With the global music extravaganza that is Live 8 just around the corner, Gerald Caplan is nervous about the crocodile tears shed for Africa by leaders like Tony Blair. Caplan writes that the job of Bono, Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. “Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time,” writes Caplan.

Everybody must be aware by now of the Bob Geldof Live 8 spectacular coming at us next week. The media has been abuzz with burning questions about where the concert will be held and who'll be performing, with a sentence occasionally thrown in about saving poor old Africa or ending poverty. This is a serious problem.

Getting it wrong about Africa is a venerable tradition in the rich world, and music has played its role. Remember the great famine concerts of 20 years ago and the giant hit "Do They Know It's Christmas?" It's just been re-recorded, with its inane lyrics of Africa as a land "underneath a burning sun…where nothing ever grows" and "no rain nor river flows". Get it? Natural causes---bad luck—are at the root of Africa's problems.

Television does its share. Who among us haven't seen inspiring stories about young Canadians who decide to raise pennies for a well or school in Africa? These efforts are invariably motivated by the best of intentions. But I'm concerned with their unintended message. I fear they reinforce wrong-headed stereotypes of both Africa and us. To my eye, they show Africans as helpless, dependent, passive victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate, resourceful missionaries.

Now Paul Wolfowitz's has added his explanation for Africa's plight. Moving swiftly from being a maven about Iraq to becoming an authority on Africa's 53 countries, the new head of the World Bank has just completed a whirlwind learning tour of the continent—6 days, 4 countries. The problem in Africa, he announced at the end, is simple: "corruption". Right. If only Africa's leaders were more like our own.

These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world blameless for Africa's multitude of problems. I greatly fear that Live 8 is inadvertently strengthening the notion that we in the rich world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves. The truth is already being lost-- the deep, comprehensive responsibility of western nations and western financial institutions for so much of Africa's continuing underdevelopment and poverty. The real reason the rich world should be racing to deal with African poverty is the central role we have played in causing and perpetuating it. Has anyone told Paul Wolfowitz that vastly more money pours out of Africa each year back to rich countries than flows in? That's the key to Africa's development crisis, and it's almost entirely unrecognized.

The responsibility of the rich world takes many forms. It includes the indispensable support given over the decades to countless African tyrants and to white racists. It includes the demonstrably retrograde free market policies imposed on virtually every Africa government by ideological extremists at the World Bank and International monetary Fund (also known by African pediatricians as the Infant Mortality Fund) and backed by almost all western governments, including Canada. Across west Africa, it's cheaper to buy a subsidized frozen chicken imported from Holland that to buy one from a local producer. Foreign aid is always tied to buying goods and services in the rich country or to sending consultants to Africa to make more in a day than the vast majority of Africans do in a year. Rich countries drain off a huge percentage of the professionals—doctors and nurses, especially—who are trained in African universities. Western corporations plunder Africa's natural resources, pay starvation wages and almost no local taxes, bribe anyone in charge—corruption!--pollute hideously, and leave conflict and human rights abuses in their wake. Western donors demand that user fees be imposed on health services and tuition fees on schooling. They demand that public services be slashed so that health and school systems deteriorate. The US government and fundamentalist western religious groups introduce unrealistic and irrelevant moral dogmas to combat AIDS and undermine evidence-based methods of prevention

Anyone who doesn't distrust the Group of 8 leaders who'll be meeting next month hasn't been paying attention. They're the ones responsible for the economic apartheid that characterizes rich-poor country relations today. Every one of them has failed to live up to repeated pledges about aid, debt relief and agricultural subsidies, solemnly made and blithely ignored. The recent ballyhoo about debt relief for 14 African countries was wildly overblown; it was no more than a modest first step. The more leaders like Tony Blair and Paul Martin shed crocodile tears talk about their moral crusade for Africa, the more liberal imperialist rhetoric they spin, the more nervous we should be. The job of Bono and Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or do-gooders. Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have inflicted on them for such a long, long time.

* Gerald Caplan works with various UN agencies on African development issues.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

I first met Barbara Harrell-Bond in the early 1980s. I was a researcher who knew something about human rights, but very little about refugees (the two topics of this book). And I was working with Ugandan refugees in Kenya, the two countries studied in detail here.

So, I did not know, for example, that officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees were not meant to be part of the status determination procedure in Kenya – rather they should be acting as advocates for refugees. My ignorance was perhaps excusable, since no one at UNHCR knew either. On the evidence of this book, things are just as bad 20 years on. And the status determination procedure is just the start of it.

