Ideas - How Stephen Lewis helped changed the world's mind about AIDS

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

"AIDS exacerbates and accentuates inequality," Stephen Lewis said in his final CBC Massey Lectures he delivered in 2005. Back then the willingness of the world’s richest countries to help in the HIV/AID crisis was in question. The former ambassador to the UN and Canadian political leader died March 31st at 88. He will be remembered for his unwavering efforts to bring international attention to the HIV pandemic in Africa — calling out Western governments and financial institutions. This podcast revisits Lewis's Massey Lectures and his overall message to make a difference."I thought I understood the way the world works. I don't. I'll devote every fibre of my body to defeating this viral contagion, but I cannot abide the willful inattention of so much of the international community. I cannot expunge from my mind the heartless indifference, the criminal neglect of the last decade [1995-2005], during which time countless people have gone to their graves, people who should still be walking the open savanna of Africa." — excerpt from Stephen Lewis in his 2005 CBC Massey Lectures.

What's that noise? I don't know. I get that checked. Quickly. Yeah, good point. Point S, Tires and Auto Service. You think Point S has good deals on tires? Definitely.

What makes you say that? This. Until May 31st, get up to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point S.ca.ca. Good point. Point S, tires, and auto service. This is a CBC podcast. If this were five years ago, and I'd been given the privilege of delivering the Massey lectures,

I might have adopted a more conciliatory tone. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. We're calling this episode Remembering Stephen Lewis. But 2005 is not 2000. In the interim, I've been emotionally torn asunder by the onslaught of AIDS, and it has profoundly changed my view of the world. My life is consumed by this plague. I can't deny it. It colors everything I believe and say. In 2005, Lewis was the UN Secretary General's Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa.

He'd been in the role for four years. As I write these words, I have many African friends who are even now gasping for a few more days of life. My impatience with the United Nations and with Western and African government stems in large part from their dilatory, often unconscionably dilatory, response to the pandemic. While it is true that I've been tough in places in these lectures, I don't believe I've gone overboard. Indeed, as measured against the human apocalypse, the reader may even conclude that I've been restrained. 2005 was also the year when Stephen Lewis delivered his CBC Massey lectures, entitled Race Against Time. He wrote them as deaths from AIDS-related illnesses reached their highest ever point, with over 2 million people dying in a single year, most of them in Eastern and Southern Africa.

I've spent the last four years watching people die. Nothing in my adult life prepared me for the carnage of HIV-AIDS. Between 1998 and 2000, I participated in a study of the Rwandan genocide commissioned by the Organization of African Unity, visits to commemorative sites reminiscent of Auschwitz, encounters with survivors, interviews with women who had been raped repeatedly during the genocide. It all felt like a descent into depravity from which there was no escape. and yet somehow, because it came to an end, because the little country of Rwanda is managing to piece itself together step by painful step,

there is at least a sense that the horrific events are rendered unto history. That is not to say that we should ever forget, only to say that it is over. But the pandemic of HIV-AIDS feels as though it will go on forever. Stephen Lewis died on March 31st. He was 88. He'd been many things to Canadians, a political leader, an ambassador to the UN, a weekly panelist on CBC Radio. But he'll perhaps be remembered most for his efforts to bring international attention to the HIV pandemic in Africa. Today, we return to 2005 and to the full force of Lewis's eloquence in service of that defining goal.

The adult medical wards of the urban hospitals are filled with AIDS-related illnesses, men, women, wasted and dying, aluminum coffins wheeling in and out in Kafkaesque rotation. In the pediatric wards, nurses tenderly removing the bodies of infants, funerals, occupying the weekends, cemeteries running out of grave sites. In the villages, hot after hot yields a picture of a mother, usually a young woman in the final throws of life. No one is untouched. Everyone has a heartbreaking story to tell. Virtually every country in East and Southern Africa is a nation of mourners. In July of this year, I was traveling in Kenya, visiting an association of women living with AIDS in a slum suburb of the city of Nairobi. The slum was teeming with orphans being cared for by the women left alive. In every such instance, there's always some kind of performance for the visitors.

as though the encounter would be incomplete or marred without it. We gathered outside one of the crumbling homes where six children ranging in age from five to 12 wearing ragged green school uniforms chanted the largely tuneless funereal dirge of their own composition. Here we are the orphans, carrying our parents in their coffins to their graves.

