Rock star Bono and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s nine-day African tour was like chicken soup for a bad cold: It made us feel good despite a lot of misery. Also, it probably won’t do any harm and it might even do some good.
Among other good things, it gives a high profile and appealing face to a cause Americans love to gripe about, foreign aid.
To hear the angry voices squawking over talk radio, you might think half of the federal budget, at least, goes to foreign aid. In fact, our current foreign aid budget of about $10 billion amounts to less than half of 1 percent of the overall budget. That’s the lowest of all wealthy nations as a percentage of gross national product.
So, without much of a constituency in this country, the world’s needy often must look to celebrities to help bring attention to the problems foreign aid is intended to help.
Through Ghana, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Africa the Bono-O’Neill tour visited families who were living in mud-hut villages, scrap-metal shacks and lean-tos covered with plastic sheeting. They visited abandoned children and dying AIDs patients in overcrowded Catholic shelters.
And they talked and argued and smiled for the cameras. Bono talked about how wealthy nations like the U.S. must do more and give more to help the poorest nations. O’Neill, visibly moved, nevertheless grumbled about scant gains in the “measurable results” of the past 50 years and the need for “problem-solving” approaches to African aid and development.
Is Bono’s approach doing some good? Or is he only, as some activists sniff, helping the Bush administration look better than it deserves to look? The proof will be in deeds to come, not only by the Bush administration, but also by African nations and other Third World governments that the administration says it wants to help.
The U.S. poured billions of dollars into such nations throughout the Cold War, mainly to keep them from joining the communist bloc. The result has been billions of dollars in debt for the regimes that have inherited those nations.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), has called for immediate relief from that debt burden, which sucks resources out of Africa and prevents African leaders from spending what they need to fight their problems. Salih Booker, executive director of Washington’s Africa Action, points out that as the dominant shareholder in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the U.S. should use its power to have that debt reduced or erased.
At the same time, African nations need to show how they will put that money to better use. Here, too, the world has changed since the Cold War. Uganda, where Idi Amin once ruled with a notoriously bloody hand, now leads the continent in sensible and effective AIDS reduction. It has expanded its schools and boosted teacher pay to 27 times what it used to be. War-torn Mozambique’s economy produced a 10 percent growth rate last year.
Yet South Africa still is paying back more than $18 billion in loans accumulated by its old apartheid regime. Its neighbors are paying interest on more than $26 billion in debt accumulated during the regional wars that South Africa enflamed during that period.
Security, not for foreigners but for Americans, was a major theme when President Bush met with Bono in the Oval Office in March and proposed the Millennium Challenge Account to help developing nations with more than $5 billion in additional aid over the next three years. Linking foreign aid to security wisely recognizes that the world has changed. The Sept. 11 terror attacks dramatize how Americans cannot continue to shrug off the problems of the rest of the world. As the world’s biggest superpower, we cannot comfortably expect the rest of the world to stay out of our lives when our policies intrude into their lives.
Although most of the Sept. 11 terror plotters came from comparatively middle-class families, Bush correctly noted, when governments like Afghanistan and others “fail to meet the most basic needs of their people, these failed states can become havens for terror.”
Indeed. Remember how easily Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda has operated in Africa, particularly in Sudan and in Tanzania and Kenya, where two U.S. embassies were bombed?
The issue of national security offers Americans a good reason to forgive Africa’s debt, as it did for Americans to help Africa build that debt. The Bush administration needs to establish a new system of incentives tailored to the post-Cold War world to help developing nations help themselves. These struggling nations can make their own chicken soup, as long as they have chickens.
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