(Third in a three part series) — Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had soft spots for the apartheid rulers of South Africa, who were, after all, passionate fellow anti-Communists; it was Bob Woodward who exposed the close personal working relations between Bill Casey, Reagan’s CIA director, and key South African government officials, including its intelligence service.

In Angola and Mozambique, the U.S. came in behind Portugal and South Africa to train and arm rebel groups against African governments. To the satisfaction of Belgian mine owners and the U.S., Belgium conspired with Congo secessionists to murder Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first and only democratically elected president.

France propped up an array of tinpot tyrants in nearly all its former sub-Saharan colonies, most notoriously the sadistic “Emperor” Jean-Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Republic.

Virtually all researchers agree that the Catholic Church and the Belgian, French and U.S. governments bore some of the responsibility for the Rwandan genocide. Oil companies grow fat from the Gulf of Guinea, increasingly a source of American oil supplies, while the citizens of half a dozen countries go without lights, clean water, good health and jobs.

The U.S. colludes with the government of Sudan in the “war on terrorism,” while accusing that same government of orchestrating a genocide in Darfur. Africa’s most deadly and intractable crisis, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has its roots in America’s 30-year unconditional support for Mobutu in Zaire (which is now the DRC).

But Western governments, international financial institutions, and transnational corporations do far more harm than merely bolstering and arming tyrannical regimes. Western commercial and financial activities in Africa, as a wealth of research by Human Rights Watch, among others, confirms, are overwhelmingly exploitative and destructive. Research carried out by the well-respected Washington-based NGO Africa Action comes to this startling conclusion: “[Africa] subsidizes the wealthy economies of the world through a net transfer of wealth in the form of payments for illegitimate debts. More money flows out of Africa each year in the form of debt service payments, than goes into Africa in the form of aid.”

South African academic and researcher Patrick Bond looked at other variables: “Although remittances from the Diaspora now fund development and even a limited amount of capital accumulation, capital flight is far greater. At more than $10 billion each year since the early 1970s, collectively the citizens of Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, the DRC, Angola and Zambia have been especially vulnerable to the overseas drain of their national wealth.”

Based on the evidence at hand and contrary to popular belief, it is likely that since the West and Africa first began their multiple interactions, more wealth has drained out of Africa to the West than has been infused into Africa by all Western sources.

In truth, not a single African country has the sovereign right to introduce policies that would significantly direct or alter its own destiny. Governments must either implement the demonstrably failed policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or forfeit aid, loans, debt relief, and general international acceptance.

This is the new imperialism, or neo-colonialism, in practice. As noted by prominent American economist Jeffrey Sachs, “The IMF routinely works with the finance ministers of impoverished countries to set budget ceilings on health, education, water, sanitation, agricultural infrastructure and other basic needs, in the full knowledge that the consequence is mass suffering and death.” As a Zambian pediatrician told me, for him IMF will always stand for Infant Mortality Fund.

Joseph Stiglitz, former senior vice-president of the World Bank and author of Globalization and Its Discontents, calls it market fundamentalism. He means the extreme version of free-market nostrums that the IMF and World Bank, backed by Western governments, have unilaterally imposed on Africa over the past 25 years. These policies have overwhelmingly failed to grow African economies, but they have succeeded magnificently in increasing poverty and the gap between rich and poor, both between Africa and the West as well as within African countries.

Failures when known as Structural Adjustment Policies, these same prescriptions were cynically renamed poverty-reduction strategies with the same destructive consequences. Forcing Africans to pay for schooling and health care meant that fewer went to school or attended health clinics, an outcome that apparently came as a shock to the experts at the IMF and World Bank. Imposing tight ceilings on health and school staff, slashing funds to schools, health clinics, and hospitals, and failing to maintain or expand health infrastructures, have inevitably led to deteriorating health and school systems across the continent.

All these deliberately severe austerity programs were imposed at exactly the same moment the AIDS pandemic was surging out of control. According to the NGO Essential Action, when the World Bank demanded that Kenya begin charging $2.15 for services at clinics for sexually transmitted diseases, attendance fell by as much as 60 per cent.

