It's tough to explain to the average Zambian what a figure like $6 billion means. Try to convert it to the local currency, the Kwacha, and most calculators don't have enough zeros to display the result. Four out of five Zambians live on $1 a day, and many die from disease or hunger because they lack even that. So $6 billion seems like just funny money, an abstract concept rather than something real stored in a vault somewhere.
But that sum - Zambia's national external debt - has a very real, potent significance in one of the world's poorest countries. To put flesh on it, and the debt of many other African countries, look into the face of Caroline Mumba, the 16-year-old glued to the ground in a Lusaka slum waiting to have her leg cut off.
Caroline lives in Masisi "compound", a sprawl of ramshackle houses pinned between a railway line and a disused limestone mine. It is a desperate place of open sewers, drunks and wild children orphaned by AIDS. Caroline's house, which she shares with her jobless mother, her grandmother and a cousin, is the size of a coal shed and about as clean. Like every house in Masisi, it has no electricity and no running water.
Caroline sits on a dirty blanket, her legs stretched out in front of her.
Despite the squalor, she looks smart, wearing a checked blazer, and is dignified, greeting visitors with a shy smile. But when she pulls back the cloth covering her legs, it is enough to make one cry.
Her right foot is a disfigured mash of raw flesh and metal pins. There is a glistening open wound the size of an outstretched hand; her ankle looks like a pulped orange, and four steel pins run into her bones, held in place with what look like twisted bicycle spokes. Faced with the looks of horror from her visitors, Caroline calmly explains that the foot has been like this for four months.
A lorry knocked Caroline over on her way back from the city's Soweto market in March, snapping her bones and tearing a gash in her foot. She was rushed to Lusaka's main public hospital for treatment. Under normal circumstances, Caroline might have been released in a week, making a full recovery. But in Zambia, a technically bankrupt country where hospitals cannot afford surgical gloves let alone expensive surgery, even routine procedures require small miracles.
The doctors cleaned the wound, sometimes using medicines they sent Caroline's mother out to buy at a nearby pharmacy. The hospital shelves were bare. They inserted a DIY "fixator", or pins and wire, to hold the bones in place while the wound healed. But it didn't get better and eventually they just sent Caroline back to her home in Masisi compound. They told her mother to wash the wound with water mixed with Jik, a caustic powder used to scrub sinks and toilets.
Until last week, Caroline sat in the half-dark of the shack, going to the toilet where she sat and fearing the inevitable amputation. But she bears the wound without complaint. "At night, it is paining," is all she says.
Her case, which is repeated many times all over Africa, illustrates the terrible burden of Third World debt. Last year, Zambia spent about $76 million on propping up its ramshackle health system. During the same period, it spent $89 million on servicing the colossal $6.3 billion national debt, most of which is owed to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Forty-eight sub-Saharan countries are drowning in debt, paying $13.5 billion in interest every year. Most of those nations have crumbling health systems, poor education, and are being ravaged by the gallop of AIDS. In Zambia, for example, the average life expectancy has plummeted to 37 years. One in five adults is infected with HIV.
And still, Western creditors insist, the debt must be paid.
It's a situation that a vocal international lobby - combining forces as diverse as the Pope, pop singer Bono and Mohammed Ali - has denounced as deeply immoral and economically lunatic. Some of the money was borrowed to fund the excesses of discredited regimes, they say, and current African governments can never hope to pay it back.
"This is not an economic issue ¡ it's a moral one," said Fr Peter Henriot, a Harvard-educated Jesuit who is fighting for debt cancellation in Zambia. "We led the fight against apartheid in South Africa, and it cost us dearly. Why should Phillipinos pay for Mrs Marcos's shoes, or the Congolese for Mobutu's palaces?"
The campaigners have achieved some, albeit limited, success. On the last day of 2000, the IMF and World Bank agreed to cancel a large part of the debt of 22 countries under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. In Zambia's case, that meant cancelling or rescheduling 60 per cent of the $6.3 billion national debt.
But so far, the benefits of HIPC are difficult to pin down. Debt relief comes with a bewildering array of conditions, and the real-life benefit for the 22 countries is much smaller than it might seem. Zambia will benefit by just $35 million per year over the next five years and, ironically, due to the vagaries of IMF loan structures, its interest bill this year will be greater than last year.
The campaigners say debt relief has failed. This weekend, they are descending on the Italian city of Genoa, where the world's most powerful leaders, or G8, are meeting. The G8 leaders are effectively the shareholders of the IMF and the World Bank. The campaigners are calling on them to unconditionally cancel the entire Third World debt.
"This whole debt crisis has become a sickening joke," said Bob Geldof, a prominent supporter of the Drop the Debt campaign, recently.
No doubt Caroline Mumba would agree. But there is another face to Africa's debt crisis, one that raises troubling issues of accountability and transparency that are difficult to capture in a soundbite. In Zambia, that face is His Excellency Frederick Chiluba, the diminutive president with the impish grin who likes to lavish money on his fellow leaders while his people are languishing in poverty.
