Global Policy Forum

Britain's announcement last week that it would write off the bilateral debt owed it by a number of poor countries is welcome news for East Africa, Bolivia, Mauritania and other countries that come under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Earlier, in April 1998, Uganda benefited from the HIPC in the form of debt relief to the tune of $338 million. Even under that initiative, Uganda was an early qualifier as one of the first countries to fulfill the criteria for debt relief.

Number crunchers were still busy at the weekend tallying up how much East Africa owed the UK. Whatever the final figure, Britain deserves a pat on the back, considering that the Royal Exchequer will have to absorb in Pounds a 640 million loss over the next 20 years as a consequence of the debt relief. There is no debate over the moral imperative for debt relief. As Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, rightly pointed out, it is time other rich countries, especially members of the G8, followed suit.

The World Bank and the IMF would also do well to release some of their $2.1 billion in profits to fund debt relief, Mr. Brown argued.

But while the arguments for debt relief are unimpeachable, a little caution is in order, if only to ensure that this relief, like a good deal of development aid itself, does not end up as numbers in the books with no tangible benefits realised on the ground. Uganda's Secretary to the Treasury, Emmanuel Mutebile, has already promised that the relief will go towards primary education, access to clean water, better sanitation, and to reduce by half the number of people living under the poverty line.

These are laudable sentiments, but are they any different from the unfulfilled pledges other African regimes have made over the past three decades of independence?

It might prove more productive if our "benefactors" first dealt with the forces that have made, for instance, Uganda into a country where 54 per cent of the population have no access to safe water, 52 per cent no access to primary health care services and 43 per cent of children under five are underweight. There is unfortunately very good reason to believe that with or without debt relief, the social and material condition of the poor and the voiceless, in whose name this relief is granted, will remain exactly the same.

If economic growth and debt relief are not to remain only phrases bandied about between donors and beneficiary governments, something has to be done about bureaucratic corruption. After all, the economic burden which corruption imposes on an economy is the aggregate of the costs of each form of corruption. As the donors themselves have pointed it out, it will be difficult to sustain growth in countries where this growth appears to have facilitate systemic corruption. This unhealthy co-existence of vice and virtue must eventually undermine all positive social goals.

So, unless a deliberate push for open and clean government is tied to these debt relief initiatives, the benefits will as usual go to a privileged few while the underprivileged many continue to wallow in abject poverty.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.