The song ended with the words, Help, help, help. And then there came forward a girl of ten, a translator at her side, to describe the last remnants of her mother's life. It was truly awful. The mother had clearly died only a few days before, and as the young girl described the journeys in and out of hospital, and her mother's final hours, she wept so uncontrollably, her words strangled in loss, tears gushing, not falling or streaming or pouring, but gushing, down her chest. and onto her sweater and then to the ground, as though in this one child, in this one moment,

all the untold agony of the pandemic was incarnate. In this context, in the midst of this nightmare, in this race against time, the Millennium Development Goals, the MDGs as they are called, seem strangely miscast. And yet the MDGs were and are the ostensible subject of these lectures. in a way which no one could have forecast, the MDGs have become the centerpiece of public policy in country after country, especially the countries of the developing world. They emerged from the UN's Millennium Assembly in 2000, when the international community, with surprising unanimity, decided that a number of targets had to be set for the year 2015,

essentially to confront the eviscerating poverty of so much of the developing world and Africa. in particular. So allow me to recapitulate the eight MDGs for you, remembering that the target date is 2015. Cut the worst of poverty and hunger in half, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality, reduced by two-thirds the under-five child mortality rate, reduced by three-quarters the maternal mortality rate, halt and reverse the spread of HIV-AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, ensure environmental, sustainability and develop a global partnership for development. It's important to note at the outset that every learned commentator from the World Bank to the United Nations Development Program UNDP asserts that not a one of the high-prevalence

HIV countries will make the goals. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa is so poor, so besieged by a range of communicable diseases, so lacking in human capacity, so barren of infrastructure, that that it is entirely likely that not a single country in the region will make the goals. Hindsight shows us that this sobering prediction was broadly correct. The deadline for the Millennium Development Goals was 2015. When that year passed, the United Nations Development Programme revise the goals and rename them. They're now the Sustainable Development Goals. They also have a new deadline, 2030.

We at UNDP believe everyone can have enough of what they need, living within our planetary boundaries, and we are working around the world to make this happen. Our goals to reach by 2030 are to eradicate extreme poverty, protect our environment, and much more. Hindsight also shows us victories paid off. Campaigns succeeded. The rate of death from AIDS-related illness has now fallen by 70%. New HIV infections among children are down by two-thirds over the past 15 years. Among women with HIV, nine out of ten know they have it. Among those who know, nine out of ten receive treatment. And in nine out of ten of those receiving treatment, the virus is suppressed and cannot be passed on.

But back in 2005, the willingness of the world's richest countries to help was in question. The attitude of Western governments and financial institutions became a target for Lewis in his first Massey lecture. The easy canard, of course, is to say that Africa is a basket case of anti-democratic chaos. The detractors finger eastern Congo, northern Uganda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe as examples of countries in such turmoil as to defy democratic development. And of course, in large measure in those specific instances, the detractors are right. But there are 53 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, increasing numbers of them embracing democracy, and it's the height of arrogance to consign them all to some self-inflicted purgatory. It's important to remember that

Africa was left in dreadful shape by the departing colonial powers and was subsequently whipsawed between ideological factions in the Cold War. But rather more of the war. But rather more decisive. It was also delivered through the depredations of the so-called IFIs, the collection of international financial institutions dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and including the African Development Bank and other regional development banks. The result of the IFI's destructive power over Africa was to compromise the social sectors, particularly the health and education sectors of the continent to this day. History conveniently overlooks the policies of the bank and the fund.

I don't intend to. In the late 80s and 90s, the IFIs launched what are famously known as structural adjustment programs or SAPs. Stripped of the econometric gobbledygook and overblown ideological formulations, SAPs were Reaganomics gone berserk. It is my contention that for almost 20 years, those rigid, fundamental, fundamentalist policies did extraordinary damage to African economies from which they have yet to recover. Everyone understood that SAPs were driven by conditionality. The bank and the fund would offer loans in return for which the recipient countries would have to live with certain conditions.