At the same time, Western financiers offered generous loans to African leaders, including the most monstrous among them. Then interest rates rose usuriously, and the debt crisis became yet another component of the African reality. This crisis led to an enormous outflow of scarce capital from Africa to the West, a direct reverse transfer from the poorest of the poor to Western governments and their financial surrogates at the World Bank.

According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, between 1970 and 2002 sub-Saharan Africa received $294 billion in loans, paid out $268 billion in debt service, and yet still owed $210 billion. Even while the G8 industrialized nations were promising debt relief in 2005, African countries had to surrender $23.4 billion in interest and principal payments.

The consequence for individual African countries is breathtaking. In 2003, Senegal and Malawi spent about one-third of government revenues on debt-servicing. Angola and Zambia spent more on debt-servicing than they did on health care and education combined. In a sane world, where commerce yields to justice, much of Africa’s debt to Western institutions and governments would be considered odious and cancelled.

Yet not even in the case of Rwanda, where a $1-billion debt was incurred by a government largely responsible for the 1994 genocide, or of South Africa, which inherited a debt of $22 billion from its apartheid predecessor, or in some 16 other states left unbearable debts by their Western-backed dictators, is there discussion of unconditionally cancelling these debilitating debts. Contrast this with the Bush administration’s successful call for the full cancellation of Iraq’s debt incurred under Saddam Hussein.

The IMF and World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative and its successor, the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (G8), have delivered debt relief. However, it amounts to far less than the 100 per cent debt cancellation the world was deliberately led to expect. Furthermore, in order to become or remain eligible for debt relief, all countries must comply with the same free-market policies that have already damaged Africa so brutally.

Even when it seems the West is actually investing in Africa, the reality is almost exactly the opposite. With few exceptions, Africa’s fabulous natural riches — from Nigeria to Angola to Chad to eastern Congo to southern Sudan — have become a “resource curse.”

Of Africa’s less than three per cent share of the world’s foreign direct investment, almost all goes to extractive industries — oil, minerals (gold, diamond, coltan, platinum) and timber. Two-thirds of American capital entering Africa goes into mining and petroleum.

But to label this “investment” badly distorts the concept. Although there are exceptions, in the majority of cases, foreign companies pay little or no taxes, increase corruption by bribing their way to their objectives, build no lasting infrastructures, pay starvation wages, destabilize communities, become involved in local conflicts, then disappear, leaving behind an environmental and social disaster.

Last year, the Guardian undertook a major investigation of resource-plundering and corruption in three African countries — Angola, Liberia, and Equatorial Guinea; their harsh conclusions led them to label the situation “The new scramble for Africa.”

The bribes paid by Western companies to loot Africa’s natural resources are useful reminders of what should be self-evident: it would be quite impossible for Africans to steal the quantities involved without outside help. In fact, such bribes are just one component in what Patrick Smith, editor of London’s Africa Confidential magazine, calls “a system run by an international network of criminals: from the corrupt bankers in London and Geneva who launder the money; the lawyers and accountants in London and Paris who set up the front companies and trusts to collect the bribes or ‘commissions’; the contract-hungry Western company directors who offer the bribes and pocket some for themselves.”

As Michela Wrong illustrates in her book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, the scale of theft carried out by Mobutu suggests his foreign financial backers must have been aware that much of the aid and loan monies intended for Zaire were actually destined for this African kleptocrat’s Swiss bank accounts. The most conservative estimates state that Mobutu had a $50-million nest egg when he ended his 22-year reign. During the same period, Zaire’s debt grew to an astonishing $13 billion.

Natural resources and cash are by no means the only items being drained out of Africa. As it did during the slave trade, the continent is once again giving the West its most precious resource — its best, brightest, healthiest and most productive people. In effect, African countries are using their meagre resources — often from foreign aid ostensibly aimed at “capacity building” — to train professionals who end up in Europe or North America.

Thus, a good chunk of our foreign aid to Africa actually benefits us, not them. This includes university graduates and professionals in all fields, but is most extreme in the health sector. No African country can afford to lose a single health-care professional. The U.S. has 937 nurses per 100,000 people, Uganda has 61. Canada has 214 physicians per 100,000 people, Ghana, one of the continent’s more stable countries, has 15.

