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Letter to the Editor, Irish Examiner, 26th July 2006
Congratulations to Stephen King on his enlightened
July 19th article, Giving for Africa may make us feel good,
but it doesn’t solve very much. He has put his
finger on the root cause of Africa’s poverty by rightly identifying
corruption as the biggest problem facing people in the Third World
today.
He also highlights the fact that debt relief is not
as effective as people think it is and points out that cancelling
debts to corrupt regimes does not automatically bring improvement,
or even change, in the fundamental areas of education, health and
anti-poverty strategies. The author gives the example of Nigeria’s
President Olusegun Obasanjo’s decision to direct $347 million,
equal to that nation’s annual education budget and twice its
health budget, towards building a 60,000-seater stadium, to demonstrate
that African countries need good leaders, not debt relief.
Injecting cash at the top level of corrupt regimes,
of which there are many, is a total and utter waste of time.
A culture of political correctness may be partly responsible for
the NGO community’s apathy towards corruption, but being politically
correct, in this situation, is nonsensical – people’s
lives are at stake.
The bottom line is that pumping ever increasing amounts
of money into Africa is not the answer. We as an aid agency
do not believe that we are the answer, nor do we believe that our
money is going to solve the problems of the Third World, because
we know that for as long as corruption is endemic, we will only
ever scratch the surface of the African dilemma. Aid money
must be routed away from corrupt governments and, instead, put directly
in at ground level through the support of specific projects run
by reputable NGO’s and missionaries. GOAL has consistently
argued also for the Irish government to “adopt” one
Third World country and implement humanitarian projects itself in
that country. All that is required here is inventiveness and
moral courage.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN O’SHEA
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