It's always proven remarkably easy for the West to make promises to Africa. It has been in the area of following through on those promises where the outside world has so often fallen short. Thabo Mbeki has identified the crises in Sudan as an area in which promises have been made, and at least to this point, have gone unfulfilled:
A majority of the countries who undertook to assist Sudan financially in implementing the African country's peace agreement have not fulfilled their pledges, President Thabo Mbeki said on Wednesday.
Briefing the media at Tuynhuys in Cape Town following a meeting with his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir, Mbeki said that despite the international donor community having pledged to assist with equipment and other resources required to help the Sudanese government resolve its political crisis, many of the countries still had not yet delivered.
“Various countries around the world have not yet responded,” he said.
He said making the resources available to the Sudanese government was a critical element for the resolution of the crisis, and that the South African government would do everything in its power to ensure that countries fulfilled their pledges.
“We need to bring everybody on board,” Mbeki said.
South Africa is often caught in a difficult situation in its role as a continental leader. But Mbeki is right: when the world does not follow through on its promises, especially in a crisis situation such as that in both Darfur, and increasingly in the once-again rumbling south of Sudan, it almost guarantees that chaos will continue to reign.
