"One of the concerns that I have with our aid policy generally is that western consultants and administrative costs end up gobbling huge percentages of our aid overall. It seems to me that what we should be doing is trying to minimize our footprint and maximize the degree to which we're training people to do for themselves..."

- US President Barack Obama, in a chat with ALLAFRICA.COM, ahead of his visit to Ghana in 2009.

The proposed intervention by The Global Fund to drastically reduce prices of Artemisinin Combined Therapies (ACTs) through its Affordable Medicines for Malaria programme (AMFm), which will see ACTs from six foreign companies sell from September 2010 at a monitored price regime of between N60 and N70 a dose, as against the current average price of N350 for most ACTs produced or marketed in Nigeria, has generated a rumpus in the last few weeks in the media. And if TV discussions on the subject last weekend are anything to go by, the days ahead will certainly witness more intense debate.

Let me say straightaway that I am biased about foreign aid, or I should say I am cynical about it. Sometime in the late 1970, the white men came up with the novel idea that Nigeria was "under borrowed". But rather than tightening our belt by cutting our coat according to our cloth, we resorted to the Euro-currency market to raise a loan of two billion US dollars. A frustrated Gen. Obasanjo was to express his confusion many years after when he wondered why you would borrow an amount of money, pay back the principal plus interest that is higher than the principal, and still find yourself owing more than the principal! We did pay dearly for that misadventure of Gen. Obasanjo in the 70s.

And at the time when China is undermining democracy in Africa through subtle collaboration with dictators in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Niger and promoting corruption in many countries of Africa, including Nigeria, by collaborating with local public officers to fleece their host nations, she recently promised to help Africa with investments up to 5 billion US dollars. These investments, as usual, will end up flooding the Africa continent with Chinese citizens in the name of technical staff! Foreign aids! Did plundered resources from Africa not develop the great metropoles of Europe, North America and part of Asia? Foreign aids!

China sends its men to the guillotine for acts of corruption but suffers no compunction in promoting same in Africa. Switzerland will not condone corruption in its territory but provides a haven for looters of the African commonwealth. What manner of world is this?

But here we are confronted with a health issue. Malaria remains the number one killer disease in Africa with Nigeria being the worst hit. The World Health Organisation reports that over 57 million Nigerians are annually afflicted by the endemic disease, leading to the death of about 300,000 each year, most of them children, under the age of five. Nigeria has an unenviable record of about 40 per cent of malaria cases in Africa.

Ordinarily, this scale of devastation by malaria should have led to a state of emergency in the health sector. Even among the war-mongering nations, a casualty figure of 300,000 per year should provoke an immediate overhaul of the entire campaign. Therefore, in spite of my cynism, I should deliberately welcome the humanitarian gesture of The Global Fund, though with a caveat.

I suppose The Global Fund is aware that there are pharmaceutical and ancillary companies in Nigeria producing and marketing ACTs. I suppose the logical question to ask is: If the safety and efficacy of the locally produced drug are not in doubt, why not partner with these companies, so that while mass-producing the ACTs locally and making them available to Nigerians at a cheap price, the thousands of Nigerians employed by these companies will keep their jobs and more Nigerians will simultaneously be gainfully employed? A collaboration of this nature, in my view, is a win-win situation for our local industries and the teeming masses of our people.

I reckon that the intervention of The Global Fund will not last for more than two years. But if its current template of assistance is implemented as it is, Nigerians will get the drug at a cheap price for the duration of the intervention while local pharmaceutical companies and linkages to them will collapse while the intervention lasts. At the end of the intervention, the pharmaceutical firms and Nigerians will then return to square one! Besides, how are we sure the undesirable elements among us would not go to China to procure fake ACTs which they will now import to Nigeria and sell at the same price with The Global Fund?

Of course, I am aware from the news report that all the six foreign firms- Guilin (China), Ipca (India), Ajanta (India), Cipla (India), Novartis (France) and Sanofi -aventis (Switzerland)- whose products will be subsidized by as much as 80 per cent by the Global Fund are "pre-WHO qualified manufacturers..." My take is that it is still better to teach people how to fish than to give them fish. Pre-WHO or not, if neither WHO nor The Global Fund has found any fault with the locally made ACTs, the best help Nigeria deserves should have been for the multilateral agency to partner with the local firms in the mass production of the drug; additional quantity could be brought from overseas if local production cannot meet the quantity demanded by the target market.

Nonetheless, the government of Nigeria that has put the local firms in this dire position, through years of misgovernance, should now wake up to its responsibilities. The Global Fund, as the giver, is at liberty to decide how it wants to give. It is the responsibility of the Federal Government, through the Ministry of Health, to immediately unveil its plan on how to make the gesture of the donor agency a win-win situation for the local pharmaceutical industries and Nigerians, both in the short and long runs.

Ultimately, cure is more costly than prevention. Our focus should shift to how to eradicate the killer-disease. Nigeria and African governments should henceforth look inwards and deliver themselves from The Begging Syndrome.