UN to Africa: Default on Your Debts
At a conference on hunger, one of Kofi Annan’s top economic advisors explicitly told African nations that they should default on their debts, if “rich nations” refused to cancel them.
Jeffrey Sachs, a top economic adviser to Annan, said African nations should ignore their debt. His comments were made at a conference on hunger, on the eve of an Africa Union summit, which estimates sub-Saharan Africa has foreign debts of $201 billion.
“The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable,” said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Annan on global anti-poverty targets. “If they won’t cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction; you do it yourselves.”
The leaders of Ethiopia, Mauritius, Sudan, Uganda, Mozambique, Mali and Burkina Faso attended Monday’s hunger conference.