Wall Street Journal - January 31, 2003
Daniel Henninger*

No Child Left Behind is the name of his strategy to raise performance in the nation's inner-city schools. Of the AIDS effort, one may at least ask: Why does a powerful and rich country, the United States, which for 25 years has done next to nothing useful to educate its own poor black children think it can reverse the even grimmer biology of death from AIDS across the whole continent of Africa?

Politics gave us the word "hubris" long ago, but one of the reasons we have politics is that people persist in believing that however daunting such problems as America's failed city schools or HIV/AIDS in Africa, the political process must at least try; it is not morally acceptable to walk way, to just give up.

That said, George W. Bush is properly skeptical of what politics by itself can accomplish. Accordingly, the centerpiece of his No Child Left Behind program became measurable accountability for the money politics would spend -- the standardized testing requirement.

Accountability and responsibility may well be the two words Mr. Bush hopes most to deposit in our political vocabulary. On the AIDS initiative, news reports this week suggested that Mr. Bush has been skeptical the past year of the notion that mere money, the failed strategy for our own city schools, would help Africa. He has now committed $15 billion to this project, but I can't yet discern the lever of accountability in the president's African AIDS effort. Maybe it will come; $15 billion should buy you some influence.

Africa is the one big place in the world no one in politics wants to think about. Africa is "hopeless." Our leaders in Washington, however, can't escape Africa's realities entirely because they spend each day in the back seat of taxis driven by black men who have fled from Africa's non-functioning economies. It is always disconcerting when one talks with these African taxi drivers to find they are often better educated than American blacks in similar jobs. They are in America not because Africa is stupid but because Africa's politicians are often corrupt and have stupid ideas that ruin the people beneath them.

June Arunga is a young Kenyan woman in her 20s who was in London yesterday on her way back to a job with the Interregion Economic Network in her native country. Ms. Arunga, a former medical student who diverted into economics, told me that "most of the prostitutes I know in Kenya have college degrees. They are prostitutes because there are no jobs." These educated, HIV-infected women tend to "do it with doctors, lawyers and teachers, which is killing off the top level of our society." Below this level, with a pandemic of joblessness, "there is a lot of idle sex."

Ms. Arunga says city-living Kenyans often spend weekends at "their country homes, which for us means your ancestral home. When I travel into the country to visit my grandfather, the roads are filled with cars carrying coffins. When I grew up you hardly ever heard of someone dying, other than an old person. But you should do a random Google search," she told me, "where you will find the HIV orphans." She's right; go look.

June Arunga shares the widespread belief that Africa's poverty makes it susceptible to a plague of opportunistic infections. But her idea of a solution to Africa's health catastrophe is a little different: "The unilateral removal of tariffs, quotas and subsidies would go a long way to improve people's standards of living." Most of the world's anti-AIDS organizations will laugh, but I think she's right.

A lot of political energy has been diverted the past few years into fighting over the cost of AIDS drugs for Africa, and just yesterday several familiar AIDS groups were already complaining that the U.S. financial commitment isn't enough. Anyone who takes the time to examine the most recent published literature on AIDS in Africa learns what the real solution is: the creation of a functioning civil society.

The primary public-health goal now in Africa (and inevitably in Russia, China, India and other aborning AIDS disasters) is prevention -- stopping additional infections. An important study appearing in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, comparing treatment regimens in parts of Tanzania and Uganda, found that changing behavior, rather than merely medicating, significantly cut the incidence of HIV infection. What we also have learned in the global AIDS fight is that the most effective control programs, in Thailand and Uganda, have deployed not just medical personnel but all levels of civil society. Not least, that includes a nation's religious leaders.

"You're trying to reach an entire society which is something that the religious leaders can do," the U.N.'s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, told a conference in Kenya last July. Uganda's largest traditional monarchy, the Buganda Kingdom, is trying to formally revive an old tradition among women: virginity. Don't smirk until you've read the Web site of the Diocese of West Buganda: "Currently an estimated three out of every ten children of school-going age and below are orphans."

One hopes some way will be found to attach Bushian accountability to this $15 billion, for the president knows that well-funded good intentions, a specialty of the global helping community, are not enough. And one hopes someone at a higher pay grade than June Arunga, say Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, who are said to have pushed for this money, will support Ms. Arunga's belief that the fate of Africa's battle with HIV/AIDS is crucially tied to the economic ideas under which its people -- the ones who haven't died or fled -- have to live.

Toward the end of his address this week, Mr. Bush made clear his fear that some great biological calamity could befall the U.S. But even now our politics can be remarkably frivolous, exploiting the melodrama of these events. It's good our politics has become engaged with the HIV/AIDS plague in Africa. We may learn soon enough what it means to get serious.

*WONDER LAND

ABOUT DANIEL HENNINGER

Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Mr. Henninger joined Dow Jones in 1971 as a staff writer for the National Observer. He became an editorial-page writer for the Journal in 1977, arts editor in 1978 and editorial features editor in 1980. He was appointed assistant editor of the editorial page in 1983 and chief editorial writer and senior assistant editor in October 1986, with daily responsibility for the "Review & Outlook" columns. In November 1989 he became deputy editor of the editorial page.

Mr. Henninger was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 1996, and he won the Gerald Loeb Award for commentary in 1985. In 1998 he received the Scripps Howard Foundation's Walker Stone Award for editorial writing, for editorials on a range of issues, including the International Monetary Fund, presidential politics and cloning. He won the 1995 American Society of Newspaper Editors' Distinguished Writing Award for editorial writing, and he was a finalist in that award in 1985, 1986 and 1993.

A native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger graduated from Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree from the School of Foreign Service. He began his journalism career at The New Republic magazine. He and his wife, Mary, have three children and live in Ridgewood, N.J.

Mr. Henninger invites comments to edit.page@wsj.com. Please put HENNINGER in the "Subject" field.
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