Africa’s woes test grandest of plans

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Agnes Makhubela shakes her head slowly and says she has never heard of Tony Blair and his ambitious G-8 aid proposals for poor countries. Nor, for that matter, has she heard of George Bush.

Too poor to afford a radio or a newspaper, too overwhelmed by immediate concerns of survival to worry about far away events, she admits to little understanding of the world beyond the gold mine on the horizon or past the cheese factory a half-mile down a dusty road where she trudges each day to bring water to her family and a meager, thirsty patch of spinach and tomatoes.

On a continent that has redefined poverty, misery and despair, Makhubela is among the poorest of the poor.

She looks confused when an aid worker tells her that Blair is the prime minister of Britain and that he is trying to sign American President Bush and other world leaders onto an ambitious plan to help her and more than 300 million other Africans living on less than $1 a day.

“Can I talk to them? Can I meet them and tell them about my problems? I think maybe they can help.”

Blair has pushed for the other leaders of the major industrialized nations to adopt a plan at this week’s G-8 summit in Scotland that would forgive Africa’s staggering debt, double foreign aid to $50 billion a year and drop barriers that have kept Africa from trading its way out of poverty.

The plan’s blueprint is a 400-page report by a panel of experts Blair appointed to study ways to save the continent beset by poverty, war, persistent famine, pestilence, massive corruption and bad governance.

However, key parts of the plan already are in trouble.

At a meeting in Washington, Bush and Blair could not agree to forgive Africa’s more than $300 billion in foreign debt. G-8 foreign ministers did agree to erase debt for 18 of the world’s poorest countries, 14 of them in Africa. All had already qualified for debt relief under the World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries program.

As he prepared to leave for the summit, Bush made three proposals for Africa:

• Spending $1.2 billion to cut malaria deaths in half by 2010.

• Doubling U.S. spending to $400 million to promote the education of girls.

• Spending $55 million over three years to improve legal protections for women against violence and sexual abuse.

But Washington has resisted large increases along the lines Blair has suggested.

It is ultimately the scale, the breadth and depth of African poverty that condemns even the grandest schemes to save it.

South Africa is by far Africa’s most prosperous country. Its economy is nearly three times larger than that of Nigeria, the second largest.

Economists, however, say real unemployment here exceeds 40 percent, well above the official figure of 28 percent.

If it was an American city, South Africa would rank 11th in gross domestic product, slightly behind Detroit.

The GDP for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is roughly equivalent to the figure for Pennsylvania, the sixth richest U.S. state.

More than half of Africa’s 900 million people survive on $2 a day. About 320 million live in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day. That figure is expected to rise to 345 million in 10 years, making Africa the only continent that will not make the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015.

According to the United Nations and the World Bank, 184 million Africans are malnourished. Only 57 percent of Africa’s children are enrolled in primary schools, only one in three finishes high school. Less than one out of five people has electricity at home. More than 70 percent of all the people in the world infected with the HIV virus live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Foreign investment is scant. Wages are low, but so is productivity. The domestic market is puny, transportation an expensive nightmare and government interference and corruption are rife.

Despite billions of dollars in aid, Africa falls further behind the rest of the world every year. The United Nations said per capita income in Africa in 2000 was 10 percent lower than in 1980 and still falling.

Here, in the city of gold, Makhubela and three of her seven children live in an abandoned heavy equipment garage with no electricity, no running water, no windows and no heat. It does have a leaky roof of corroded, corrugated aluminum and a pervasive and overpowering smell of old oil and grease.

The African Union estimated corruption costs the continent $148 billion a year, an amount equal to about half of its debt and a quarter of its GDP.