POOR AFRICA! Seldom has debate about the fate of so many been shaped by so few from so far away -- and with so little effect.
Increase aid, tackle health hazards and build model "development villages," argues Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, and Africa can be pulled out of the poverty that makes life hell for six of every 10 of its 650 million people.
Not so, retorts William Easterly, economics professor at New York University. We've tried that and failed. Instead, aid agencies should focus on specific tasks -- such as getting malaria medicine to the sick, clean water to the poor, textbooks to schoolchildren -- coupled with home-grown political and economic reforms.
Yet 50 years after the first of the colonies won independence, Africa's capacity to follow any such advice or to manage its affairs is weaker than ever. Its dependence on foreign "experts" is greater than ever, and the influence of proliferating Western aid agencies is more powerful than ever.
And corruption is endemic. Hardly a country on the continent has enough honest officials who can deliver aid, medicines or schoolbooks without paying or receiving bribes or exploiting the aid for political patronage.
So when World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz put a crackdown on graft at the top of his development agenda, he had his priorities right. Wolfowitz's crusade against corruption is starting to be felt in Asia and South America. In India, the World Bank reportedly held up lending to health clinics because of concerns about possible misuse of funds. In Bangladesh, road contracts have been canceled because of improper bidding. Argentina, under pressure from the bank, has tightened anti-corruption measures. But the crackdown on corruption seems not to have reached Africa, the region that needs it most.
In Kenya, nearly 18 months have passed since John Githongo, the country's former top anti-corruption official, chose to go into exile and expose the details of top-level graft. Yet the response from the World Bank has been mild.
It is hard to believe that the tough Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy Defense secretary and architect of the Iraq war, is shirking a fight. Rather, it suggests that he has learned that what works elsewhere in the world does not necessarily work in Africa. That lesson is a prerequisite to change in Africa, which is undergoing a continental crisis distinct from the rest of the developing world. To grasp the depth of Africa's problems, consider two debilitating symptoms of its loss of confidence in itself: capital flight and the brain drain.
