How enjoyable to read that the Government is to consider cutting aid to Uganda by €2 million in order to encourage "reform" in that unfortunate country, and even more enjoyable to read the remarks by our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern.
"I am very concerned with the ongoing situation in Uganda and I believe that by reducing our direct funding to the administration, in partnership with other countries, it will send a very clear message about political reform," he said.
Ongoing situation? I didn't think anyone used that term any more. No doubt he meant the ongoing situation in the context of the present moment in time. I wonder - has he had a word with Tom Kitt about his plans to cut aid to central government? When two years ago I poured scorn on the way our Government was contributing money to Ugandan state agencies, he replied in the classic manner of professional Third Worlders. My remarks, he sniffed in a letter to this newspaper, were ill-informed, irresponsible and offensive.
That's not an argument, but yet another of those statements of moral superiority which we have come to expect from those who are in the habit of showering other people's money down that black hole we call Africa. Though I grant you, the column which aroused his posturing wrath was indeed irresponsible, if you think it is being responsible to squander money on projects in Africa. And it was certainly offensive if you were Idi Amin, because it referred to his taste for human flesh. But as for ill-informed? Why, certainly I am: anyone who claims to be well-informed about Africa, especially the Congo where Uganda deployed much of its army so bloodily and for so long, is either a fool or a knave.
His letter suggested - let us be kind - that he is the former. He stated as an absolute matter of fact that the Ugandan government had halved absolute poverty in the past ten years, halved the HIV/Aids infection rate, and doubled the numbers of children attending school. How he can be so very certain of such "facts" is something of a mystery; perhaps his declaration about these "facts" was in the same order of intellectual certainty of his final declaration: "Far from cutting aid, we will be continuing with our programme in Uganda and developing it further." Now we hear that, far from Government policy being far from cutting aid, cutting aid to the Ugandan government is precisely what it is going to do. Henceforth, Government money will probably be going to the voluntary sector - which is precisely what I had suggested in the column which the Minister of State for Development Co-operation and Human Rights had denounced as ill-informed, irresponsible and offensive.
John O'Shea of GOAL - who knows marginally more about these things than most people know about their own nose - has repeatedly declared that aid to the Ugandan government should be cut entirely. Moreover, I suspect that official Ugandan statistics for just about everything, including education and the HIV/Aids infection rate, are on a par with the Ugandan project to put a space station on Mars: that is, the product of some very lively imaginations indeed. That is certainly what John O'Shea thinks, notwithstanding Tom Kitt's fatuous epistolary musings nearly two years ago.
Virtually all discussion on this issue has effectively been monopolised by those who are in the business of funnelling money out of the Irish economy into Africa. On the one hand there are the Third World charities, whose existence and jobs depend on the entire process, and on the other, celebrities, such as Bob Geldof or Paul Hewson, aka Bono, who have - in image terms - very profitably incorporated Africa into their public personas. So none of these groups or individuals can be said to be disinterested. This is like a debate over insurance premiums which involves only insurance companies.
Moreover, I surely cannot be the only person who has grown rather tired of hearing Bob Geldof telling us mean f***ers in the f***ing West how f***ing selfish we are towards Africa. Is he capable of discussing the issue calmly and rationally, without bullying and grandstanding and turning the debate into a moral platform in which he must always appear the victor? Because the way things are, no one, no matter how rational and well-informed, would ever dream of taking him on in public; for the only certain reward is a Boomtown rant and personal humiliation.
Project Africa has lasted all my life, but the debate about it has grown no more sophisticated. At least when I saved a black baby, I was rescuing its immortal soul. Nowadays, my euro won't even do that: at best, they might keep the little mite alive for another week or so, or they might pay for - say - the ashtray in the Mercedes Kompressor which the infant's president is buying for his tenth wife. Next week comes wife 11 and a new order for Stuttgart, while the poor child's begging bowl is empty again, and its belly bulging.
Pouring money into corrupt societies is like exposing an already sick person to carcinogens. It does not make the society any richer, only sicker, because it merely spreads the tumours of corruption to even more people. This is the real story of Africa, one which people are afraid to tell - not least because of the self-righteous kicking they will get from those professional - and self-righteous - Third Worlders.