Africa in need of a rescue plan

ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

In Africa last week the question I was most asked was if I was disappointed that in the 18 years since Band Aid not much seemed to have changed.

I was certainly dismayed that, despite the ready response of most governments to the chronic food shortages, the EU appears to exist in the incompetent and frankly negligent way of the mid-1980s. Its tardy, pathetic response to government and non-governmental organization (NGO) pleas must be addressed. Aside from the chronic and debilitating effects of European bureaucracy, the only other recognizable factor in Ethiopia this year was the equally endemic drought conditions and their effect on food production.

Band Aid knew it could not prevent famine. It set out to place poverty, and specifically Africa, on the global summit agenda. This it achieved. From zero, Africa and the problems of poor nations has dominated heads-of-state discussions subsequently. (For all the good it's done, do you say? Quite.)

Since then, governments have understood that electorates will not tolerate mass starvation and have in general reacted accordingly. I don't believe there will be famine this year, but both UNICEF and the Save the Children Fund agree that "tens of thousands" have already died over and above the norm due to starvation. I don't know why that's not called famine, but it isn't. At least the Evian G8 guaranteed food security for the impoverished and starving, but let's pray it is not discharged through the blundering office of our dear EU.

In the 80s the problem was famine exacerbated by a Stalinist regime prosecuting the longest war of the 20th century. One could only help the people and wait for the moment to pass. With the end of the Cold War, everything so firmly fixed in our political universe became fluid and phenomena occurred.

We were too wealthy to afford an all-out war with the Soviets and they had too much to lose and were too poor to fight one. So we let others do our fighting for us. We could pay thugs to fight and die for our respective patches. Then it stopped. We didn't need the brutes any longer, so they went. But we wanted our money back, even though it had ended up not in the hospitals and schools it was intended for but in their pockets or back in ours through banks or luxury properties.

Crippled countries were forced into untenable boundaries, despite historic enmities between peoples, weighed down by permanent poverty, enslaved by debts. Born owing more than they could repay, they died owing more than when they were born.

We needed to put parameters around the economic successes that were the engines of our wealth in this globalized world. We set up the WTO. Of course, the rules suited us, but did they have to be so one-sided, so brutish in wielding our massive victory? Open your markets to us, without condition, and we will impose tariffs, taxes, subsidy on your exports to us. Fair? Trade became another burden of the already broken.

HIV/AIDS intruded in my life in 1986 when my then wife, Paula Yates, having completed a Channel 4 jokey sex education series, was asked to reshoot chunks of it to take on board this emerging deadly disease. Until then we had thought HIV/AIDS a New York gay club scene illness. Last week I heard Professor Alan Whitehead describe 35 percent AIDS infection rates in Swaziland.

We were meeting in southern Ethiopia -- incidences of 14 percent HIV-infected mothers in random testing. In northern Ethiopia it was nearer 20 percent. Can you imagine the UK with 20 percent AIDS?

Sixty years ago, another continent lay in ruins. Ours. America, in what former British prime minister Winston Churchill called "the single greatest act of generosity in history," diverted 1 percent of its GDP for four years into rebuilding Europe. Of course, it was not just generosity. The US needed a bulwark against Stalinism and a vital economy to trade with.

It worked beyond measure. We set up that now redundant but then necessary Common Agricultural Policy so we would never go hungry again. Where there had been tyranny, we enforced elective, representative governance, apolitical armies, a disinterested civil service and a free press. It's time to have a Marshall Plan anew -- for Africa.

Some argue Africa has had more than the Marshall Plan monies in aid over the years. True, but it has been incoherent, not conducive to anything but momentary support of dislocated development. It could never have succeeded because it lacked planning or a quid pro quo on anyone's part.

Some point to Africa now, its leaders almost to a man hopeless. Would you vote for any of them? They are feckless, incompetent, often intellectually incapable, corrupt. Like our lot really. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi -- under investigation but now miraculously immune. French President Jacques Chirac the same. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl -- caught. All members of the European Parliament immune from prosecution. The difference is we're rich enough to afford our corruption.

Politicians point to glimmers of hope -- Kenya, Ethiopia. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, despite reservations, is competent, well-meaning and, I think, honest, but these few only illustrate our low expectations.

Last week, I met Valerie Amos, minister of overseas development. I suggested that, for Britain's chairmanship of the G8 in 2005, we begin now working toward a world-defining summit, looking afresh at North-South disparity. That we assemble a group to discuss a way ahead to be published in advance of our G8, serving as intellectual underpinning for a new plan for Africa, and that the British G8 be mandated to attempt a continental rescue plan similar to Marshall's.

I will be sniggered at by economists, political scientists and the like. Good ol' naive Bob. Except I've been doing this for 18 years and am probably no less expert at this stage of the game. What choices do we have? We are not prepared to accept these people dying.

Nor are we prepared to accept them to our shores, threatening our social cohesion and services. They don't want to leave their homelands. They want a future for themselves and their children. If they can't get it at home, they, like I did, will move. Who wouldn't? How much better, as the US realized in 1946, to have a thriving continent trading and growing. Naive perhaps. Impossible, no.