SUNS #4289 Monday 28 September 1998


AFRICA: CHURCH JOINS CAMPAIGN ON DEBT WRITE-OFF

Nairobi, Sep 24 (IPS/Judith Achieng') -- The church in Africa, concerned about the increasing poverty on the continent, has joined the campaign to write off Africa's debt.

"We are calling for the year 2000 as a year of Jubilee for the cancellation of Africa's debts we have had to bear for so long. We are making a petition to them (the donor community) that it is now our turn to turn around and develop," head of the Anglican church in Kenya, David Gitari said while launching the campaign in the capital Nairobi recently.

Sub-Saharan Africa owes $227.2 billion to international creditors -- a figure that translates into 379 Dollars for every man, woman and child in Africa.

The Accra-based 'Jubilee 2000 Coalition", which is spearheading the campaign, says Sub-Saharan Africa paid out 1.31 dollars in debt service for every one dollar in aid grant in 1996.

Africa shoulders 11% of the developing world's debts, with only 5% of the developing world's wealth - twice the burden of any other region in the developing world.

According to the group, sub-Saharan African governments transfer to creditors four times as much as they spend on the health of their citizens. This is a burden for Africa where 262 million people -- half its population -- live on less than one US dollar a day as a result of paying back high interest loans used to inject new capital in industrialised countries.

"We will never be able to clear these debts, the only way we can develop is for the debts to be cancelled," said Gitari.

Kenya's renown conservationist, Wangari Mathaai, who helped launch the campaign, said Africa's debt crisis heightened in the 1970s when the oil producing countries of the Middle East increased the price of petroleum, forcing the poor countries of Africa and Asia to seek more loans to purchase oil.

"The advent of the Cold War eased the pressure as both Western and Eastern blocs competed to grant favours in the form of low interest loans, but not for long. In the 1980s the same donors unilaterally increased interests on the loans, forcing most developing countries to devalue their currencies, bringing down the value of agricultural goods used to service debts", Maathai said.

The heavy cost of debt servicing also has affected Kenya's economy. "When we started borrowing, the US dollar was worth six Kenyan shillings. Now the shilling is 60 against the dollar. They are using the debts to keep us down and oppressed. They are prepared to see the people die," she claimed.

The issue of morality has also been raised by the coalition. For example, Rwanda, with an external debt of over one billion dollar, is paying the debt incurred for importing machetes, grenades and small arms, used to slaughter up to one million Rwandese in 1994.

So was the role played by the donor money in supporting oppression and abuse of human rights in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Uganda and Kenya. "It takes two to be corrupt, rich countries knew very well they were investing in the wrong people and they should not reap where they invested badly," said Maathai.

Mitch Odero, editor of 'Tam Tam' magazine, published by the Nairobi-based All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), urged the donors to take urgent decision to write off Africa's debts.

Odero's sentiments, published in the latest edition of the Christian magazine, echo the views of retired South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu last year, condemning World bank and International Monetary Fund's Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS) which have forced African governments to cut back on public expenditures in order to service external debts.

"Jesus said anything that imposes unnecessary suffering on those for whom he died, is wrong and immoral, SAPs do this and they must be condemned as wrong and immoral," Tutu said.

The South African clergyman has been joined by a host of African leaders -- like former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, South African president Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel -- in the Jubilee 2000 Coalition, a non-governmental organisation (ngo) formed in 1996, to exert pressure on wealthy nations to cancel Africa's debts. The group will lobby the European Commission (EC) and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) meeting, which kicks off later this month, to negotiate a new agreement to replace the Lome Convention which gives ACP countries preferential trade treatment in the European Union (EU).