The slogans about aid and debt relief are catchy, but for serious change Africa needs more trade, a secure environment, and a real effort to find dictators' hidden cash, writes Paul Cullen
It's heady stuff, all this talk of making poverty history. World salvation, it seems, is only a few slogans away. Drop the debt! Double the aid! Tear down the trade barriers! In this way, we are told, a bright new future of affluence and equality for all is just around the corner - if only those elderly G8 men meeting on a Scottish golf course will play ball.
But are campaigners selling just another miracle-fix for the new century? And are they guilty of oversimplification for propagating the notion that the poverty endured by half the planet can be eliminated by the wave of a few western leaders' wands?
The resort to simple statements is understandable, given the complexities of debt cancellation, aid conditionalities and tariff negotiations. Activists campaigned on these issues for years without success, until they translated their demands into easily understood slogans and enlisted the support of the rock glitterati.
Today they stand at a historic juncture, with the leaders of the rich countries finally poised to take action. In response to the effective campaigning of Bono et al on the poverty issue, the G8 leaders have come up with a debt relief package worth $40 billion. In September, many world leaders will tell a UN summit they plan to double their aid budgets (second time around for Bertie). Ongoing world trade negotiations are likely to lead shortly to a further dismantling of trade barriers.
It should be a moment of celebration, and yet the niggling questions won't go away. How effective is aid? Who benefits from the debt write-offs? Who will win from trade liberalisation? Haven't we been here before?
Few of these questions have been addressed in the effort to build a broad coalition to put pressure on the G8 leaders.
How many campaigners know, for instance, that academic studies are at best sceptical about the benefits of overseas aid? Or that aid programmes, Ireland's included, are not generally monitored and evaluated by independent referees not involved in the aid industry?
Over $500 billion of aid to sub-Saharan Africa over recent decades has not prevented the continent's slide into stagnation. Irish Government Ministers boast that we have the best aid programme in the world, because most of our assistance is "real" aid that actually reaches the poor, but what does that say about other countries' aid efforts?
How many campaigners are aware that debt relief programmes have been ongoing for almost 40 years? Or that the easiest way for a state to get rid of its debt is simply to refuse to pay it? Argentina did this and hasn't noticeably suffered as a result.
"The truth is that much of Africa's debt has been fictional for a long time," William Easterly, economics professor at New York University and a former World Bank official, points out. "When the debtors had difficulty coming up with the repayments, creditors gave new loans, postponed the repayment of old loans, or forgave the old loans altogether."
Further, how many campaigners calling for fair trade are aware that the EU already allows (or is about to) duty-free access to imports from 50 least-developed countries?
As Alan Matthews of TCD's economics department points out, the main tariff barriers affecting the poorest countries are increasingly not those imposed by rich states, but those which prevent them exporting to middle-income developing countries such as China and India, which happen also to have the fastest-growing economies.
The G8 decision to cancel the debts of 18 poor countries has been criticised as too little, too late. Éamonn Meehan of Trócaire observes that it won't wipe out all the debts in some countries; because of the exclusion of some debts, Ethiopia's indebtedness, for example, will drop by just 29 per cent.
But should Ethiopia be qualifying for this writeoff? Or Uganda or Rwanda, two other countries included in the package?
Ethiopia's government spent millions on a pointless civil war with Eritrea that killed 70,000 between 1998 and 2000. Last month, its soldiers killed dozens of unarmed protesters on the streets of Addis Ababa, a fate unlikely to befall their equivalents this week in Edinburgh. Uganda and Rwanda are among seven countries implicated in the civil war in Congo, which has led to millions of deaths.
Due up on the next list of qualifying countries are Sudan and Somalia, hardly paragons of tolerance and democracy.
All of those countries spend multiples of what Ireland devotes to defence, notwithstanding their horrendous poverty.
John O'Shea of Goal believes the debt relief package, while well-intentioned, is "naive and gullible". "Has it occurred to anyone that a country whose debt is relieved might go out and buy arms with the money?"
This is a key point; existing debt relief initiatives have helped some countries in small ways - by, for example, allowing more Tanzanian children attend primary school or by immunising more Mozambicans - but there are insufficient safeguards to prevent governments spending freed-up funds on arms or, indeed, borrowing more money for similar purposes.
Debt isn't necessarily such a bad thing - after all, no one in Ireland these days loses any sleep over our €38 billion national debt. There is a case for saying that the debt burden in some countries is so crippling that relief is necessary. However, this needs to be strictly monitored as well as being tied to the same standards of governance and good behaviour as we would demand closer to home. It isn't clear that such conditions are being attached.
It's the same story with aid. Meehan acknowledges that aid has "a bad name in some quarters" because of the way projects were devised and the money disbursed.
However, he places the blame for this on the fact that the programmes were built around "pet projects" drawn up in headquarters offices in Europe and the US. The result was incoherence, and a large amount of politically-motivated aid, such as the support for Mobutu's dictatorship in the Congo during the Cold War.
The trouble is that the world is full of silver-tongued rulers who will argue persuasively that they are different from their predecessors and will put aid to good use.
In the 1980s, Robert Mugabe was a highly regarded Jesuit-educated guerrilla leader who led Zimbabwe to independence. He was courted by Dr Tony O'Reilly and The Irish Times invited him to address a prestigious colloquium as recently as 1997.
Today he's a corrupt and brutal dictator presiding over the destruction of his country.
It was the same story with Bokassa, Moi, Museveni and many others, all of whom had their admirers until the scales fell from their innocent eyes.
O'Shea remarks: "We're being taken for the biggest ride in history as we get caught up in the excitement of it all. Everyone loves to give out about the banks, but who's prepared to stand up to the tyrants?"
Co-ordination, too, remains a major problem with aid delivery. Dozens of donor states, hundreds and thousands of aid agencies, are often tripping over each other to deliver help in an emergency.
Far more than aid or debt relief, trade has the potential to liberate Africa from poverty. Unfortunately, its share of world trade has been declining in recent decades.
Given the scale of the developing world's problems, doing nothing is not an option. The good news is that there are plenty of imaginative ideas out there. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has made practical proposals for tackling extreme poverty, by spending money on fighting HIV/Aids and malaria, and building infrastructure to encourage trade.
Security is the missing ingredient in the lives of many Africans, so a small arms treaty, the creation of a meaningful UN intervention force and the pursuit of tyrants should form part of any solution put forward by the G8.
Applying the principle of "follow the money", western governments should also pursue their banks in order to retrieve the estimated $80 billion stolen by kleptocrats over recent decades.
Western enterprises operating in Africa should be required to disclose the payments they make, so as to deter bribery, and a firm track should be kept of resources such as diamonds and oil, which are so often used to fund conflict.
Complex problems require complex solutions, much more than a rush to catchy phrases and celebrity endorsement.