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Pouring money into Africa won't achieve anything, or will it? All that happens is the cash comes back to point of origin via arms sales, offshore bank accounts & luxury goods purchased by the despots in charge. Fuck em all! let's keep out of it & let them get on with it, tell em to shove the begging bowl up their arses. The aids pandemic sweeping accross the continent will solve a lot of Africa's problems without the need for aid programs & vast ammounts of cash. If that seems a tad harsh then we can always go text crazy, trot along to St Gob's Jamboree have a good ole sing, whine & wring our hands in a public show of angst before going about our business as usual conscience clear!
As Ace says charity should start at home. So before becoming self appointed saviours of the world maybe our government should open its eyes, ears & pockets to deal with problems closer to home. After all isn't that what we pay them for?

this money that they are going to write off didnt just come from the tooth fairy.a lot of it is leant by pension funds so gordon brown will be unable to write it off.the rest of it is OUR money.lets just say that 1 % of all tax/NI money collected is used for foreign loans and this is the debt we are talking about, that is money paid in by the hard working people of this country and is supposed to be invested and spent in the best interests of the people of this country.just because these people cant pay thier debts doesnt just mean Brown can say ok then dont worry about it keep it.i honestly dont think it will make a blind bit of difference.all the original Live Aid achieved was to feed these people long enough for them to breed another even bigger generation to starve to death.werent Ethiopia and Eritrea 2 of the poortest countries on earth whose people were dying from famine also fighting a war at the same time.they seem to have plenty of money to spend on jet aircraft and artillery and missiles.i wonder how many bags of rice you can get for a jet fighter.meanwhile our grannies wait for years for hip operations,while asylum seekers go to the front of the queue,second world war veterans die of hypothermia and blokes who fought in the falklands sleep in shop doorways.Ace is right charity begins at home

Most of the money is owed to international instututions like the World Bank and the IMF, so it won't affect anything like pension funds directly by writing the debts off - not that I think it'll make a great deal of difference in the long run.

There is a plan to cut the corrupt out of the chain.

Anyway, there's two issues. One is write off the debt, the other is put in more aid. Writing off debts which are small by our standards frees up their own money. Putting in more requires better management so it isn't stolen.

The thing is, debt is a weird term. Why do countries in Africa owe the First World so much? It's partly to do with the post-colonial handover that saw the UK in particular do very nicely out of its old colonies with disadvantageous trade agreements, and its partly due to asset stripping thanks to the presence of the Western mulitnationals in most of Africa.

Of course the kleptocracies operating in many African countries are at the root of the current desperate plight of so many of the continent's nations. But a lot of the dictators and their repressive infrastructures are the result of the manipulation of tribal tensions, which were deliberately exacerbated by colonial administrations as part of a divide and rule policy. Rwanda and Burundi are clear examples of that, so is Uganda.

Africa has to be able to help itself, but it can't begin to do that without 'debt' cancellation. Aid agencies don't give blank cheques to African governments, that's a fallacy. The arms' trade to Africa, which we're at the heart of, needs to be curbed too as tinpot dicators spend millions on it, and it only worsens the situation on the ground.

It's all massively complex and there are no real solutions to the problems, but I do think there is a moral debt owed to many African nations by the West, which cancellation of financial debt would go some way to repaying.