[Mb-civic] No More Nigers - Desmond Tutu - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

No More Nigers

By Desmond Tutu
Wednesday, August 3, 2005; Page A19

The cameras are rolling on another African disaster: Niger and its 
desperate, starving children have thrust the continent back into the 
global spotlight. And this tragedy has unfolded on the world's 
television screens even as leaders of the industrialized countries at 
the Group of Eight summit pledged a historic amount of debt relief and 
humanitarian aid to African countries.

Welcome tidings of the affluent world's largess have collided with yet 
another outstretched hand -- another cry for help -- from our continent. 
For Niger is not an isolated island of desperation; it lies within a sea 
of problems across Africa -- particularly the "forgotten emergencies" in 
poor countries or regions with little strategic or material appeal. 
Neighboring Mauritania and Mali, south Sudan, southern Africa -- all are 
"Nigers" waiting to happen.

In most cases, war or tyranny cannot be blamed -- just grinding poverty 
that forces half the continent to survive on less than a dollar a day, 
and the lethal overlay of HIV-AIDS that kills about 2 million Africans a 
year.

The U.N. World Food Program warned as long as nine months ago that 
Niger, already one of the world's poorest nations, was veering toward 
catastrophe -- pushed hard by severe drought and the worst plague of 
locusts in 15 years. But donors were attending to higher-profile crises; 
then came the Indian Ocean tsunami, which eclipsed Africa's misery on 
the world scene.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/02/AR2005080201937.html

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