Tony Blair called yesterday for the moral and financial support given

Tony Blair called yesterday for the moral and financial support given to the countries hit by the tsunami in Asia to be channelled into tackling the “man-made” disaster of poverty in Africa.
The Prime Minister acknowledged that the focus on the crisis in Asia could divert attention from Africa – Britain’s top priority during its year chairing the G8 club of the world’s leading industrial nations. one in which the developing countries are not supplicants, but partners.”He added: “I am aware… that the promises we all made five years ago will forever remain unfulfilled unless we act together and act now.”. Gordon Brown outlined his vision yesterday for a “modern Marshall plan” to take a historic step towards eradicating world poverty. A senior official with a relief agency said that EU bureaucracy was such that “the aid didn’t arrive until the next floods came in”.The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said rich countries should ask themselves whether they were doing enough to help Mozambique and Madagascar.. The footage of a woman giving birth to her child in a treecaptivated international audiences and led to an outpouring of pledges.But no sooner had the floodwaters receded than the aid dried up, leaving Mozambique, and other countries struck by the floods, mainly Madagascar and Zimbabwe, without the resources to deal with the consequences.

Many Mozambicans whose boreholes were destroyed still have no access to clean water.The televised images of the devastation showed the magnitude of the crisis, with people scrambling on to tree-tops and roofs hoping to be plucked to safety by helicopters. Roads in remote provinces remain in a state of disrepair today. Authorities said the damage was far worse than that caused by the war.The floods killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Many of the approximately one million people affected by the worst flooding there in 52 years are still struggling to cope.The week-long rains and floods caused damage of monstrous proportions to a country emerging from 17 years of civil war and which was beginning to rebuild. When floods ravaged Moz-ambique in 2000, donors and rich countries rushed to pledge $400m (£214m) to help rebuild the impoverished southern African country. Makgatho will be buried on 15 January at the family’s home village of Qunu in the Eastern Cape province..

A daughter died in 1948 before she was a year old, and another son was killed in a car crash in 1969 while Mr Mandela was in prison.Mr Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail, was refused permission to attend his children’s funerals. In fact many did not even know Mr Mandela had a son still surviving.His two daughters from his second marriage to Winnie Mandela, Zindzi and Zenani, took a more public profile, even accompanying their father on state visits during his early days as president after his marriage to Winnie broke down.Makgatho was one of four children from Mr Mandela’s first marriage to Evelyn Mase, who died in May at 82. “We know it is not an easy decision to make and yet it is the right thing to do to help break the silence on the HIV/Aids pandemic and to remove the negative stigma which shrouds it,” said the party’s secretary-general Musa Zondi.Mr Mandela had frequently visited his son in hospital and several sympathisers, including Mr Mbeki, came to his home yesterday to pay their respects.Despite his father’s popularity and his family’s fame, Makgatho Mandela, who worked for one of the country’s top law firms before resigning to work as a legal consultant for a commercial bank, kept a very low profile. Mr Mbeki’s government has drawn criticism over its Aids policy and only court intervention made it begin rolling out anti-retroviral drugs, through public hospitals, after questioning their effectiveness.Mr Mandela’s stance is likely to add impetus to calls for the government, to take the disease more seriously.The Inkatha Freedom Party yesterday welcomed Mr Mandela’s decision. Mr Mandela refused to answer questions about his views on Mr Mbeki’s position.

Mr Mbeki’s spokesman, Parks Makahlana, who worked for Mr Mandela when he was president, died of Aids.According to the United Nations body UNAids, five million of South Africa’s 45 million people are infected with the virus and at least 600 South Africans die of the disease daily.Mr Mbeki caused a storm in 2001 when he said the real cause of Aids was poverty not HIV. “I hope that as time goes on, we realise it is important for us to talk openly about people who die of Aids,” said Mr Mandela.Makgatho Mandela’s wife Zondi died of pneumonia last year and suspicions had lingered that he had Aids.Mr Mandela has refused to be drawn into a controversy with his successor, President Thabo Mbeki, who denied knowing anyone suffering from Aids in a 2003 interview with the Washington Post. The taboo that keeps many Africans from openly speaking about the disease has hampered efforts to address the pandemic on a continent in which more than 25 million are infected.But Mr Mandela also emphasised he had not been aware of the real reasons of Makgatho’s illness when he began lobbying for more openness on Aids several years ago. Former South African President Nelson Mandela revealed yesterday that his son Makgatho had died of Aids, breaking a widely held African taboo which holds it shameful to openly admit deaths from the disease.
Mr Mandela, one of the most prominent Aids campaigners in Africa, said he believed the only way to fight the disease was to speak about it openly.