Collectively, African countries already fall far short of the WHO minimum standard of 250 health-care workers per 100,000 people, while the brain drain continues to suck doctors and nurses out of Africa and into the developed world.

At every step, Africa finds itself the victim of double standards. The continent is routinely forced to play by the rules of free trade though the West ignores these rules at will. According to NGO Christian Aid, sub- Saharan Africa is $272 billion worse off thanks to the free-trade policies forced on it as a condition of receiving Western money.

At the same time, the United States and the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) spend $1 billion a day in agriculture subsidies (mainly to large agribusinesses), allowing them to flood Africa with commodities at lower prices than African producers can match. This protects their own farmers and makes it virtually impossible for African products to gain a foothold in Western markets.

Bizarrely enough, it’s now cheaper for a Ghanaian to buy an imported European-raised chicken than a locally raised one. According to CorpWatch, in 1992 domestic poultry farmers supplied 95 per cent of the Ghanaian market; by 2001, their market share had dwindled to 11 per cent. The pattern has been the same elsewhere; poor African countries lose substantial and sustainable local industries as they are forced to open their markets to cheap imports.

As for the overseas development assistance (ODA) that all Western governments include in their budgets, there’s a dirty little secret about all those billions. It’s not just that most countries could easily be far more generous; the real story of ODA is how much less has been delivered than almost everyone believes.

Many bemoan the billions of aid dollars that have flooded into Africa over the past 40-odd years with precious little to show for it. Now recent research by the British NGO ActionAid, among others, has demonstrated the pathetic reality behind the official numbers. It’s often difficult to determine what constitutes ODA in any country’s budget; debt relief, for example, is often lumped in as a form of aid, and some countries still commonly receive aid money for geopolitical rather than developmental purposes, badly distorting the data.

Much aid, in fact, directly benefits the donor country, as it is tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor. This makes little sense in terms of costs or efficiency: food purchased through tied aid, for example, is 40 per cent more expensive than what could be acquired through open market transactions.

As a result, sub-Saharan Africa effectively loses between $1.6 and $2.3 billion of the annual aid it receives. Though the U.S. and Italy are the worst offenders, Canada is not much better. By most estimates, more than half of all Canadian aid is tied to the purchase of Canadian goods and services.

Tied aid is but a manifestation of a larger category known as “phantom aid.” As described by ActionAid, in addition to tied aid, phantom aid involves a “failure to target aid at the poorest countries, runaway spending on overpriced technical assistance from international consultants, tying aid to purchases from donor countries’ own firms, cumbersome and ill-coordinated planning, implementation, monitoring and reporting requirements, excessive administrative costs, late and partial disbursements, double counting of debt relief, and aid spending on immigration services.”

All of these factors deflate the value of actual aid being delivered. Of the $79 billion reported as aid in 2004, ActionAid insists that only $42 billion was actual aid. In real aid terms, the U.S. spends 0.06 percent of its Gross National Income, less than one-tenth of the UN’s 0.7-percent target.

With the exceptions of five small northern European states, the prospect of the developed world ever reaching a real 0.7 percent of gnp in ODA is a cruel hoax. Not a single one of the large European countries is even close.

Between meagre aid, phantom aid, tied aid and aid pilfered by recipient governments, it’s far from evident how much of an impact aid actually makes on Africa. While there’s little question of the benefits aid confers upon the private sector in donor countries, for Africans the consequences of the aid scam, together with other facets of the great collusion between Western and African élites, could hardly be clearer.

Africa faces a permanent tsunami, almost entirely ignored by the rest of the world. Every week, an estimated 130,000 Africans die of causes that, in most cases, are easily preventable. The four major killers of children are diarrhea, malaria, pneumonia and measles; for all of these, cheap, safe, available interventions already exist. To meet their bottomless pit of urgent needs, African governments have available resources so grossly inadequate that it’s almost laughable.

Many Westerners travel to Africa with more health paraphernalia than can be found in typical African clinics. When I visited a clinic in Rwanda responsible for the care of thousands of local widows who had been raped and infected with AIDS during the genocide, there were fewer drugs in its fridge than I had in my hotel room. In Canada, we spend annually approximately $3,000 per capita on public and private health care; Malawi spends $13, Rwanda $7, Ethiopia $5. In Canada, annual drug spending per capita is $681; in Africa it’s two bucks.