The conditions ranged from the sale of public sector corporations to the imposition of cost sharing, the euphemism for user fees imposed on health and education, to savage cutbacks in employment levels in the public service, mostly in the service sectors. To this day, the cutbacks haunt Africa. The IFIs continue to impose macroeconomic limits on the numbers of people, think nurses and teachers who can be hired, and if that doesn't do the trick, there are financial limits placed on the amount of money that can be spent

on the social sectors as a percentage of a country's gross national product. the damage is dreadful. One of the critical reasons for Africa's inability to respond adequately to the pandemic can be explained by user fees in health, that is, people can't afford to pay for treatment, and user fees in education, in other words, school fees, which helps to explain why so many orphans are out of school. Simply put, at the heart of structural adjustment policies,

there lay two absolutes, curtail and decimate the public, sector enhance at any cost the private sector. And there was a kind of forced agreement in place. Africa would improve its governance in return for which the donors would ensure that resources flowed to the continent. Many countries of Africa made a determined effort to honor their side of the bargain. The donors, specifically working through the bank and the fund, unleashed structural adjustment. It was immediately evident that the bank policies would do severe damage. Both the bank and the fund were treating Africa as though it consisted of mature economies to whom Western economic

protocols would apply. The upper echelons of the bank and the fund talked the worldly language of macroeconomic adjustment while Africa shredded its social sectors and poverty intensified. In fact, the constant increase in levels of poverty should have sounded a high decibel alarm. Instead, the cerebral aristocrats of the IFIs plowed ahead as if financial architecture mattered far more than human vulnerability. I watched the growing controversy over policy firsthand because of my formal appointment as the then Secretary General's representative to Africa. Here's how it played itself out. The United Nations established an interagency task force on Africa, specifically created to oversee the implementation of the agreement

to which I referred between the donors and the recipients. The task force met every couple of months in places as disparate as Khartoum and Geneva, and the attendance was always surprisingly good, virtually every UN agency, including the bank and the IMF, although the IMF didn't deign to turn up, as often as the others.

The task force almost immediately split into three factions. The first comprised the coterie from the IFIs in attendance at any given meeting. At the very least, the bank's vice president for Africa was present, accompanied by the chief economist, and occasionally someone from the fund. Then there was the other end of the spectrum. The chair of the Interagency Task Force was Professor Adabio Adideji, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa based in Addis Ababa. Proff, as he was everywhere known, was one of the most knowledgeable African leaders I have ever encountered.

The vice chair was Richard Jolly, now Sir Richard Jolly, deputy executive director of UNICEF, and a man universally admired for a truly astonishing intellectual blend of brilliance and decency. The secretary was Sadiq Rashid, a close personal friend, at Adegi's right arm at the Economic Commission for Africa, prodigiously informed and prodigiously hardworking. And I was part of that little group as a member of the task force ex officio. By far the greatest number of participants representing a range of UN agencies were in the middle somewhere, although in every crucial vote they sided with the Adideji Jolly Alliance.

The battles and bitterness knew no bounds. The World Bank representative, attired in a double-breasted blue surge suit, was clearly unamused by the entire process. Why in the world should the World Bank check in with any group of mortals so palpably of lesser grasp? And why should the bank suffer the indignity of explanation? It's hard to convey the harshness of the words that were exchanged. We loathed each other. And from Professor Adedegi and Richard Jolly, albeit cloaked in. academic dignity, there came ever more vigorous attacks on SAPs. The thing about structural adjustment

is how wrong-headed the policies were and how even the apologists for the bank gradually retreated in the face of the evidence. At one of our interagency meetings in Khartoum, attended by the bank representatives, we passed a Khartoum declaration in which it was said that SAPs were, quote, rending the fabric of African society, close quote. I vividly remember a meeting on African economic recovery, held in one of the committee rooms of the UN, when I asked Mark M. Brown, then a vice president of the bank, and explicitly not an ideologue, what he felt about the lingering damage of SAPs,

his answer lives with me to this day. Stephen, structural adjustment is dead. End quote. Melik Brown went on to become administrator of the UNDP. He is now chief of staff to Kofi Annan. He's a remarkably gifted man. I take his words seriously. But the truth is that structural adjustment is not dead. It's just morphed into other forms. The imposition of conditionality is still alive and well, fashioned now more often by the IMF as it continues to impose macroeconomic frameworks on impoverished African countries. I have come to the conclusion as I travel that the IMF simply doesn't understand the combined ravages of HIV AIDS and poverty. Simply fails to understand that you can't deny the hiring of health professionals in the face of an apocalypse just because you adhere religiously to some rabid economic dialectic, which says that no matter how grievous the circumstance, you can't breach the macroeconomic environment. I saw it in Zambia and I saw it in Malawi,