Two weeks ago, Chiluba hosted the annual summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the grouping of all African leaders thatis better known for its fine speeches than for its actions. More than 40 African heads of state flew into Lusaka for the occasion, and the ever-beaming Chiluba pulled out all the stops to ensure their comfort.
A fleet of 60 brand-new Mercedes-Benz were flown in from Europe to ferry the African leaders around Lusaka. Their security was assured by an escort of 120 new motorcycles, driven by policemen who normally survive by extracting bribes from motorists. The leaders were driven to their hotels on a carpet of fresh Tarmac, a fine sight in a country of potholes and dirt tracks.
In Lusaka, Chiluba had intended to lodge his distinguished guests in a complex of presidential apartments that were specially built for the occasion. However, the project fell behind schedule and was left half-finished. It's not yet clear who is going to pick up the $17 million tab, but it appears that the mercurial Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi may help out.
A new conference hall was also built in honour of the OAU summit, and frantic efforts were made to furnish it with the latest in modern facilities. Unfortunately, two days before the summit, a structural fault was discovered in the hurried project. Chiluba, not wishing to be responsible for a roof caving in on the entire leadership of Africa, had to abandon the idea and revert to an older centre nearby - which proved perfectly adequate.
The three-day conference cost Chiluba's government at least $20 million, or about one-third of its annual health spending, according to official figures. The cost infuriated many Zambians, who were left wondering whether the government could be trusted to ensure debt relief ends up in the hands of the poor and not the pockets of the rich.
One such sceptic is Dipak Patel, a one-time government minister who left for the opposition five years ago. "I appreciate the demonstrations by all these young people. But do they want to drop the debt and then allow our leaders to rob us blind?" he asked.
Patel chairs the parliamentary committee that monitors government spending. He can list a string of seedy corruption scandals that have implicated senior figures - a cobalt scam that lost the exchequer an estimated $60 million; a maize programme where $2.4 million was lost. More recently, $1 million was "diverted" from official funds to pay for a meeting of Chiluba's ruling MMD (Movement for Multiparty Democracy) party. A corruption tribunal was set up to investigate. Unfortunately a star witness, former government official Paul Tembo, was murdered in his bedroom just hours before he was due to give evidence.
"Are you sure the debt money will go for the intended purposes?" said Patel. "If it is going to be channelled through the government, there must be accountability."
Accountability is the job of the Western financial institutions. Questions about fleets of OAU Mercedes embarrass Dr Laurence Clarke, the resident World Bank representative in Lusaka. "All I can say is that I hope we don't have another OAU here," he said.
Similar concerns arise in many of the remaining 18 African countries that have so far qualified for debt relief. The IMF and World Bank demand that beneficiaries draw up poverty-reduction plans that clearly show debt relief money being funnelled into health and education and not fancy cars for government ministers.
But such requirements are criticised for being overly bureaucratic and slow-moving. In the last initiative, only two countries - Uganda and Mozambique - actually managed to fulfill the stringent conditions and receive full debt relief. For the Drop the Debt campaigners, political reforms must follow debt cancellation and not the other way around.
World Bank president James Wolfensohn counters that cancellation could lead to a collapse of the institutions that are designed to bail out countries such as Zambia. "Creditors will say 'okay, we've done that once but now you're on your own'," said Dr Clarke.
But not everyone agrees, including the Zambian finance minister, Katele Kalumba. "They say debt cancellation is bad for you. That's like saying getting better is bad for you," he said. The debt debate has also opened a wider argument about the hold the West has over African economies through the IMF and the World Bank, and whether force-fed globalisation is the solution to the woes of the world's most underdeveloped continent.
Zambia, for example, has swallowed the bitter pill of liberalisation in the past, yet the country has slid further and further into abject poverty.
Hospital fees were introduced as part of "cost-sharing" to reduce health spending, but now many cannot afford treatment. The copper mines, once the main foreign-exchange earner, were privatised and many lost their jobs, although some mines are doing well now. Inflation has fallen significantly in a decade, but people have less and less money in their pockets.
Luanshya was once one of the biggest mines along the copperbelt, attracting 6,500 workers, with generous benefits and decent wages. But since a botched privatisation in 1997, Luanshya is a ghost town. The workforce has halved, one of the mineshafts has flooded, and work stopped recently after the company went into receivership.
Wages have been stopped for three months and now the miners have been reduced to selling their modest furniture to pay for food and school fees.
"The whole town is in misery. Every little money you have, you are thinking of home," said miner Loungu Policarp at a trade union meeting recently.
Debt campaigners say Luanshya is symptomatic of the destruction wreaked by Western economic prescriptions. Corruption and mismanagement are endemic, they admit, and debt cancellation will not be the panacea to their countries' problems. But it will at least give them a chance to get off their knees.
"You can't sacrifice a whole generation of people to say that in 15 years' time it will be fine. In Europe, you can handle job losses and people are re-absorbed," said Fr Joe Komakoma of the Trocaire-funded Zambian Catholic Justice and Peace Commission.
"But in Africa, there is nowhere to go."