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Here comes old Dr UN with yet another set of useless prescriptions

Saturday October 03 2015

The poor old UN is getting tired. If it were a paediatrician, Dr UN would give a picture of a bouncing baby to a drunken teenage girl in the slums and expect that it is enough to make her a perfect mother on getting pregnant.

After the failure of the Millennium Development Goals, the sweet old UN has now given us a brand new set of goals to make us all developed by 2030. One would be forgiven for imagining that all along our problem has been lack of goals.

In Africa at least, some of our most hopeless countries have enormous resources and very nice development plans. Their development since Independence has been hindered and continues to be hindered by one simple factor and that is rampant corruption.

By not explicitly setting the elimination of corruption — or its reduction to sane levels — as a goal, I doubt if any honest person can expects the new set of goals to be of much use.

Indeed, give the girl who started drinking alcohol the day she got weaned off breast milk a picture of a healthy baby and consider your job of preparing her for motherhood done.

We shall not name names, but what is easily the world’s most dangerous country for a woman or girl to live in also has about the world’s most lucrative mineral resources under its soil, stupendous electricity potential flowing through its rivers and forest reserves that even the most reckless loggers cannot deplete it in the foreseeable future.

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It also has meticulous scholars who actually make you marvel when you meet them in international workshops. 

Actually, their medics even started vaccinating their health workers against ebola by using plasma from survivors long before WHO could finish its lengthy procedures to endorse a vaccine. Surely, is it lack of goals that keeps their country behind?

When you talk of improving health for all age groups in a country like Uganda where half the public maternity centres have no lighting even though most deliveries occur at night and our so-called Nokia midwives have to balance a phone torch between their teeth in order to deliver babies, it is not to say that electricity in labour wards was not budgeted for.

It was, and the appropriate disbursements done.

So, we had the right goals to deliver maternal health. But due to corruption, some people are even advising Ugandan women to start conceiving their babies during daytime in the hope that the labour will also come during daytime nine months later, so that delivery can be conducted in natural light.

Africa needs only one goal for now — the reduction of corruption from crippling to sane levels. That is all. Studies keep revealing the massive net transfer of funds and resources from Africa to the developed world.

Chunks of national budgets are routinely stolen. Donor funds are equally robbed. Yet beautiful plans are drawn up every year. There is no shortage of plans.

What is lacking is the will to end criminality in handling public funds. Nobody drew up development goals for the developed countries.

It is likely that every country knows where it wants to be in 2030. What they need to do is to protect their resources so they are able to stick to their good plans.

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