and in each case the governments were frantic, but the IMF wouldn't budge. I remember being in Malawi in 2002 at a roundtable discussion with the vice president and a number of civil servants from the Ministry of Finance. They were complaining bitterly about the limits imposed by the International Monetary Fund on Malawi's public sector pay levels and hiring intentions.

It was surreal. Here you had a country with huge human capacity problems that wanted desperately to retain its professionals in health and education and increase their numbers, but the IMF wouldn't allow them to do so. We're talking about a sovereign government,

fighting the worst plague in history with but a handful of professionals. According to the Minister of Health, Malawi has one third of the nurses it needs. In fact, in my observation, there's a total of 94 doctors in the public sector and two pediatricians in the entire country of 12 million people. And they weren't being allowed. I repeat, this sovereign government wasn't being allowed to hire more staff

and pay better salaries because it would breach the macroeconomic straitjacket. What makes me nearly apoplectic, and I very much want to say this, is that the bank and the fund were fully told about their mistakes, even as the mistakes were being made. It's so enraging that they refused to listen. They were so smug, so all-knowing, so incredibly arrogant, so wrong. They simply didn't respond to arguments which begged them to review the human consequences of their policies. the fact that poverty became increasingly entrenched or that economies were not responding to the dogma as the dogma predicted made no difference.

It was a form of capitalist Stalinism. The credo was everything. The people were a laboratory. What makes all of this so important is the need for radically new policies if Africans are to be given the opportunity to rescue their consequences. continent. The achievement of the MDGs has become a pipe dream in the minds of many because in the five years since they were promulgated, we've learned that HIV AIDS has sabotaged all of the socioeconomic indices, and the continued damaging Western policies in trade and aid and debt served to drive the nails into the coffins. In the bizarre circumstances of the pandemic, nails and coffins aren't just metaphors.

Stephen Lewis was well known for his eloquence, how he could strike a powerful image or deliver an unusual turn of phrase to make his case. But his eloquence had another part to it, and it was just as important to the strength of his message. He could hold an audience's attention while delving into the details of bureaucracy. His opening Massey lecture dissects what the UN calls

ODA, official development assistance. The truth is that every ODA figure is overstated, and I say that because so much of the money never gets to the recipient. ActionAid, the excellent UK non-governmental organization, released a revealing study of G8 foreign aid on the eve of the summit. ActionAid argued, and the arguments seemed to be unanswerable, that over 60% of ODA should, should be called phantom aid, aid that is never really available for the purposes pretended. Where then does the money go? To technical assistance, otherwise known as overpriced consultants.

To Tide Aid, otherwise known as the purchase of goods and services from the donor country's own firms, and to administrative costs, otherwise known as inflated overhead. Furthermore, according to ActionAid, and again unanswerable, is evidence that a considerable chunk of ODA comes with very particular strings attached, strings knotted by IMF conditionality, especially support for privatization. So, for instance, in the case of the ground nut industry in Senegal or cotton marketing in Burundi and Madagascar, or urban water in Tanzania, foreign aid is available if the government will agree to privatize the industries and price them out of the range of the impoverished citizenry. If only 40% of foreign aid is real aid, as opposed to the phantom variety, then the G8 countries have to go well beyond doubling or tripling their pledges.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has authoritatively pointed out that of the $3 billion, the U.S. annually pledges to have, Africa, less than one billion actually finds its way to poverty reduction. It becomes evident that if the phantom aid were made real, the money then available could be used to dramatic and sterling effect. I'm weary beyond the definition of weariness at the way in which the G8 plays with figures. So far, they've had an unblemished record. of betraying their promises. I do not believe that the record was broken

at the Glen Eagle Summit, except in the exotic mind of Bob Geldof. Yes, there will be more money by 2010. Yes, every penny makes a difference to Africa and potentially to lives saved. I'm not so foolish or commudgeonly as to deny that reality, but spare me the claims of breakthrough. A fair trade,

regimen is a will of the wisp. Cancellation of debt is a fragment. The increase in foreign aid is purely conjectural. We have Kilimanjaro to climb before we meet the needs of Africa. This is a special episode of ideas, remembering Stephen Lewis, who died at the end of March. I'm Nala Ayyed. What's that noise? I don't know.

