Britain is backing reforms which are deepening Africa's poverty
Tony Blair is not planning to meet Mary Agyekum while in Ghana. Perhaps he should. Mary breaks stones for a living. Her children help her out. If she's lucky, she gets 20,000 cedis a week, about ?2. But the Agyekum family used to live well. They owned a farm in the village of Atuabo, in the west of Ghana. One day a mining company forced them off their land.
Gold is the biggest export earner. For decades the mining firms have had a free rein. The Ghanaian government, urged on by the IMF and the World Bank, gives mining firms "tax holidays" of up to 10 years and keeps environmental and other regulation to a minimum. Two thirds of the land in the west of Ghana is under concession. Everywhere you go, you see huge cavities in the ground, discarded pits where thriving villages once stood.
The Agyekums are forced to make trade-offs. Each morning begins with a trip to the public toilet. Mary has to pay to be let in. She begs the woman to allow her to take her children in for free. Later they walk to the nearest borehole, where they pay for a bucket of water.
This is what the World Bank calls full cost recovery. It is an integral part of the World Bank's poverty reduction strategy - the centrepiece of the economic reform and debt relief programme that the British government is pushing so hard. The strategy is fundamentally flawed.
Economists call Ghana a cash and carry society. Nothing comes for free. You pay for medical care, schooling, drinking water - and to go to the toilet. The trouble is that most people, especially in rural areas, can't pay.
The first sub-Saharan country to gain independence, Ghana used to be called the model pupil. But after two decades of structural adjustment, the poor are poorer and the government more dependent than ever on outside help. Now the Ghana model is being exported across the developing world. But if the neo-liberal experiment has failed Ghana, what chances anywhere else?
Privatisation of the urban water supply, one of the conditions for further World Bank loans, is proceeding apace. The contracts provide rich pickings for competing consortia, mainly British and French. Activists who oppose the water sell-off are denounced as subversives by the Ghanaian government. In villages, water supply will remain in government hands, but only because it is not profitable enough to be sold. So, to balance the books, the state is making villages pay for the upkeep of the boreholes and water pumps. The villages can't afford it.
The issue is not whether Blair should be in Africa rather than at home , whether we should feel guilty or whether he's right to want to help. Who wouldn't if they saw the state of most of the continent? It's whether World Bank and IMF policies, being pushed hard by the British government, are right. Call them monetarism with a human face: the old IMF dogmas with spin. The scar of debt has been worsened by private partnerships between weak, sometimes corrupt, African governments and powerful, sometimes corrupt, international corporations.
Wherever I travelled on a recent visit to Ghana, I saw these policies depriving people of their livelihoods, and then making them pay for essentials. Privately, even the practitioners admit things have gone wrong, and that trouble is brewing. Instead of helping indigenous industry, these countries are being forced to import artificially cheap goods, and are not allowed to help themselves.
In the village of Kpembe, the chief invited us for lunch. We ate chicken feet, soup and American rice. And yet the Katanga valley, just a couple of miles away, was until recently Ghana's rice bowl. It now lies fallow. Ghana used to be self sufficient in rice. The World Bank and IMF decreed subsidies had to stop, that poor countries should concentrate their efforts only on what they can export. And yet the US rice industry receives tens of millions of dollars in support. The double standards apply to water. No state help in Ghana, but subsidy aplenty in countries like the US.
In the hospital in the town of Tarkwa patients have to pay all the costs of surgery - gloves, drugs, blood, anaesthetics, gauze, even cotton wool. Betty Krampa, a 20-year-old who has just given birth, is ready to leave. But she can't until she's paid for her treatment. Her parents are dead. Her husband is out of work. User fees have to be collected to keep the hospital going - in an area where multinational mining companies are making millions.
If Blair really wants to remove the scar of Africa from the conscience of the world, he should use his influence to force a rethink in economic programmes which, however well-intentioned, are deepening the misery of the most vulnerable people in the world.
? John Kampfner was in Ghana to make a film on the impact of IMF/World Bank reforms for the BBC. jkampfner@aol.com
