Cleaning up the mess in Africa

From The Washington Post:

LAST WEEK President Bush hosted a White House summit on malaria. "We know exactly what it takes to treat and prevent the disease," Mr. Bush said, referring to insecticide-treated bed nets and other simple measures. "The only question is whether we have the will to act." The day before the malaria summit, the question of will was raised again by the announcement of an AIDS breakthrough. According to clinical trials conducted in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, male circumcision can cut the chances of HIV infection by perhaps 60 percent; on one estimate, making circumcision widely available could avert 3 million deaths over 20 years in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is whether health systems in poor countries will be boosted so that circumcision is an option for those who want it.

I'll add a couple of things. Tens of thousands of children die from dysentery because the disease dehydrates them. The body loses its electrolytes causing the heart to become unable to function properly and the child dies. Oral re-hydration salts could save them, or at least the overwhelming majority of them. What are oral re-hydration salts you ask. They are small packets of the minerals which the body needs. Add them to water, stir and what you have is in essence Gatorade. Give this to the child with dysentery and his electrolyte balance is maintained until the disease passes through his body and he lives.

The packet of oral re-hydration salts costs pennies.

You might ask why, since the things are so cheap, are the packets of oral re-hydration salts not ubiquitous in Africa. This is, after all, the kind of thing that the US and the EU and the UN can (or should) agree on. This is even one of the few things that the Islamic world doesn't call blasphemous and fly into a murderous rage over.

Basically the problem is a failure of the local governments to rise above tribalism. The borders of most African nations were drawn by European colonial powers without regard to the tribal makeup of the territories they were creating. To make things worse the Europeans would often draw their native government administrators, soldiers and police from the minority tribe. This was done on the theory that the minority tribe would be more loyal due to the fact that their place of privilege in the nation was due only to the colonizing power and without them they could face retribution from the majority.

Another way in which this tribalism comes into play is the distribution of food aid. If you take the food grown in Africa and add the food sent into Africa by the various world charities (government and private) there is enough food to feed everyone an adequate diet. However the food is often either siphoned off into the black market with the money from its sale finds its way into some "leader's" Swiss bank account or is held back from the starving because the government considers them to be disloyal.

Another area where millions of lives could be saved is in the reintroduction of the insecticide DDT to control mosquito populations. DDT is one of the safest insecticides to humans and other mammals ever developed. The only thing standing in the way of bringing back DDT is the failure of will in the Western governments to stand up to their domestic environmentalists.

Another area where the lunatic fanaticism of the Greens is costing Third World lives is in their success at banning CFC refrigerants. Many medicines, you see, have to be kept cold or they go bad. Making refrigeration more expensive means that there will be a shortage of that which was already in short supply in the places where it is needed most.

If the European colonial powers had taken a more enlightened approach to the dismantling of their colonial empires a great deal of this could have been avoided. They should have adopted a slow process of withdrawal lasting 100 - 150 years. During the long transition period they could have established a nationwide educational system, a transportation infrastructure and a national electrical grid all of which would have weakened the grip of tribalism and left the African nations ready (or at least more ready) to take on the burdens, responsibilities and rewards of full independence sometime in the first quarter of the 22nd Century.

Also, before the Europeans left they could have also done incalculable good for the people of Africa by eradicating every last trace of Islam from the continent, but that's a another story.