In
the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
The
Debt Crisis in Africa
[Shamim A Siddiqi, New York]
“In a world where AIDS is claiming more than
8,000 lives a day, and literacy rates are falling, the most impoverished nations
are siphoning desperately needed resources for health care and education to
continue to pay the wealthiest nations and institutions service on a debt that
they have already paid three times over. African nations are at the epicenter
of both the debt and the AIDS crises, facing drought and famine and recovering
from regional conflict. Despite this reality, African nations are paying more
in debt service to the United States
and other creditors than they receive in aid, new loans, or investment. The President's
AIDS initiative provides a perfect example of this reality. The fourteen
countries eligible for funding to fight AIDS, mostly African, will receive $2.4
billion dollars in 2004; the same fourteen nations will pay and estimated $9.1
billion in debt service this year.” [Africa Focus
Bulletin]
This quote from African Focus Bulletin of
February 8, 2004 presents the grimiest picture
of the condition prevailing in the Continent of Africa about which the
G8 nations have agreed yesterday “to write off $40 billion debt owed by 18
mainly African countries, ahead of the
G8 summit” going to be held at
Gleneagles, Scotland in July 2005. “This would save these countries nearly $ 1.5
billion [a drop in the bucket] in debt repayment. It is “considered” as a drive
to free Africa from hunger and disease”.
The debt crisis in Africa can well be understood from
the following statistics that I am quoting from the same source referred above:
- Today Africa’s
external debt stands at $333 billion. African nations pay $1.51 in debt
service for every $1 received in aid.
- African nations have
paid their debt three times over in the past ten years alone, yet African
nations are three times as indebted as they were ten years ago.
- All African countries
are paying more on debt service than on health care for their people,
regardless of initial and insufficient debt relief. The average spending
per person on debt service is $14 per person while the average spending on
health is less than $5 per person.
- If governments invest in
human development rather than debt payments, an estimated three million
children would live beyond their fifth birthday and a million cases of
malnutrition would be avoided.
How much debt was supposed to be canceled, I quote the same source to
enlighten our readers that in comparison to what it was incumbent upon the rich
nations to day what they have done is simply a “peanut” and they are hiding
their faces behind propaganda stunt that they are very “mindful” of the
conditions of the poor. They are covering their treacherous game of
exploitation of the past, present and the future through the process of
Globalization and the so-called open Market Policies:
- At the G7 summit in Cologne,
G7 leaders committed themselves to canceling $100 billion of the debts of
the 42 poor countries included within HIPC. Of this total, $50 billion was
to be provided through the HIPC initiative itself; $30 billion from
traditional debt relief such as that provided through the Paris Club; and
$20 billion from cancellation of aid debts by bilateral creditor
countries.
- *According to the
initial schedule, 19 out of the 38 countries deemed to need debt relief
under the HIPC initiative should have received initial debt relief by the
end of 2002. Total debt relief for these countries, and traditional relief
for other countries, should by now have amounted to $68 billion [against
40 billion that they have now earmarked in 2005]
I have no
choice but to quote exhaustively from these sources to put the correct picture
as what the rich nations were supposed to do in mitigating the loan burden of
the poor nations of Africa and elsewhere in the world in comparison to what they are
doing or have done so far. Every day the News Bulletin of BBC, CNN and other
New agencies around the world are loaded with the grave inhuman condition of
African people from Sudan, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Central Sahara region, Somalia and
many more, creating a lot of hue and cry that they are starving, no drinking
water, no food, no medicine, no shelter, dying in thousands daily with hunger,
disease and HIV epidemics. This presentation on their own accord should have
been sufficient to convince them to write-off the entire debt of each and every
African country. Not only that, they should further provide them with funds, grants
and financial support on massive scale, enabling each of them to provide at
least the basic needs to the suffering
humanity whose awful picture they never tired of depicting every now and then.
The G8, the sum
total of old colonial countries, have robbed the poor countries of Asia,
Africa, Central and Latin America two ways during the days of colonization by
plundering their raw material at cheapest price and then dumping these poor
countries of their finished products at the most exorbitant prices. Thus,
“looting” them in two ways, they left them and their skeleton bodies
overburdened with loan at a very high rate of interest, living them to live and
die constantly with beggar’s bowl with no blood in their cheeks and no money to
pay even their Debt Servicing charges on the accumulated loans that now amounts
to more than 300 Billion dollars. The rich have reached the stage of
”over-capitalization” while rendering the poor with only empty handed bowl.
Globalization, Open Market economy and control through WTO and IMF are just to
perpetuate that one-sided flow.
Now the rich
nations of the world know that the poor countries of the world cannot pay any
more. No blood is left in their skeleton frame. They are just brook. They are
throwing some “pieces” of dry bread in their bowl to make them stand on their
trembling feet making them easy to fall
back in their “hunting” net of Globalization and get them entrapped in
their open market plan for plundering them again in different names and games. Germany and Japan are still not willing to give up their loans though both
are aspiring to be permanent members of the SC.
Under this miserable condition,
world economy is bound to collapse one day with a great thud. It is inching
towards that catastrophe and no amount of “patching” device can save it from
collapse. It is all a fraudulent game of tyranny, the game of exploitation of
the poor and of have-nots by the haves. It cannot survive long. The Creator and
Sustainer of this cosmos abhors it. So it is bound to collapse one day. Only a
magnanimous attitude of the rich for the poor and sharing their past booties
with the poor and have-nots can redeem its future.
Shamim A Siddiqi
Dated: June 13,
2005