Scanning through the news in Africa is often frustrating. In many cases you are confronted with first-hand accounts of poverty, war and injustice

But the thing that is most frustrating is when you come across an article which touches on the root cause of many of the problems, and usually that root cause is money. A recent article on allafrica.com (sourced from the Daily Nation Newspaper in Kenya) is a perfect example. The article focuses on criticism that has been building up against the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It argues that their fiscal and monetary policies are hindering Kenya's capacity to address those living with HIV and TB.

Kenya Aids NGOs Consortium (KANCO) have claimed that the IMF's demands are crippling the Kenyan Government, forcing them to lower their wage bill and restricting government spending. This has led to a freeze in employment which has left the country short of much needed healthcare workers. Kenya's battle against HIV is now almost wholly reliant on NGO assistance. While NGOs do good work, their help alone cannot protect a whole nation such as Kenya from diseases such as HIV.

The sixth Millennium Development Goal estimates that one million health staff will be needed to even stand a chance of tackling the spread of HIV in Africa. At a time like this, it seems terrible, but sadly not surprising, that such a huge international body could impose restrictions on governments that directly affect the employment of these health staff, as well as the amount of aid available. It’s not fair, and it’s not practical.

I just get this image of Kenya, and other African countries, in this already uphill struggle being constantly dragged down by the powers that be - or perhaps a better way to describe it would be a bigger boy holding another boy's head under water, letting him up for air for a couple of seconds just to dunk his head under water again. 

The article points to a former Kenyan MP, Billow Kerrow, who launched the report by KANCO commenting, “Our people will continue dying unless we get our priorities right. Why does IMF put a budgetary ceiling on health and education and not on military?”

This is a telling statement, one which resonates in so many ears at the moment - how can you have people dying of treatable diseases due to budget cuts when your military budget remains unscathed?

Kerrow also attacked the rationale behind the decisions by continuing, “Policies such as cost-sharing in health facilities are not applicable in a country like ours, in which people die from simple controllable diseases such as cholera.”

The Daily Nation insists this is no new problem, that this latest report is not the first one to hit out at the IMF. In 2003 the then World Bank Vice President Joseph Stiglitz published a book called ‘Globalisation and Its Discontents’ in which he accused the IMF of undemocratic behaviour and “exacerbating developing world poverty through rigid and unworkable policies”.

It is this sort of information that when broken down, points to a problem that always arises – corruption.

If the IMF imposes unworkable conditions which do not allow countries like Kenya the resources to tackle issues like HIV, these problems will never be tackled, regardless of the Millennium Development Goals set. The IMF are essentially putting money ahead of lives, in turn causing the death of millions. Now that is a true injustice.

Words: Ben Anderson. Ben is a former Ctrl.Alt.Shift staff writer, now freelancing and making movements in the big bad world.

Photo: Flickr user krisnotaro - of a protest against the IMF and World Bank in Washington D.C., in 2005.