I get that checked. Quickly. Yeah, good point. Point S, tires and auto service. You think Point S has good deals on tires? Definitely. What makes you say that? This.

Until May 31st, get up to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point.c.ca. Good point. Point S, tires and auto service. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.

I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. In November 2025, the Stephen Lewis Foundation held an event at Glen Gould Theatre in Toronto called Race Against Time 20 years later. Participants looked back on years of huge progress in Africa after Stephen Lewis delivered his Massey lectures 20 years earlier. They spoke of the vast increases in the availability of anti-retroviral treatments,

the real prospect over the next decade of ending. the AIDS pandemic altogether. They also spoke of renewed fears. In particular, the effect of steep drops in international aid is especially from the U.S. HIV cases are now rising again in Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. The UN attributes the rise to a lack of services and to punitive laws aimed at HIV sufferers and homosexuality. A new report from the Joint United States, Nations program on HIV AIDS declares ending AIDS today is, quote, not a mystery, it is a choice. International aid money was crucial to the 20 years of progress in Africa. And back in 2005, when Stephen Lewis began his Massey lectures, he was determined to push Canadian Prime Minister

Paul Martin into spending more. He brought up the UN's target for wealthy countries, putting 0.7% of gross national income towards international aid, a target that Canada has never met. We declare our support for the crusade to make poverty history. We say we want to get to the 0.7%, but we resolutely refuse to set a timetable. The Prime Minister says that there's nothing in internationalism worse than to make promises that are not kept. That's the real immorality, he argues. With respect, he's wrong. The real immorality is for one of the most wealthy and privileged countries in the world to fail to respond adequately to the life and death struggle of hundreds of millions of impoverished people.

The irony is that on an issue like HIV-AIDS in the developing world, Canada's record is excellent. The reality is that our initiatives on the pandemic are completely eclipsed by our failure. on foreign aid. I've put great emphasis on trade and debt and aid in this opening lecture for two reasons. First, these components effectively constitute the

final and decisive millennium development goal, develop a global partnership for development. Second, every other goal, without exception, is completely or significantly dependent on this one. There's no way around it. Unless we can summon a

continuous flow of resources, the goals are doomed. The particular focus on official development assistance is also deliberate. While it is true that economic growth is ultimately tied to trade, there can be no sustained growth until the burden of disease is dealt with. It's a fatuous fantasy to think that whole populations barely able physically to survive can drive the economic engine. Restore health and will restore hope for a roe.

robust economy. The two are inseparable. But it will never happen without a gigantic boost in foreign aid. It's foreign aid that gets plowed into the social sectors, not private money, not foreign investment, not the dollars from commercial banks. If the promises of the G8 summit fall apart, Africa falls apart with them. I may be a voice in isolation, but I'd be prepared to bet that the so-called doubling of aid by 2010 is as illusory as a mirage in the desert. Early on in my tenure as envoy, I visited a little community center, run down, falling apart, but vibrant, in Kigali, Rwanda, where one or two hundred schoolchildren and their caregivers gathered at the end of each day for milk and cookies and play.

The children were sitting on the lower steps of the compound's porch, and I was drawn to a trio of young girls. They turned out to be sisters, each of them consumed by shyness in the presence of a white visitor. I bent down to talk with them, turning to the youngest whom I found irresistible. She had the sweet, trusting face of a six-year-old, uncomfortably thin, very plain of feature, hair unkempt and straggled,

but the entire portrait transformed by radiantly piercing green eyes. I asked about the parents. The father was dead. The mother was sick. I asked who looked after the girls. They looked after themselves. I asked if they went to school. They did occasionally when they didn't have to care for their mother. The conversation was confined to that one little girl who answered me in whispers so muted that I had to place my ear almost to her lips to hear. We finished talking, and I got up and walked the hundred yards or so to the far end of the compound, where the women caregivers had gathered in a raucous singing and dancing crowd

to tell me about their grievances. They were tremendously animated and articulate, many of them HIV-positive, filled with predictable dread about what would happen to their children when they died. I was standing just in front of them, asking questions, answering questions, when I suddenly felt a tiny figure tuck itself into my body so close, so tight, it was as if we were welded one to the other. The little girl had come the full length of the compound, just to seek the warmth of a friendly abysmal.

