Africa Fatigue
November 17, 2008

RADIO 2CBA FOCAL POINT COMMENTARY BROADCAST ON FRIDAY MARCH 24TH, 2000 ON RADIO 2CBA FM.

The recent natural disasters in southern Africa have again forced the world to pay some attention to African affairs. But generally speaking Africa is very much a neglected continent in terms of outside political action.

“Africa Recovery” is a magazine of the United Nations Department of Public Information. It is an excellent source of the type of information which often does not get into the Australian mass media. Its current edition uses a phrase that I have not heard before: “Africa fatigue”.

There is, of course, the phrase “compassion fatigue”, whereby donors in the western world are exhausted about being asked to give to so many disaster relief and development projects. Australia is an example, of “compassion fatigue”: the Government now gives, as a percentage of gross national product, the lowest amount of foreign aid since records began four decades ago. As Australia has got richer so it has become meaner.

“Africa fatigue” means that the rest of the world does not want to help Africa. It all seems too hard. As the magazine points out, half of the world’s war-related deaths are occurring in Africa, This is an amazing statistic. Half the people killed in a war around the world are killed in Africa.

As the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has said: “There are places in Africa where governments persist in spending money on weapons they can ill afford for wars they should not fight; where conflicts are seen as business opportunities for arms merchants and rebels groups alike”.

It is interesting the compare the speed with which the international community deployed peacekeeping and other forces in the conflicts in the Balkans and East Timor, with the delay in sending forces to Sierra Leone or Congo. The media gave a great deal of attention to the siege in Sarajevo in the mid-1990s but more people were killed each week in Mozambique than were killed each year in Sarajevo.

The UN debates African affairs but governments do not do much about actually helping Africa. There are many resolutions but few solutions. Never before has a region been the subject of so many UN reports but the situation remains the same.

Australia can do its part to help Africa. For example African agriculture is often dry land farming. Australia is the only developed country which does dry land farming. We could be helping Africa to learn from our techniques. We could also be increasing foreign aid to Africa.