Barbara dealt with my large areas of ignorance thoroughly and pretty impatiently, which is what she is like. In this book, however, the entire establishment of the refugee industry gets the treatment.

Faced with the task of reviewing a book as good as this one, the contrarian immediately goes in search of what is wrong with it. Actually the main thing wrong is fairly quickly apparent: the Foreword by Albie Sachs.

Justice Sachs seems to have misunderstood an important part of what the book has to say. The problem, he says, is that “Refugee law is glacially trapped in its 1950 format when its main focus was on enabling people to flee from persecution and then simply to survive.” Not only is that quite incorrect. It is almost the precise opposite of the conclusion that Verdirame and Harrell-Bond reach. They note that the scope of rights enjoyed by refugees under international law is fairly extensive – certainly far greater than is generally believed. The problem, documented in forensic detail in this book, is that these rights are widely ignored – by governments, non-governmental organisations and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the international agency with primary responsibility for refugee protection. The word ignore can perhaps be used in both its senses. Refugee rights are systematically disregarded. But they are also too little known and understood (including apparently by South African Constitutional Court judges).

Sachs goes on to a rather extraordinary attack on the book that he is prefacing:

“Do I think the book is narrowly focused and too harsh on those that it criticises? I do. Do I think that this work pays insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees? I do.”

He then proceeds to recommend the book in these terms:

“One hopes that those who feel that their work has been treated with unnecessary harshness will read and study this book with an appreciation of the importance of dialogue over the issues that it raises.”

Personally, I don’t give a damn for the sensibilities of those criticised in this book. And I hope it gives them many sleepless nights.

So why bother with taking issue with a Foreword? First, for the minor reason that some people may pick up the book and judge it by what is written in the first few pages. But secondly, and more importantly, because in Sachs’s comments one can anticipate the response of the refugee industry to this book.

Is the book “narrowly focused”? The core of ‘Rights in Exile’ consists of two case studies of the treatment of refugees in Africa: Uganda and Kenya. The whole range of refugee rights are studied in those two countries, from rights on entry and through the status determination procedure, to civil and political rights, to economic, social and cultural rights. The authors describe it (rightly to the best of my knowledge) as the first academic work to look at this issue in depth. Of course, they might have chosen countries where the problems were less acute, but what they have succeeded in establishing is that their criticisms of the international refugee regime are not broad generalisations but can be precisely documented.

This is probably a matter of “damned if you do and damned if you don’t”. Had they chosen to carry out case studies of more countries in less detail, they would have been accused of lacking academic rigour. As it happens, ten years ago I was involved in just such a non-academic study of African refugees’ rights on behalf of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. (The study receives a positive mention from Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, so here I must declare my interest.) We visited seven countries: Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Sudan and Zimbabwe. With some local variation our findings, though less well substantiated than those of Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, coincided precisely with theirs. Their work has a close focus, but not a narrow one.

Do they pay “insufficient attention to the dialectic of international responsibility for refugees”? This is a curious criticism, since the entire book is about precisely this question. The authors certainly interpret this “dialectic of international responsibility” in a way that is inconvenient and unacceptable to those who wield power over refugees. Such people do not, for the most part, really care for Barbara Harrell-Bond. For the past quarter century or so, working always from the perspective of the refugees themselves, she has described, analysed and theorised on the reality of refugees’ experience and on the real meaning of the measures ostensibly put in place to help them.

In her 1986 book ‘Imposing Aid’ she showed clearly how refugee camps are designed to facilitate the delivery of assistance – to the benefit of the donors, not the recipients. She, and scholars of many disciplines at the Refugee Studies Centre that she founded in Oxford, have scrupulously researched a variety of inconvenient truths. That external assistance often undermines refugees’ own coping strategies. That refugees are the best protectors of their own physical environment, not a threat to it. That integration, not repatriation, is usually the most effective long-term solution for refugees.

This book has a similar disregard for orthodoxies and sacred cows. It is harsh, for example, on the role of many NGOs in delivering assistance – and failing to protect the rights of refugees. The fashionable and poorly reasoned “civil society” orthodoxy is speared almost in passing with an elegant reference to Gramsci.

More obviously, the UNHCR’s reinterpretation of its own mandate – away from refugee protection, towards ”humanitarian assistance” – is exposed as a betrayal of the whole purpose of the international refugee regime.

This regime of refugee protection was always envisaged as part of the international human rights system. This book explains how that link has been broken and sets an agenda for re-establishing it. It would be a mistake to see Rights in Exile as some sort of wacky, left-field contribution to a “dialogue” about refugees. This book sets the terms of the debate.

