OPINION

Time for a blunt message to Africa

The U.N. Security Council needs to tell African leaders the world is fed up with their silly antics and buffoonery

Burundi's six-year civil war has claimed 150,000 lives and displaced thousands of people. These Hutu refugees were part of the exodus in December 1999

By George B.N. Ayittey
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- In his bid to bring an end to Burundi's six-year civil war, Nelson Mandela lashed out at negotiators on January 16, 2000, accusing them of dawdling while women and children are slaughtered.

The former president of South Africa and Nobel laureate scolded them for lacking the talent and the vision to end the war that has claimed at least 100,000 lives.

A similar rebuke should have been delivered to the African heads of state who met in New York on January 24, under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, to address the crises ravaging the continent: abject poverty, conflicts and the AIDS epidemic. Instead they were coddled.

Of the 33.6 million people infected with the HIV virus worldwide, 23.5 million (or about 70 percent) are Africans, and the U.N. estimates the number of AIDS orphans will reach 13 million by 2001.

Africa has already lost 13.8 million people to AIDS, and nearly 10,500 new cases are diagnosed each day.

Further, Africa is the continent most ravaged by war. A "curtain of fire" stretches from Eritrea, through Ethiopia, Sudan and Congo to Angola. At least 14 conflicts rage on the continent.

Africa is home to more than half of the world's refugee population -- about 12 million including those internally displaced. Refugees make easy targets for sexual predators, many of whom carry HIV, the AIDS virus.

West African soldiers, for example, fathered some 25,000 children during peacekeeping missions in Liberia between 1990 and 1998. The Nigerian contingent accounted for 50 percent of the cases and soldiers from Ghana, Guinea and Sierra Leone the rest, according to Teniola Olufemi, coordinator of the charity known as the ECOMOG Children Project Inc. All the fathers abandoned the children. (Reported by the Pan African News Agency, September 21, 1998.)

In the Congo conflict, Ugandan soldiers prey on Congolese women with impunity, aggravating an already precarious AIDS situation.

Only so much outsiders can do

A woman with AIDS, right, stands with her daughter in a corn field near their mud hut in Mzuzu district of northern Malawi

Alarmed by the deteriorating situation in Africa, the international and donor communities have sought to mobilize resources.

On December 14, 1999, the Strategic Partnership with Africa (SPA) in Paris pledged $3.7 billion from donors for poverty reduction and economic development in Africa over the next three years. That is in addition to the debt relief agreed to in September 1999 under the Enhanced Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and the nearly $5 billion expected from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Since 1988 SPA has mobilized $18 billion in assistance for Africa.

To be sure, AIDS and chaos in Africa threaten not only the continent's economic future but also global security and stability. But there is only so much the international community can do.

Without strong political commitment on the part of African leaders, well-intentioned initiatives are doomed to fail. Indeed, similar high-profile crash initiatives for Africa have in the past failed miserably.

Back in 1986 the United Nations held a highly publicized special session on Africa. It got nowhere.

A decade later the United Nations launched a $25 billion "system-wide special initiative on Africa" to revive development. Boutros Boutros-Gali, U.N. secretary-general at the time, warned that Africa was in danger of becoming the "lost continent."

The Clinton administration, to its credit, elevated the profile of Africa, proposing the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), holding high-level conferences and making official visits. President Clinton himself visited Africa in March 1998. Posturing and lack of seriousness on the part of African leaders, however, doomed these efforts.

Not one African head of state bothered to attend last September's annual conference on AIDS in Africa in Lusaka, Zambia. Notably absent was the president of the host country, Frederick Chiluba, whose office was just minutes away and whose own minister of local government and housing, Bennie Mwiinga, died of AIDS on the eve of the conference. (The official cause of death was listed as something else.)

'We have been in denial'

African government officials for years dismissed AIDS as a "racist conspiracy plot" invented by the West.

"For a long time we have been in denial. We looked at AIDS as a foreign problem, involving white people, foreign people," said Mary Kanya, Swaziland's ambassador to the United States.

Half-baked attempts were made at public education. Existing AIDS-related laws seldom were enforced. Only two countries made serious efforts to confront the AIDS epidemic.

Senegal managed to hold its infection rate below 2 percent of the adult population. Uganda, through intensive public education, condom distribution, voluntary testing and counseling services, cut its infection rate from 15 percent to below 10 percent in the 1990s.

The others prefer to allocate scarce resources for the procurement of arms to crush an indigent population and prosecute senseless wars. Even in those countries at peace, government priorities are grotesquely misaligned.

A grandmother, who cares for nine AIDS orphans, prepares breakfast outside her house that was recently damaged by fire near Kuanda village in northern Malawi

South Africa, for example, faces the fastest-growing AIDS crisis in Africa: 1,700 people contract HIV every day and within five years more than 6 million of its 40 million people will have the virus.

Morna Cornell of the Johannesburg-based AIDS Consortium, a clearinghouse for organizations fighting the epidemic, estimates that in the next five to 10 years 3.5 million South Africans will die of AIDS.

And this is the country -- of all those in sub-Saharan Africa -- that is best equipped to deal with the AIDS crisis. It is relatively more developed and has the infrastructure and health care delivery systems.

Yet only $13 million has been allocated to AIDS-related education and care programs over five years, Meanwhile the government is spending approximately $6.5 billion on new military hardware, including three German submarines.

A paradigm shift is needed

The new millennium calls for a paradigm shift: a new approach and a complete overhaul of how the international community deals with Africa's problems.

The U.N. Security Council needs to deliver a blunt message to African leaders and governments: The international community is fed up with their silly antics and buffoonery.

Africa cannot enter the new millennium preoccupied with violence, war and political instability. Sustainable development cannot occur in such an environment. Nor can control of the AIDS epidemic.

Attempts by African leaders, governments and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to resolve conflicts have been unimpressive.

West African peacekeeping troops sent to Liberia in 1990 to stop the mayhem even joined in the fighting and the looting. Guinean peacekeepers joined two rival factions in the shelling. Nigerian peacekeepers dismantled an entire iron ore processing plant and carted it off.

The OAU was snoring when Somalia imploded in 1993, followed by Rwanda in 1994 and Congo in 1996. In the Congo conflict the neighboring countries that were supposed to stop the fighting joined in themselves.

The solutions to Africa's numerous problems lie in Africa itself -- not at the U.N. Security Council or at the World Bank.

If African governments are unwilling to seek such internal solutions, the international community should not oblige them by giving in to their badgering and extortionary demands. That would only compound Africa's problems.

The author, George Ayittey, a native of Ghana, is an associate professor of economics at American University and president of the Free Africa Foundation, both in Washington.