A Britains Chancellor, Gordon Brown,  flies around Africa offering to pay 10% of the debt owed by individual countries, Ike Okonta asks not for charity or aid but for justice.

An African Replies Tony Blair…..

British Prime Minister Tony Blair assumed leadership of the Group of Eight industrialised countries (G8) on January 1st.   It was an inauspicious moment for the British premier, more so as he made made it clear he would use the opportunity of Britain’s leadership of the body, to effect a fundamental change in the troubled relationship between the poor and exploited countries of the southern hemisphere and the industrialised north.

It was inauspicious because the Tsunami disaster had devasted several Indian Ocean countries during the Christmas week, leaving bloated corpses and wrecked livelihoods in its watery wake.   The major American and Europoean news networks, picking up the cue from their politcial leaders, were dutifully blanketing the airwaves with the Tsunami "specitacle" to the exclusion of all else.

Such African countries as Somalia and Kenya had been affected by the disaster, but the major focus of the Euro-American networks were Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India in that order.   Watching CNN and other US media day after day as the full import of the Tsunami tragedy unfolded, you would not believe that there was such a thing as "Africa", that there were real people living there who had been similiarly affected, and that they deserved, no less than any of the other victims, a chance to air their sorrows on an international platform.

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Dokubo and the December Amnesty

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