* Please send comments to

In the context of World Refugee Day on June 20 and African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on July 02, Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie from the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), suggests that helping the West to wean itself of African aid would be “a great leap forward for humanity”.

In Western media coverage African (and other) refugees and asylum seekers are frequently vilified as illegal aliens, as leeches sucking all the good out of a generous but gullible West taken for a ride by menacing schemers. Similarly, recent media coverage about Africa has created the distinct impression that Africa is a helpless burden, totally dependent on generous Western aid, constantly needy, lacking in its own agency. And yet the reality is quite the opposite. To understand this, you need to see the story the media never tells.

The bulk of aid to reach ordinary Africans comes from Africans themselves in the form of self-help. Moreover, Africa is in fact a big aid donor to the West. To the extent that Africa is dependent upon aid, the vast majority of the “aid” that actually reaches ordinary Africans and communities comes from Africans themselves – those people living in the diaspora who regularly send money, called remittances, home. Monies that flow in to Africa via a combination of formal and informal channels amounts to roughly $200 billion a year, according to World Bank estimates. Although this figure exceeds both official aid and foreign investment for the continent you will not hear the media talk about Africans being their own biggest aid donors and investors.

Africa’s aid to Britain

But the media’s oversight does not stop there. Africa is also a huge aid donor to the West. Taking Ghana as a case study, researchers for Save the Children Fund, a UK-based charity, estimated that between 1999 and 2004, the total number of doctors registered in the UK and trained in Ghana, doubled from 143 to 293. By 2003/4 an estimated cumulative total of 1021 Ghanaian nurses had registered in the UK. The researchers estimate that Ghana has foregone around £35 million of its training investment in health professionals. In comparison, the UK has saved £65 million in training costs by recruiting Ghanaian doctors since 1998. For all of Africa this subsidy amounts to billions of dollars a year.

However, Africa’s giving does not stop there. Africa sells its commodities at give-away prices because rich countries skew their markets through tariffs and subsidies to ensure that little value can be added to raw products at source in Africa. Other subsidies enable American cotton farmers or European beef farmers to dump their products at artificially low prices on African markets, meaning that it is Africa that is keeping Western farmers in business. Yet more aid from Africa comes in the form of capital flight sent to Swiss and other bank accounts by corrupt officials and of course investors who lack confidence in the stability and profitability of African economies.

African Aid Conditionality Summit

Helping the West wean itself off African aid would in fact be a great leap forward for humanity. What a pity, though, that Africa does not impose its own conditionality upon its aid recipients. Instead, African leaders, civil society activists and others are inadvertently complicit in perpetuating the myth that 2005 is a make-or-break year for Africa and that the G8 summit is terribly important or worth a lot of our energy.

Neither is true. Indeed, even more significant than the G8 summit would be a summit among Africans in Africa and the diaspora to decide how to maximize the impact of the aid that flows from Africa and how to maximize the impact of the aid and investment that flows into Africa.

Here is a win-win-win proposal to achieve the former, given that this is Refugee Week. This is a win for African refugees, a win for Africa and a win for the Western societies where so many refugees find themselves today.

In addition to having the right to safe haven when fleeing persecution in their countries of origin, numerous African refugees and asylum seekers (and, of course, people from other parts of the world) actually arrive in the West with valuable skills and experience. Skills and experience that could further help prop up Britain’s ailing National Health Service or NHS, already heavily dependent upon nurses and doctors from Africa.

And yet, far too many such skilled and experienced refugees and asylum-seekers find themselves languishing on the margins of UK society blocked from active paid employment by a combination of regulatory impediments, institutionally racist attitudes and lack of job-preparedness among potential applicants.

Refugee fighting fund – “Live8419”

We need a fighting fund to enable refugee and asylum groups to tackle these numerous obstacles themselves, whether it’s a question of more and better training or lobbying for changes in the law.

The benefits to refugees and asylum-seekers are obvious – the opportunity to regain a sense of self-confidence, hope and dignity rather than be the focus of constant, vicious media hostility; the opportunity to invest in their own personal development; the opportunity to better support loved ones and friends back home; the opportunity, one day, to deploy enhanced skills back in Africa, where they are so desperately needed.

African governments will win because they will have a better chance of retaining talent at home. Of course, African governments and other employers will have to make far more effort to create the sort of environment that will encourage workers to stay in Africa. Otherwise, they will continue to vote with their feet.

The win for the Western societies in which refugees and asylum-seekers will work are also obvious.

