Stardate 20020207.2216

(On Screen): The World Bank has approved an additional $500 million for Africa to use to fight HIV and AIDS. God knows that Africa has a problem; it may well end up killing a third of the people there in some places.

In the mean time, the problem is bad and it's getting worse, and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa do not have the resources to fight it on their own. So they get $500 million over and above another $500 million approved last September. So that's a billion dollars. But it's a loan.

There's a place for loans. The best way to handle them is to use them to invest. You borrow money, use it to buy equipment for your factory, increase your production and income, and use that to pay the loan back. At the end you're square with the bank and you have a bigger and more productive factory. Nations should be the same way: you borrow money to improve things which will increase the economic activity of your nation; and use some of the increased revenue to pay the loan back.

Or am I a hopeless romantic about such things?

The nations of sub-Saharan Africa are already deeply in debt. Most of their economies are wrecked, and they're kept that way in part because of the payments they have to make – in hard currency – for loans taken out in previous years and decades, which money was squandered, or stolen. So now we (the industrialized nations, who provide the funds for the World Bank) are going to give them another $1 billion in loans, and they're going to spend it all on medicine. It won't make their nations more productive, but it will increase their debt burden and make their economic plight all the more severe.

How, exactly, is this a help? They cannot support any more debt, not even zero-interest debt. Simply paying back the principal here is more than they can handle. It's no good helping them in one way while we screw them in another.