McGill Tribune“The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.” -George Kimbel
Five years remain for the United Nations to achieve an ambitious set of goals mapped out 10 years ago.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), ratified in September 2000, aimed to slash the percentage of people living in absolute poverty (under $1 per day) by half, eliminate gender disparity in all levels of education, and completely terminate the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria by 2015.
These are only three of the UN’s 21 targets. But hey, anything’s possible. So please stop rolling your eyes at the UN. Please ignore its embarrassing track record, its inability to put its foot down, and its infinite capacity to disappoint. This time, like always, things are different.
For example, in his recent progress report on the MDGs, economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the United Nations Millennium Project, made the heart-warming announcement that “a great deal has been achieved, with some of the most exciting breakthroughs occurring in Africa.” Sachs went on to disprove this statement by listing reason after reason and failure after failure to the contrary. This is not because he or the UN are not trying hard enough; it is because they set goals that are hard to measure.
Directing our attention to Africa, Sachs listed six reasons why the MDGs may not be achieved by the target date of 2015:
(1) Fewer donations than promised from high-income countries. (2) Human-induced climate change. (3) Rampant population growth. (4) Excessive corruption, mostly engineered by relentless American, Asian, and European companies whose talent for exploitation knows no limits. (5) Foreign traders closing their markets to African agricultural products. (6) Ignorance.
Importantly—as Sachs notes in his work—not a single one of these setbacks to Africa’s prosperity has much to do with Africa itself. For example, human-induced climate change is usually the nasty byproduct of highly industrialized countries. Moreover, efforts at voluntary population control and family planning are severely hindered by the no-birth-control policy of an extremely influential Roman Catholic presence on the continent.
“Attaining these goals on a global scale may seem impossible,” as Sachs wrote in his 2008 book, Common Wealth, but rightly maintains that, “there is nothing inherent in global politics, technology, or the sheer availability of resources on the planet to prevent us from doing so.” So what is preventing us?
We are told that we live in a zero-sum world, where in order for some countries to prosper, others must not. However, the deterioration of African countries is no longer only relative to the prosperity of richer countries. “Many of these countries are not just falling behind,” says economist Robert Collier. “They are falling apart.”
Most economists and activists now agree that the problems within Africa can only be solved by Africans. Overreliance on agencies like the UN not only leads directly to disappointment, but also distracts from the real problems and their accompanying solutions.
Some experts reduce the issue to the language of poker, suggesting that Africa has a bad hand because of its poor location and Flintstones-esque technology. But perhaps it’s this very image of an eroding Africa, painted elaborately by many politicians and “experts,” that has pushed millions of intelligent and hopeful Africans to invest their energies not in developing their own usually resource-rich countries, but rather in escaping from them.
It is unacceptable for our leaders to take Africa no more seriously than a photo opportunity. It is unacceptable for us to stand by and watch our brave brothers and sisters trying desperately to reverse the corruption and violence in their countries without seriously committing ourselves to doing something about it. It is even more unacceptable for us to forget that as humans we all come from Africa, and that it is indeed our common and original home.