Efforts to create this win-win-win scenario are already underway but we need to do more. This is why as part of its annual African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on Saturday 2 July this year the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) has called on African performers to take to what it has called the “Live8419” stage in London to help raise some money to support this effort.

Of course, under normal circumstances we provide this aid directly to the British government. However, the absence of good governance gives us cause for concern. Amnesty International has recently questioned the legality of the detention of asylum-seekers in Britain. Similarly, the British government is implicated in the scandal of the US-controlled illegal detention camp at Guantanimo Bay in Cuba. In light of these concerns, we shall channel our aid via refugee and asylum-seeker led organisations.

With leading African artists relegated to performing in a village somewhere in Cornwall on 2 July we thought it important – some 11 years after apartheid was finally defeated – for African performers to have a presence in London on that day. The excitement will not stop there as African performers at Live8419 will for the first time ever perform the hit song, “Do they know it’s summertime?” written by AFFORD to raise more African aid for Britain. This world exclusive will undoubtedly set the media world alight.

Enterprise Africa! - ad3 2005

And here is a proposal to help Africans maximize the impact of the support they already provide to counterparts back home in Africa. A 2004 BBC survey of the views of 7,500 Africans living in the urban areas of 10 African countries gave a clear picture of their major concerns. Some 20% of respondents identified securing a well-paid job as their main concern. Two out of three respondents said making money is a priority for them. Far from being an example of avarice or greed, this desire to make money focuses attention upon African peoples’ aspirations to make something of their lives and to enjoy basic economic security.

With a job and reasonable economic security more Africans will take care of their own basic needs of health, education, housing, food, clothing, leisure, etc. More people in productive employment, most likely through small and medium sized enterprises would dramatically reduce dependency on an increasingly bloated and self-serving aid industry. An aid industry that will swell further if official aid to Africa was indeed doubled.

That is why AFFORD’s annual ad3 in 2005 will focus on enterprise in Africa - mobilizing African diaspora resources to help create and sustain enterprises, jobs and wealth in Africa. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Wangari Maathai, will be on hand to provide the keynote address and share her experience of working with grassroots women and communities to plant over 30 million trees and in the process provide people relegated to the margins of society with increased economic security, dignity, hope and self-confidence.

Self-determination, self-help, self-reliance, self-respect, and self-confidence will be our watchwords on 2 July and beyond. Every African in the diaspora needs to take personal responsibility to invest and help create and sustain just one entrepreneur or job, not through charity but through social enterprise. In less than the 30 years it has taken Professor Maathai’s Green Belt Movement to plant 30 million trees we shall have the equivalent self-sustaining tree of hope, dignity, fulfilling and rewarding human existence in Africa.

* Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie works for the London-based African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), organizers of the annual African Diaspora & Development Day (see www.afford-uk.org) on 2 July at The Rocket, London Metropolitan University

* Please send comments to [email protected]

It is good to clamour for debt forgiveness but it is also important that we begin to think and discuss the dividends of such action.

This is because the suffering of Africans is not directly linked or connected to the debt but the consuming greed in our leaders who are now recycling themselves and making governance a family affair or dynasty.

Post-debt forgiveness experiences should also be given importance. What is the essence if afterall, there is no difference in the lives of our people?

Ethiopia's main opposition coalition has reacted angrily to the dropping of more than half of the investigations into alleged election fraud. The Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) says that most of its complaints have been dropped, while those of the ruling party have been retained. Final results from May's poll have not been released while the allegations are being investigated.

Togo's ruler Faure Gnassingbé has announced the country's new government, which includes his own brother, hardliners from his father's military dictatorship and a few detractors from the opposition. International calls to form a national unity government after the 24 April rigged elections thus have finally failed.

The government of Burundi has welcomed the UN Security Council's adoption of a resolution to create a mixed truth commission and a special court to prosecute war crimes and human rights violations committed during decades of civil war in the country, Justice Minister Didace Kiganahe said on Tuesday. He attended a special briefing on 15 June in New York, the UN headquarters, on the preparation of resolution 1606, which the Council adopted on Monday.