Things change. Until 1945, Europe had been a hopeless war zone for millennia. South Korea has changed beyond recognition in the past half-century. China and India are changing. And Africa will change too, though it’s always been Africa’s bad luck that it has no Africa of its own to exploit. What will expedite that change in the right directions?

A facile mantra is now widely recited by politicians both Western and African: African solutions for African problems. At best, that’s only a half-truth. Certainly Africa’s political, business and professional élites must change. We have a new African Union — the continent’s equivalent of the European Union — which already outshines the shoddy record of its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, scornfully known as the African Dictators’ Club.

But as the disappointing experience of the AU forces in Darfur revealed, it is so dependent on the West for resources and is so divided by all the troublesome African fault lines — French versus English speakers, north versus south, Christian versus Muslim, South Africa versus Nigeria, terribly poor versus very poor — that it will take years before it plays a truly significant continental role.

In reaction to Western demands, African governments initiated the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), described grandly as “a vision and strategic framework for Africa’s renewal.” But since NEPAD from the first has rested on discredited neoliberal assumptions about growth and development, it is a frail reed on which to rest the continent’s hopes. It’s destined to play a modest role, at best, for the foreseeable future.

The best hope for Africa lies with two developments. First is the increased number of countries that are experiencing political democracy, however tenuously. Second is the emergence of local civil society groups determined to entrench the idea that governments must rule on behalf of all their citizens, not merely cronies and kin.

Everywhere, local NGOs fighting for social justice, democracy, clean government, gender equity, children’s rights, the environment, the rule of law and human rights are well placed to have an impact. Many women’s groups and AIDS support groups play an especially inspiring and often courageous role.

Heaven knows it’s a slow, frustrating, dangerous crusade, but you don’t reverse centuries of entrenched patterns and monstrous deeds overnight. If you’re looking for places where funds are well spent, here’s a pretty good bet.

But whatever steps Africa takes, unless the West radically changes its role few positive results can be expected. What we should do is obvious enough: the evidence from success stories beyond Africa tells us that rejecting the dogmas and programs that the World Bank and IMF unilaterally impose on poor countries is a sine qua non of successful development and poverty reduction.

If the West were truly serious about helping Africa, it would not use the World Trade Organization as a tool of the richest against the poorest. It would not dump its surplus food and clothing on African countries. It would not force down the price of African commodities sold on the world market. It would not insist on growth without redistribution. It would not tolerate tax havens and the massive tax evasion they facilitate.

It would not strip Africa of its non-renewable resources without paying a fair price. It would not continue to drain away Africa’s best brains. It would not charge prohibitive prices for medicines. In a word, it would end the hundred and one ways in which the West quietly ensures that more wealth pours out of Africa each day than the West transfers to Africa.

But that’s the catch. It’s the assumption that we want to help that needs to be questioned. I’ve no doubt ordinary Westerners sympathetic to Africa’s plight take for granted that our policies are meant to help; after all, that’s what they’re invariably told. In the face of palpable reality, rich countries largely continue to insist that their interest in Africa is based on compassion, philanthropy, and generosity.

Let the word go forth: the white man’s (and woman’s) burden lives again. Occasionally, our missionary duty becomes so taxing, so exhausting, so damn boring, that we westerners suffer from bouts of “compassion fatigue.” We feel sorry not for those in need but for ourselves. But we pull ourselves together and re-embark on our “civilizing mission” — saving Africa from its leaders, its incapacity, its self-destructive tendencies.

But all this nobility serves to conceal the real obligation of the rich world — to pay back the incalculable debt we owe Africa. We need to help Africa not out of our selflessness and compassion but as restitution, compensation, as an act of justice for the generations of crises, conflicts, atrocities, exploitation and underdevelopment for which we bear so much responsibility.

Many speak without irony of the desire to “give something back,” not realizing the cruel reality of the phrase. In fact, that’s exactly what the rich world should do. We should give back what we’ve plundered and looted. Until we face up honestly to the West’s relationship with Africa, until we acknowledge our culpability and complicity in the African mess, until then we’ll continue — in our caring and compassionate way — to impose policies that actually make the mess even worse.