A few months ago, Bill Gates, the world's richest man, donated 5O Million US dollars towards Malaria research[1]. For most of us Africans, Malaria does not need an introduction. Most of us must have at one time or another, lied down under the African skies, which is often times dusted with twinkling stars. And we lied down not because we wanted to savour and appreciate the aesthetic beauty of these constellation of stars:- Andromeda Nebula, The Milky way, The Great Bear and The Big Dipper, million of light years away and apart. No. Not that we lacked a sense of appreciation for this incredible beauty nor that we were deficient of elementary knowledge about the cosmos. No. Only that we were down, humbled and stricken by this dreadful disease which according to the WHO claims 12 Million lives a year, the majority of which are African children.

Talking about African children.........

There is a BBC report, again published a few months ago, about street children in Zambia which describes in painfully graphic details how, because of abject poverty exacerbated by the burden of the HIV epidemic, children coming from homes where one or both parents have succumbed to the epidemic are obliged to either fend for themselves or depend on the care of elderly grandparents who frequently are past the age of economic productivity. With little prospects of getting basic education or acquiring elementary job skills, these orphans commonly take to the streets to eke out an existence engaging in activities that expose them to all sorts of things….. nothing original about this you might say and I will agree with you. But there is something about this story that arrested my attention and touched a chord within me: even in such desperation and hopelessness, the geniuses of these children have somehow found a way of teasing out a special gas mixture from human excreta in the sewers which when sniffed brings to them a ephemeral glee; transiently taking away their chronic hunger, sadness and melancholic memories about the loss of their loved ones and putting in their places…happy visions of times well past...and new dreams...to be fulfilled? A couple of kids were pictured standing knee deep in a sewer gutter, looking dazed and zombish, obviously high on this hallucinogenic gas.

That was absolutely pathetic. But equally pathetic was yet another report I had read on BBC home page about children in Sierra Leone, who, as is often the case, were caught in criss-cross fire between government troops and the rebels. The report said that these children were having their limbs chopped off with Machetes by one of the rival factions. There was a picture too that came with this story. A young girl, very cute and very ebony, barely ten years old, naked except for a small piece of cloth hanging around her waist, with only one limb- the other one chopped off from just below the shoulder joint, the stub of the remaining proximal humerus hanging awkwardly in the air.

Of all the pictures depicting sufferings of African children that I have seen there is one that probably will never cease haunting me till when I am rested in the forests yonder: an extremely emaciated child, literally all bones-big headed, sunken eyeballs with a severe ,exfolliative rash on its skin, littered with flies- clinging and desperately sucking for the sake of dear life, its lips dry and mottled , on the withered floppy breast of its mother, herself equally wasted and lethargic. Victims these were, of the mainly man made famine in the south of Sudan.

When the human body is severely starved, it starts cannibalising itself, chewing first the non essential organs such as muscles. There is an appalling repugnant stench emitted by severely malnaurished/starving individuals, so strong hardly anyone attendig such persons could possibly fail to notice it. Well, it has got to be strong, for the smell may well be the last signal for help from these dying souls. Though I first saw this picture on TV, my nostrils were strongly hit by this smell of impending humiliating and miserable death……

I have no doubt that part of Bill Gates' donation that will trickles down to Africa will save thousands of children, perhaps even millions. Something to be extremely excited about. Yet, as grotesque as it may sound, I can not help being struck by the perverse irony that, as remote as it may sound, there is a chance that some of the children whose lives will be saved from Malaria earlier in their life history will sooner on later have their lives violated and painfully ended either due to malnutrition or cut down by bullets fast and readily flowing from the guns of their own leaders.

Mobutu, the former president of Zaire, early in his leadership changed his name to: Mobutu sese seko kuku ngbendu wa za banga which literally means "the earthy, the peppery, all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from contest to contest leaving fire in his wake." Mobuto is now dead, still, by jove, there are other current African leaders such as Kabila, Savimbi, Al Bashir, Garang,…Moi..Mugabe…Muluzi….etc...who are still leaving fires in their wake, causing great torment to millions of African children. These fires can of course be abated, perhaps even extinguished, if only our leaders can learn a Microsoft lesson from Bill Gates. My simple question is, can they?