Margaret Legum, Mail & Guardian
September 12, 2005

In her analysis of the March 2005 UN Millennium Development Goals report, UK and South Africa-based economist and journalist Margaret Legum highlights a report recommendation urging developing countries to “recommit themselves to taking primary responsibility for their own development by strengthening governance, combating corruption and putting in place the policies and investments to drive private-sector-led growth and maximise domestic resources to fund national development strategies.”
But, counters Legum, a following paragraph “apparently ignores the history of Africa’s $295-billion debt crisis and therefore the fact that Africa was persuaded on false information to take out loans, although it has “in fact repaid these loans many times over,” and “that any person owing such debts would by now have been offered solutions
that acknowledge that the lender also has a responsibility for ‘foolish lending’ and that the borrower has the right to start again, and by rights owes nothing.” But Africa needs to “start breaking some rules,” she said. “For example, we should refuse, as a continent, to repay any more of the odious debt.” Legum also suggests a new economic paradigm
is needed, “rooted in the critical analysis of what the current economic order does to create poverty, and how this situation can be changed.”

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