"Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny from the burden of debt that has crippled them and their countries for so long."
Thus Bob Geldof on the decision last weekend to axe the debts of 18 debtor countries. But in reality, the only Africans who woke up on Sunday feeling any better than they did the day before were the rascals who had been behind so much misery.
The truth is that it was not the debt incurred by the parasites in charge which caused a single African country, or any individual, to be "crippled".
It was theft, maladministration, corruption, inertia, disease, tribalism, voodoo, sexual incontinence, greed and violence - indeed, the very qualities which prompted European missionaries to see Africa as ripe for Christianising, and European plunderers as ripe for raping, a century and a half ago.
Well, the plunderers and most of the missionaries have gone now, and even countries which are still relatively intact are staring into the abyss.
Take Zambia, whose first president, the wretched Kenneth Kaunda, was being ludicrously fêted in Dublin the other day. Its economy is now being run by the World Bank and the IMF after governmental corruption almost drained the country of its entire resources. Under President Chiluba, who replaced Kaunda, the proceeds of the sale of the ZCCM mining company simply vanished into thin air. Despite billions of dollars of international aid since 1991, three-quarters of Zambia's population still live below the World Bank poverty threshold of $1 a day, and Aids is killing hundreds of thousands.
But Zambia is an "efficient" and "democratic" country compared with others. So too is Nigeria, for its president, Obasanjo, was chosen democratically. However, his true priorities are characterised by his plans to spend $330 million on a national soccer stadium, a familiar extravagance to Irish ears, but which in this case exceeds the combined budget for both health and education. Nonetheless, this fine fellow has been re-elected to office.
Meanwhile, obligatory Shariah law is spreading across many regional states, but it could be worse; on the advice of witch-doctors, one non-Islamic regional government outlawed polio jabs, thus giving the state the rare distinction of electing to become home to 80 per cent of the world's supply of polio.
Malaysia is approximately on the same longitude as Nigeria, with much the same climate. Its per capita income has increased 15-fold in the past 30 years and the overall economy has grown 25-fold. Modern Malaysia did not grow from the stable base of peace, but from two decades of war. Moreover, like Nigeria, it is a post-colonial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious society, governed by complex laws which, one way or another, seem to work.
Fifty years ago, after the ruinous war with North Korea and China, South Korea was a wasteland. Today, despite starting from a lower base than Nigeria, and a subsequent history of coups and murder, its GDP comes to $20,000 per head of population.
What enabled those two Asian countries to escape from the legacy of decades of war and colonialism was the combination of the rule of a consistent, predictable law, an educated workforce, low taxation and trade with the outside world. Any visitor to Africa can testify to young people's passionate desire for education, which has been encouraged by mothers in particular. But that almost insatiable African thirst for learning cannot of itself produce prosperity in the absence of the other vital requirements: social stability, respect for the law, integrity of the banking system, transparency of process free from corruption, and personal safety from violence and disease.
Some of these vital ingredients to economic take-off are missing from virtually all African societies; and a few countries - Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia - are without any of them whatever. Indeed, in their social order, in their pathological belligerence, and their credulous devotion to voodoo, they more resemble stone-age societies than modern ones.
Cancelling the debts of such countries will not make any real difference to their inhabitants, though it might just make their rulers feel cocky and credit-worthy enough to seek more loans from the private sector to buy a few more limousines. Such debts, freely incurred and given by private banks who are no better than they ought to be, already constitute an untouched and untouchable drain on many African economies. Zimbabwe meanwhile slides unstoppably towards poverty, anarchy, the pandemic of Aids, and next, civil war. And in dear old Swaziland, over the past couple of months King Mswati III has acquired two more teenage brides, bringing his total of wives to 12. (How gratifying for his impoverished, starving subjects to learn that each freshly minted bride gets a brand new Mercedes.)
Perhaps worst of all, our view of Africa is still tainted by the politically correct, fashionable falsehood, such as that reiterated by Ken Wiwa in the Observer last weekend: "It will be ten years in November since my father was murdered for daring to expose the complicity between Shell and the Nigerian military dictatorship to exploit the oil reserves of my Ogoni community."
Untrue.
Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed for his part in the murder and cannibalisation of four Ogoni elders who wanted a deal with Shell - which, moreover, actually opposed his execution. But the Saro-Wiwa fashionable falsehood has taken hold in the West, further feeding Africa's - and our own - desire to blame the white man for all the continent's woes.
And fetishising debt relief for Africa is merely doing more of the same.