Sunday, July 03, 2005

Control or empowerment

Gordon Brown reminds us that Live 8 and the G8 summit won't solve Africa's problems on their own:
"It is not a week's work at the G8 that is going to determine the long-term future of Africa or the developing countries...It is a lifetime's work where we empower the people of Africa and the developing countries to make decisions for themselves."

And what strategy has done nothing but fail in the past?
"For about 30 years, the strategy of the richest countries, that is us, was that if we had strong, sometimes autocratic, leaders in Africa then that might be the best way of getting the modernization necessary...That has led to Zimbabwe and (President Robert) Mugabe and all the problems we have got with people who ignore the wishes of their people."

Absolutely right. While some commentators would rather blame the victims in order to avoid our having to do anything now, we shouldn't forget that it was first-world-backed dictators who ran up huge debts in the first place. Forgiving those debts now is the least we should be doing to try to genuinely empower Third World citizens.

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