Really wicked solutions needed to beat Bush

Really wicked solutions needed to beat Bush

Far from being the most positive US president towards Africa in 40 years, as Bob Geldof maintains, the incumbent of the White House is the biggest impediment to a fair deal for the world’s most impoverished nations

By Muriel Gray

06/08/05 'SH' - - Reading the variety of people and organisations already signed up to the campaigning group Make Poverty History is like taking a warm bath. The moving revelation that almost everyone is there – from Jesuits to Marxists, from Muslim groups to special needs charities, from humanists, Baptists, Sikhs to school students and anti-nuclear campaigners – imbues one with an overwhelming sense of wellbeing that this at last is one issue on which absolutely everyone can agree. Down with poverty! Yeah!

If this is the case, and we assume that it applies to world leaders as well as the sea of humanity willing to stand up and be counted, then the problems ahead are simply ones of persuasion, to change methods and apply sensible strategies to clear up the complex political mess still killing African children on a biblical scale. Not a simple or easy task admittedly, but hey, we’re all in this together, remember, in the sure and certain knowledge that everyone wants poverty to end. Who on Earth wouldn’t? The fact that it is still with us is just because we haven’t quite worked out exactly how to eradicate it yet

. But what if that isn’t true? What if poverty in some of the worst affected areas of the globe is not simply the result of mismanagement, incompetence, corruption, and indifference? What if it’s the result of deliberate economic engineering?

A terrible thing to contemplate indeed, since no amount of public protest, like the impending Live 8 rally in Edinburgh, could possibly have an effect if the people responsible were not only devoid of shame for the plight of the poor, but were actually rather pleased with themselves"

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