‘My way or the highway’ -Bush
By Milan Vesely
President George W. Bush is proposing US aid cuts to sub-Saharan Africa
in fiscal 2002: $789m as opposed to last year’s $794m. If approved
it will put an end to the steady increases achieved during President Clinton’s
last five years in office. As such it will shrink development funding to
the continent below the level of 10 years ago.
The United States allocates
$15bn of its $3 trillion federal budget to foreign aid. Three nations
- Egypt, Israel and Russia - receive roughly one third of this. A similar
proportion is earmarked for military and police support programs slated
for the developing world.
With Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet
Union now taking centre stage in the fight on terrorism, charges that
development aid to the world’s poorest continent is being ‘cannibalised’
are being raised by former Clinton officials.
“To shore up support for the coalition against the Taliban and Osama
bin Laden, Pakistan, India and Uzbekistan are being allocated moneys previously
earmarked for African development projects,” former Clinton African
policy maker Susan Rice claims.
“Africa is an incubator for the foot soldiers of terrorism,”
Rice wrote in an op-ed piece for a leading Washington paper. “Its
poor, young, disaffected, unhealthy and under-educated populations often
have no stake in government nor faith in the future. They harbour an easily
exploitable discontent with the status quo. For such people, nihilism
is as natural a response to their circumstances as self help.”
Her list of solutions?
“We should open our markets completely to goods and services from
the developing world, provide more trade and investment financing, bridge
the digital divide, bolster democratic institutions, invest more in debt
relief, increase assistance for education, build health infrastructures,
treat the infected and find a vaccine for HIV/Aids. What is actually required
is billions and billions of dollars in additional US aid to the poverty
stricken African continent,” she suggests.
A tall order key republicans in the Bush administration contend.
Read the full
story in the February 2002 edition of African Business Magazine
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