of Darfur, and the international community, including the UK, was also failing to act.

"Everyone is talking about helping Africa, but the talk has no substance," Dr. Dov Pasternak, director of the International Programme on Arid Land Crops (IPALAC) told media representatives here.

A senior United Nations official has accused President George Bush of "doing damage to Africa" by cutting funding for condoms, a move which may jeopardise the successful fight against HIV/Aids in Uganda.

Stephen Lewis, the UN secretary general's special envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, said US cuts in funding for condoms and an emphasis on promoting abstinence had contributed to a shortage of condoms in Uganda, one of the few African countries which has succeeded in reducing its infection rate.

"There is no doubt in my mind that the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by [US policies]," Mr Lewis said yesterday. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."

The condom shortage has developed because both the Ugandan government and the US, which is the main donor for HIV/Aids prevention, have allowed supplies to dwindle, according to an American pressure group, the Centre for Health and Gender Equity (Change).

In 2003, President Bush declared he would spend $15bn on his emergency plan for Aids relief, but receiving aid under the programme has moral strings attached.

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves? These are timely questions in a summer in which Blair and Bush, their hands still wet with Iraqi blood, sought to rebrand themselves as the saviours of Africa. The G8's debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to "conditions", which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services. This was no gift; it was what the merchant bankers would call a "debt-for-equity swap", the equity here being national sovereignty. The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the west and Japan, and oil from nations who bank their profits in London and New York. Only in a bookkeeping sense had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa's debt was trivial compared to what the west really owes Africa.