Big Men, Big Corruption

ON July 14, the Financial Times reported that the governments of only two countries in Africa, Botswana and Uganda, had taken up the offer of the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim to provide free supplies to African countries of the drug nevirapine—a single dose of which, taken during labor, prevents the transmission of the HIV virus from mother to baby. This suggests, at the very least, that the concern of African governments for the health and welfare of their populations is something less than obsessive.

Not that this fact can be expected to obtrude too greatly on President Bush’s plans to throw money at AIDS in Africa. As Mrs. Jellyby discovered more than a century and a half ago, there is no better way to acquire a reputation for compassion than by proposing aid for the dark continent: this, despite the fact that such aid has not always brought much in the way of enlightenment—quite the reverse. It was aid to Somalia that provided both the motive and the means for the leaders of tribal factions to keep the war of each against all going for years, until the country had been smashed utterly. It is aid that likewise keeps the war in Sudan going, and it was aid that paid for Nyerere’s forced relocation of three-quarters of the rural population of his country, Tanzania. The result was an economic disaster—to which, of course, the only solution was further aid: much of which, by strange coincidence, found its way into the private accounts of the leaders of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Party of the Revolution, and the rest of which was completely wasted.

About the Author

Anthony Daniels

Mr. Daniels, a retired doctor who worked in several parts of the world, is the author of Mass Listeria, a book about health scares.

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ON July 14, the Financial Times reported that the governments of only two countries in Africa, Botswana and Uganda, had taken up the offer of the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim to provide free supplies to African countries of the drug nevirapine—a single dose of which, taken during labor, prevents the transmission of the HIV virus from mother to baby. This suggests, at the very least, that the concern of African governments for the health and welfare of their populations is something less than obsessive.

Not that this fact can be expected to obtrude too greatly on President Bush’s plans to throw money at AIDS in Africa. As Mrs. Jellyby discovered more than a century and a half ago, there is no better way to acquire a reputation for compassion than by proposing aid for the dark continent: this, despite the fact that such aid has not always brought much in the way of enlightenment—quite the reverse. It was aid to Somalia that provided both the motive and the means for the leaders of tribal factions to keep the war of each against all going for years, until the country had been smashed utterly. It is aid that likewise keeps the war in Sudan going, and it was aid that paid for Nyerere’s forced relocation of three-quarters of the rural population of his country, Tanzania. The result was an economic disaster—to which, of course, the only solution was further aid: much of which, by strange coincidence, found its way into the private accounts of the leaders of the Chama Cha Mapinduzi, the Party of the Revolution, and the rest of which was completely wasted.