Chicago Tribune - July 6, 2005
Clarence Page, Editorial Board

Madonna, Coldplay, Elton John, Mariah Carey and other superstars performed at Bob Geldof's globally televised Live 8 concert over the weekend to urge the world's wealthiest nations meeting this week at the G-8 summit, hosted by Blair in Gleneagles, Scotland, to double their financial aid to Africa.

At the same time, Gadhafi, hosting a semiannual meeting of the 53-member African Union in Libya, was urging African leaders to come together, solve their own problems and stop "begging" for outside aid.

Although few African leaders were willing to openly join Gadhafi's long-standing opposition to Western involvement of any kind in the continent, his comments express an extreme answer to a question many are now asking: At a time when the wealthy nations are remarkably united in their desire to help Africa, what's the best way to do it?

Most African leaders are quite willing to embrace Blair's aid proposals, at least in public, but not without some reservations. Well-intentioned as it is, the current push for the wealthy nations to "Make Poverty History," as one campaign calls itself, strikes many African ears as echoing the condescending missionaries and explorers who came from Europe in past centuries to "save" Africans from themselves.

As one Nigerian analyst at the meeting in Libya told the Reuters news service, "Africa's image is that of a child. We are infantilized by this campaign."

Yet, much of Africa has desperate needs. More than 40 percent of Africans live on less than $1 a day; AIDS kills more than 2 million Africans a year. Many others are killed by malaria or wars (there have been some 186 coups d'etat and 26 major conflicts since imperial pullouts a half-century ago).

Some African governments, such as Mozambique and Ghana, are making impressive economic and political progress, while Zimbabwe and other kleptocracies continue to behave like the proverbial brother-in-law on the couch: You keep waiting for him to get a job, straighten up and get his act together, but he never does.

Blair and other anti-poverty campaigners are pushing for doubling of aid to Africa, to $25 billion by 2010, a plea that is backed by major reports from the UN Millennium Project and Blair's own Commission for Africa.

President Bush has rejected Blair's target, but offered to double America's Africa aid to $8.6 billion by 2010, which is more than any previous administration has committed.

But more important than the aid earmarked to meet Africa's short-term needs is the approach the developed world should take in helping Africa grow in the long term.

For example, in April when I visited Dakar, Senegal, the bustling West African port city whose Hong Kong-like financial district surprised me with its gleaming high-rise glory, I found a rising generation of educated and enterprising Africans in suits and polished wingtips who wanted trade, not aid, especially if they could get it under fair international rules and cleaner African governments.

And this new generation is not alone in looking at how market capitalism, entrepreneurship and education reforms have improved the fortunes of countries such as China since the late 1970s, India since the early 1980s and Vietnam since the late 1980s.

"All of these were home-grown policy reforms, which allowed countries to get richer by making money, not by receiving it," an editorial in Britain's The Economist magazine rhapsodized on the eve of the G-8 talks.

China, India and Vietnam now trade with the U.S., providing cheaper goods and services and, it must be said, ominously competing with American workers for U.S. jobs that can be outsourced.

Such is the magic of the marketplace. It has its winners, its losers and those who can't seem to get into the game. That last category, unfortunately, is where too much of Africa continues to languish.

Thus, a new debate is emerging and it's not about whether to provide foreign aid to fight global poverty but what kind of aid is best.

In many ways, the squabble resembles America's welfare-reform debate; some critics say conventional foreign economic aid actually hurts those it is intended to help, if it does any good at all.

As The Economist concluded in its editorial, more aid may not "make poverty history," but it will do some good, at least in the short-term.

In the long-term, however, the best partnership between developed and underdeveloped nations will benefit best by following an old fish proverb: Give someone a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you will feed him for a lifetime.

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*Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com

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