Leaders of the G8 gathering in Edinburgh tomorrow have become the focus of a concerted global campaign to have them fix the mess that is Africa.
If you believe the Make Poverty History campaigners, Africa's problems are by and large the result of neglect by the West and only leaders from the West, starting with the G8, can put things right.
However, as foreign aid commentator and journalist David Rieff observed in The New York Times, all of this is just "a politically correct version of the imperial impulse to give some money and all will be well, as if the problems of Africa are just the results of our not paying enough attention".
On the weekend, capturing the Zeitgeist of the moment, Nelson Mandela made a public appeal to G8 leaders at one of the Live8 concerts: "Do not look the other way, do not hesitate ... as it is within your power to prevent a genocide".
All of these words miss the fundamental point that the causes of Africa's woes are internal, not external. The reasons for Africa's malaise are complex, sometimes rooted in its colonial past but more often than not Africa's biggest problems tend to be in the form of endemic corruption, horrific ethnic conflict, political instability and poor governance.
Rather than protesting in Edinburgh at the G8 Summit, if campaigners and celebrities were really serious about making poverty history, they would have been better advised to be protesting in Tripoli where leaders from the African Union are meeting, and calling on them to govern their countries properly.
Although campaigners say that Africa has a new generation of leaders, in issues such as corruption things have actually gotten worse over the past few years, as measured by the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. For example, in 2000 the average African CPI was 3.24, on a scale of one to 10, with the higher the number meaning the lower the corruption. By 2004, the African CPI fell to 2.87.
Of course the G8 can help Africa help itself. Here the Live8 demands on the leaders of the G8 are relevant, (although it is difficult to see how these demands would help right now the people of Zimbabwe, whose biggest problem is the madness of Robert Mugabe). Of the three demands (to cancel Third-World debt; to dramatically increase foreign-aid flows; and deliver what they called trade justice), it is trade or, more specifically, lowering barriers to Third-World imports which is the most important contribution the West can make to Africa and the developing world.
The importance of trade is illustrated by the fact that for all the inflated rhetoric about the importance of foreign aid, overseas development assistance flows stand at about $US63 billion ($84 billion) while trade generates $US1.7 trillion for the Third World.
Trade is by far the best weapon in the so-called war against poverty. Free trade is clearly in Africa's interest.
The problem is that the campaigners are not actually calling for free trade. They are pursuing something rather dubious, as its name may imply, called trade justice, which in essence rightly calls for an end to Western tariffs and subsidies but then perversely argues that the developing world should be able to erect their own barriers to free trade.
Africa has little to show for the $US1 trillion in foreign aid that it has received in the past 50 years. Aid has not just been ineffective in Africa; it's been counterproductive.
Nevertheless, a good deal of the debate has focused on the levels of foreign aid spending by Western governments. This is predictable as it is non-government organisations behind the Make Poverty History campaign, all of which are hungry for more aid money.
In this respect, the motto of the aid industry should be: ask not what you can do for Africa, but what Africa can do for you.
While the aid groups and the deep thinkers from the entertainment world have us believe it is the G8 leaders who hold Africa's fate in their hands, the reality is that ultimately it is only Africans and specifically their leaders who can make poverty history.
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