Posted on 06/29/2002 7:01:03 AM PDT by yankeedame
Friday, 28 June, 2002, 06:57 GMT 07:57 UK
Africa demands swift G8 action
African leaders accepted the G8 response
African leaders have welcomed an action plan promising aid, debt relief, medical help and military intervention from the world's richest nations to the poorest.
They're offering peanuts to Africa - and repackaged peanuts at that
Phil Twyford of Oxfam South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is attending the summit, described the plan as a "very, very good beginning", but said speed was needed to implement the decisions taken.
In sharp contrast, aid agencies denounced the summit as long on advice and short on help.
The leaders of the G8 nations signed an agreement with four African heads of state on Thursday to promote economic and political development which they said would herald a new dawn.
'Genuine partnership'
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair declared the G8 plan - developed in response to an African initiative called the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) - was "not old-fashioned aid... [but] a genuine partnership for the renewal of Africa".
We need, all of us, to move with speed to implement these decisions that have been taken.
Thabo Mbeki
Mr Mbeki told the BBC the level of engagement between the G8 and Africa was unprecedented.
"There's never been an engagement of this kind before," he said. "Not between Africa and G8, where we would sit together with them having agreed to the priorities that we have decided as African countries."
Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo who helped to create the Nepad initiative which promises reform in return for aid, trade and help in resolving conflicts, was more sanguine, though he said he was satisfied.
"Of course, there is nothing that is human that can be regarded as perfect," he said.
Phil Twyford, Oxfam's international advocacy director, was blunt: "They're offering peanuts to Africa - and repackaged peanuts at that.
"The thing that is most disappointing is that the leaders have spent the last year talking up this event as the moment they were going to deliver for Africa."
An unequal world
The G8 Africa Action Plan promises benefits for African countries "whose performance reflects the Nepad commitments".
The plan's main points are:
--An agreement to develop a peacekeeping force in Africa.
--A promise to get rid of polio in Africa by 2005.
--A commitment to improve global market access for African exports by tackling trade barriers and farm subsidies by 2005.
--An offer to work towards spending half or more of the G8's annual new development aid - about $6bn - on African nations that govern justly.
On the first day of the summit, G8 leaders agreed to increase debt relief for poorest countries by $1bn, hoping the money "saved" could be spent on health and education.
'Hot air'
However, aid agencies said the relief programme would barely make up for the fall in commodity prices such as coffee and cotton on which many developing nations' economies are reliant.
Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director of the Washington-based 50 Years is Enough debt-relief organisation said: "There's nothing new here."
James Orbinski, a former president of the medical relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres, was also disappointed that only $580m had been promised towards a $10bn UN fund to treat and prevent Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.
"The global fund is starting to very much look like a wrinkled party balloon that didn't quite get off the ground," he said.
"The $580m or 5% [of the plan] is quite disappointing hot air."
Maybe they are going to resettle our farms.. I mean, we are the white devils.
Welfare, government employment, affirmative action, foreign aid, bogus Jesse Jackson "settlements" with corporations over bogus "bias claims", etc. These are the very substance of the economic face of african culture.
Forgive existing debts, hand over new money, accept their insults, ignore the hideous wrongs done to non-black farmers in Zimbabwe; and HOPE that something will be spent on education and health.
So here's my deal:
Pay off my mortgage, hand over about a million and a half (no taxes please), seal the police records, and I promise to go right back to school as soon as I've broken in the Harley.
Takers?
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