As a result, so many are ailing in debt that a debt-handling industry has been born, complete with lawyers, consultants, counselors, writers, lotteries and Web sites. Plenty, although nothing as facetious as Blacks in America being so much in debt that they can teach Africa a thing or two. The amount of money some countries owe to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other foreign lenders is more than double the value of goods and services those countries produce. In some cases, debt payments consume 30 percent to 40 percent of the national budget, diverting already scarce resources from health care, education, sanitation and economic development to pay interest on debts. The term donor nations should be banned from the lexicon of African development because of its implication of inequalities.
Debt is Africa s newest plague.
It is as devastating as AIDS, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade told a small group of journalists during his visit to the United States last month to attend the United Nations Millennium Summit on Peace. Slavery lasted three centuries, colonialism less than one century. But this debt seems endless. We don t know when it will end, President Wade said. What hurts most is that there is nothing to show for the debt, he said.