Why Do Bush's African Aid Recipients Look Like American, Christian Conservatives?

Quantitatively, every president exceeds their predecessor's international aid commmitment. Typically, they start where their predeccessor left off and make small price indexing adjustments. Money being spent under Bush on Africa has increased beyond price indexing, but not because Bush has led on the issue. Instead, he has been pressured by the likes of Bono and Gordon Brown to do so. Nonetheless, Bush's promises always come up short. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush received wide praise for offering an "emergency plan" to spend $15 billion ($10 billion of which was to be new funds) on AIDs over the next 5 years in Africa and the Carribean. Yet, it then took Bush more than a year and a half to get any of these "emergency" funds to Africa, it appears that some of the early funds were coming from shifting funds promised to other problems (e.g. malaria relief) and the overall plan is off-pace to meet full-funding (even though Congress interceded in year one to raise Bush's proposed $2 billion to $2.4 billion; a move Bush opposed).

Remaining on the quantitative side of things, the U.S.'s overall commitment to international aid remains dreadful under Bush. Of the 22 development assistance countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has ranked at or near the bottom of development assistance, including AIDS relief, as a percentage of gross national income.

Yet, the larger problem with Bush's policies on African aid are qualatative. Bush is a world leader on Africa in one respect --- the giving of "phantom" aid. Phantom aid is "aid" diverted Aid for other purposes within bureaucratic aid systems, such as excess administration costs, double-counting aid as debt relief, tying aid to certain goods from the donor country, and failing to fulfill aid pledges. In a May 27, 2005 report, the Global Policy Forum estimated that 80% of U.S. spending is actually phantom aid.

An additional qualitative problem is the Bush administration's insistence on directing relief funds toward Bush's political supporters. As detailed in a Rolling Stone article by Geraldine Sealey in the June 16, 2005 issue, funding is being shifted away from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a group widely recognized as being highly experienced and effective in the fight against disease in Africa. Instead, the Bush administration is focusing on abstinence-only programs and is discouraging condom promotion. Millions of dollars are being given to Christian organizations or other Bush cronies (typical Bush patronage) which have little experience fighting HIV and AIDS like FreshMinistries and the Childrens AIDS Fund.

The dangers posed by the shift from condom promotion to abstinence-only are certain to be devastating. As Sealey notes, Uganda is Africa's biggest success story having used condom promotion and sex education to cut its HIV rate from 15 percent of the population to 6 percent. Yet, with encouragement from the Bush administration, Uganda's Ministry of Education banned the promotion and distribution of condoms in public schools. The government has also recalled all state-supplied condoms and is impounding imported condoms. For its efforts, Uganda is being handsomely rewarded with $10 million being pumped into abstinence-only programs.

In summary, Bush only acts on African aid when pressured to do so, and then, the practice has been to make grand promises that garnish all sorts of praise but which are subsequently and quietly left unfulfilled. I remain disgusted by efforts on the right to use the London attacks to shift attention from the deaths of thousands and untold suffering happening on a massive scale in Africa and will not retract any of my prior criticism of Bush on this issue.