18 countries around the world have held high-profile 'send-off' events to launch their 'friends' on their journey to take young people's demands to Scotland or combine their GCAP plans with messages from the Send My Friend to School campaign. Campaigners hope the events around the world will attract further media attention and mobilise public opinion in favour of increased G8 aid commitments and debt cancellation, with a particular emphasis on our collective responsibility to make sure every girl and boy in the world can go to school. For further information, please see: http://www.campaignforeducation.org/

To mark Day of the African Child, African GCAP campaigners launched a major publicity campaign under the slogan Thumbs Down 2 Poverty. At press conferences in Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Accra, GCAP coalitions launched Africa Snaps - a series of television adverts featuring Africa's top celebrities including Senegalese musician Youssour N'dour. 20 million people are expected to tune into the "snap ads" in 15 African countries. 16th June, traditionally the date when Africa remembers the brutal massacre of school children under South African apartheid, will also mark the launch of the Say No 2 Poverty SMS mobile phone campaign in several African countries. Messages sent by Africans will be presented to African leaders at the African Union Ministerial Summit in Tripoli, Libya and to G8 leaders in Gleneagles.

Women’s Legal Aid Centre, (WLAC) on behalf of the Southern Africa Non Governmental Organizations Network (SAHRINGON) Tanzania Chapter has organized a two days Tanzania Social Watch Country Forum to be held from 1st to 2nd July 2005 at the Karimjee Hall to contribute and support the Global Campaign on the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP).

The Council for Economic Empowerment of Women (CEEWA) in collaboration with Uganda National NGO Forum on behalf of the GCAP coalition in Uganda organized civil society events for the first GCAP White Band Day, Day of the African Child in Uganda. Over 500 children from within the city and from the internally displaced camps in the war affected districts of Northern and parts of Eastern Uganda were mobilized and gathered at the Centenary Park in the Kampala city to participate in the events and the street march.

G8 Leaders know nothing about Life
They live in a bubble created by their wealth
Come to Africa and learn of life to struggle before
the sun is up
To feel like life is not worth living
Poverty is the basis of the African struggle
When poverty is gone, Africa will become what it
should be
The world's greatest continent.

- Poem by Sena Anyomedie, 9 year old pupil from Christ
The King School, Accra at the launch of Africa Snaps
and SMS Campaign launch.

A group of national and international development organizations celebrated the Day of the African Child last week and renewed a call to the Government of Tanzania and international donors to focus on improving the quality of education by ensuring all primary schools have enough classrooms, textbooks, desks and toilets to meet student demands as well as supporting in-service teacher training.

A former top Zambian official has been arrested and charged with corruption, following a public outcry when the case against him was dropped. Kashiba Bulaya is accused of receiving a bribe of $270,000 to award a contract to supply anti-Aids drugs. The BBC's Musonda Chibamba says the original investigation was dropped on government orders, sparking protests from church groups and donors.

Debt campaigners need to be very clear about what the recent debt deal actually represents and its serious limitations, says a briefing paper from Eurodad. "There is broad agreement among civil society organisations that the deal doesn't go nearly as far as the overblown rhetoric which accompanied its release. And that it has some worrying strings attached."

For the last few years the Ghanaian market has been flooded with cheap imported chicken from the European Union and the United States. The demand for local poultry has collapsed, threatening the livelihoods of over 400,000 poultry farmers in the small West African nation, reports CorpWatch.

"The SA People's Solidarity Network joins other voices in responding to the announcement by the G8 to cancel debts for some of the developing countries…The so called debt cancellations for these countries will lead to further accumulation of more debts in that these countries still have to toe the line and respond to the demands to open up their economies for more exploitation and capital flights and other related imbalances that come up with further liberalization."

The story of West Africa’s transition from colonial to accountable government, as in many other parts of the world, has been long, slow, fraught, and bloody. Far from nearing completion, it is still work in progress. The course of this transition has been characterized by several unconstitutional changes in government, political assassinations and other forms of extra-judicial executions, forced displacement of communities and vast settlements, many rigged elections, large scale corruption, and many wars.

Former deputy president Jacob Zuma will be prosecuted on two counts of corruption, the National Prosecuting Authority said in Pretoria on Monday. Zuma was sacked last week following the ruling by Durban High Court judge Hilary Squires, who found that he had a "generally corrupt" relationship with his friend Schabir Shaik, who acted as his financial advisor. "This afternoon advocate [Vusi] Pikoli informed deputy president [Jacob] Zuma that he has decided to bring criminal charges against his person. Such charges will be constituted by, among others, two counts of corruption," spokesperson Makhosini Nkosi said on Monday.

Starting your own company is expensive in any country but Nigerian businessman Chidi-Martins Opara faced a hidden extra cost: the payment of bribes. The first hurdle was registering his small cleaning and pest control company. The official fee was less than 10,000 naira ($75), but Opara says he paid four times that amount in bribes. "You have to give money to the big officials so your papers will move faster. Otherwise your file gets 'lost'," he says.