Africans aim to answer spiritual drought.

`Transforming Africa from a bleeding to a renewed continent' was the theme of an international MRA conference in Kampala in June.

In her opening address, read by Mayanja Nkangi, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Mrs Museveni, the First Lady of Uganda, said: `The problems of Africa, and of the world, are man-made, and the solutions to them are surely within ourselves. If we listen and obey the spirit of God which is within each one of us, we will find these solutions.'

Those attending came from 17 countries, including Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Sudan.

During a plenary session on `Corruption, the cancer which eats the moral fibre of our society', Ashwin Patel, director of a firm of chartered accountants in Kenya, said: `With corruption there is no neutrality. One is either part of the answer or part of the problem.' In his own firm, he decided 30 years ago to be part of neither the receiving nor giving of bribes. Rather than driving customers away, this decision had led to a massive increase in business opportunities.

In a moving session on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Dr C Ssozi from Mildmay Referral Hospital, Uganda, said that of the 49 million people infected by HIV worldwide, 37 million were Africans. In Uganda alone 1.9 million people were HIV positive or had AIDS, including 67,000 children. Over 1.7 million children were now orphans. But Uganda's policy of openness about AIDS had already led to a dramatic fall--from 30 to 9 per cent--in the number of HIV positive women attending ante-natal clinics, the biggest drop taking place in the 15-19 year group. But she pointed out that 95 per cent of the $12 billion already spent on HIV/AIDS had been used for research and treatment in rich, industrialized countries.

The wide range of topics discussed at the six-day conference included: `Making faith practical in the light of present religious difficulties'; `Conflict resolution through a culture of negotiations'; `Economic rearmament for poverty eradication'; `Healing the environment'; and `The role of the woman in developing a culture of peace'.

John Ntimba, a member of the Judicial Service Commission, closed the conference by referring to the worldwide spiritual drought caused by fear, dishonesty, resentment and selfishness. The cure lay in accepting the challenge `to devise and produce the irrigation machinery to fight this spiritual drought'.