Give aid money to specific projects

CONGRATULATIONS to Steven King on his enlightened article (Irish Examiner, July 19).

He put his finger on the root cause of Africa’s poverty by rightly identifying corruption as the biggest problem facing people in the third world today.

He also highlights that debt relief is not as effective as people think and points out that cancelling debt to corrupt regimes does not automatically bring improvement, or even change, in the fundamental areas of education, health and anti-poverty strategies.

The author gives the example of Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo’s decision to direct $347 million — equal to that nation’s annual education budget and twice its health budget — towards building a 60,000-seater sports stadium, to demonstrate that African countries need good leaders, not debt relief.

Injecting cash at the top level of corrupt regimes, of which there are many, is a waste of time. A culture of political correctness may be partly responsible for the NGO community’s apathy towards corruption, but being politically correct, in this situation, is nonsensical — people’s lives are at stake.

The bottom line is that pumping ever increasing amounts of money into Africa is not the answer. We as an aid agency do not believe that we are the answer, nor do we believe that our money is going to solve the problems of the third world, because we know that for as long as corruption is endemic, we will only ever scratch the surface of the African dilemma.

Aid money must be routed away from corrupt governments and, instead, put directly in at ground level through the support of specific projects run by reputable NGO’s and missionaries. GOAL has consistently argued also for the Irish Government to “adopt” one third world country and implement humanitarian projects in that country. All that is required is inventiveness and moral courage.

John O’Shea

GOAL

PO Box 19

Dun Laoghaire

Co Dublin