United Press International - July 1, 2005
Dan Olmsted

Saturday will bring Live 8, a simultaneous array of 10 concerts on two continents designed to raise money and persuade world leaders to "stop 30,000 children dying every single day of extreme poverty," as the event's Web site declares.

Those world leaders are meeting next week in Gleneagles, Scotland, as the G8 group of the planet's richest countries. Along with climate change, their agenda will focus on Africa.

Ahead of the summit, President George W. Bush announced Thursday the United States will spend $1.2 billion in a five-year effort against malaria, which kills nearly 1 million Africans a year. That is on top of Bush's ambitious $15 billion, five-year plan to combat AIDS, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Both are the result of what might be considered a surprising amount of concern the White House has be expressing about the continent for some time.

"In Africa, promise and opportunity sit side by side with disease, war, and desperate poverty," Bush said in a speech in Berlin in May 2002. "This threatens both a core value of the United States -- preserving human dignity -- and our strategic priority -- combating global terror."

Such attention can only help, but the challenge is massive. Africa has been the sick man of the planet for generations, and it has only gotten sicker despite fitful attempts by the rest of the world to face up to its desperate condition. Moreover, a feeling of defeatism has become attached to this latest effort.

"No one expects G8's Africa initiative to work," states the discouraging headline of a column by Adrian Hamilton in Friday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Hamilton writes for Britain's Independent.

"In a very real sense, the G8 summit and the whole Save Africa campaign has failed before it has happened," he wrote. "Instead of a surge of gathering hope, there seems instead to be a mood of sad resignation that, with the best of intentions, we are largely wasting our money."

The reasons for this discouragement are complex. They range from concerns about corruption and lack of infrastructure to deliver aid to Africa, to disappointment with the Bush administration's AIDS initiative, to concerns by some Africans about paternalistic schemes to save them from themselves, to the ongoing internecine mayhem in Sudan and Robert Mugabe's neo-fascist Zimbabwe. How much will money for malaria medicine help children killed in these pitiless and pointless conflicts, even if it is not siphoned off by corrupt rulers?

Bottom line: The fear is Africa is a place where money simply does not matter much. For instance, the Financial Times reported Thursday that the International Monetary Fund, citing a "checkered history," urged policymakers not to "place more hopes on aid as as instrument of development than it is capable of delivering."

AIDS encapsulates the problem. In South Africa, where 5 million people are HIV-positive, the country's health actually recommends lemons and garlic as useful in combating the disease, at the same time warning about the side effects of anti-retroviral drugs.

The human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, is an organism known as a retrovirus.

In much of the rest of the world, those drugs have turned AIDS from a death sentence into a disease that can be, to some extent, lived with.

Even the administration's plan to speed those drugs to the dying has been criticized. In 2003, the president pledged $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS, with the effort focused on sub-Saharan Africa, but "from the start, Bush has failed to deliver on the funding he promised -- and what little money he has provided is being used to promote a right-wing agenda that undercuts international efforts and puts millions of people in AIDS-ravaged countries at greater risk of infection and death," Geraldine Sealey wrote on Rolling Stone/Salon.com. She accused the administration of "foot-dragging" and complained the project "took its sweet time getting going."

The White House disagrees. In a major speech Monday in Washington, Bush said, "Our country has undertaken a major effort against HIV/AIDS, the largest health initiative in history to combat a specific disease."

He said the U.S. government is "working with local health officials to expand AIDS testing facilities (in Africa), to train and support doctors and nurses and counselors, to upgrade clinics and hospitals, to care for children orphaned by AIDS, and to support pastors and priests and others who are teaching young people the values of respect and responsibility and prevention."

Stirring words, but given the magnitude of the problem, requiring some perspective.

"We're making life-giving treatment possible for more than 230,000 adults and children in Africa. We're determined to reach our five-year goal of treating 2 million," Bush said.

That is less than 10 percent of the 25 million Africans currently infected with HIV.

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