whom she did not know. I put my arms around her as we stood, locked together, and she followed the conversation with intensity, looking up at me every now and again with those eyes, those piercing green eyes. The exchange with the mothers ended. I had to leave. I bent down and gently kissed the little girl in the cheek, and she looked at me, those eyes again looked at me, and they said it all. No accusation, just resignation, another adult leaving her behind. It has become the story of the children of Africa. I've never forgotten, and we'll never forget that encounter. I found the three sisters again a couple of years later. Miraculously, the mother was still alive, albeit ill. I shall try to see them again soon. Indeed, I anticipate.

seeing them next month. I wanted to do these lectures for all those little girls and all those mothers whose lives have been torn from their moorings and whose future is in the hands, at least in part, of those who have always pretended to care

and have never really cared. Thank you. That's how Stephen Lewis ended his opening Massey lecture in 2005. If you'd like to hear the complete lecture, we've posted all five episodes of Race Against Time in full on our website, cbc.ca.ca.com. Ideas. Over the course of his lectures, Stephen Lewis described his love affair with Africa,

the role of education and combating aids, and the need to support women in particular. Here's Stephen Lewis in Toronto, delivering his fifth and final Massey Lecture. We are in a desperate race against time, and we're losing. It's simply impossible to reduce poverty, hunger, gender inequality, disease, and death significantly at the present pace. And other than the contrapuntal beat of hyperactive rhetoric, the necessary acceleration is nowhere evident.

Alas, man and woman cannot live by rhetoric alone. That being the case, what I would like to do in this final lecture is to advance a number of ideas, possibilities, suggestions, recommendations, solutions, which, were they to be applied to Africa in whole or in part, would give the continent a much better chance of survival. Some of the suggestions are sound, some are unself-consciously eccentric, some will be seen as implausible. In certain instances, I highlight initiatives that are already in place, but which carry high levels of risk or uncertainty requiring a special declaration of support. I offer them all as a gallery of alternatives in good faith. I would offer almost anything as an antidote to the

pathetically blinkered and unimaginative current approach which holds the continent in thrall. First then, let me address the G8 summit. Something occurred in July 2005 of the summit of Glen Eagles in Scotland that was deeply regrettable. Because of all the hype, because of the live eight spectacle, because of the Madison Avenue role of Geldof, Bono was much more measured, I note, and above all, because of the brilliant co-option of the NGO community by Tony Blair, civil society was effectively muzzled in its response. Its normally tough analytic appraisals were replaced by adoring complicity. The principal NGO community suddenly found itself basking in the incestuous aura of power. It was as if everyone was in the same tent while

Tony Blair did his laying on of hands. Most of the major NGO players knew that they'd been had, but there was a willful contagion of laryngitis. To read their press releases was almost comical. The words lay leaden on the page. They could barely summon a twitch of indignation, let alone a spasm of outrage. Let me offer a rather different response. this is what should now happen. The Jubilee Coalition, that International Alliance of Religious Groups and other activists who have done such a superb job driving the cancellation of debt, should, on an emergency basis, be expanded into a coalition on the cancellation of agricultural subsidies. The first target is the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong in December of this year.

The lobbying between now and then should be furious. we're in real trouble on trade. The prospects are bleak. Unless there is a break in the impasse at Hong Kong, unless the European Union and the United States do a vault face on agricultural subsidies, this round of the WTO talks is effectively doomed, and with it, Africa's access to international markets. On debt, the existing coalition should go flat out for the cancellation of all remaining African debt, still over $200 billion for all countries. The modest progress at Glen Eagles, $40 billion for 18 countries,

14 of them African, should be seen as a foot in the door rather than a major achievement. We have to break the pattern of obsequious rejoicing for every incremental fraction. On official development assistance, on official development assistance, what is needed is a year-by-year accounting,

of individual G8 contributions. This business of doubling aid by 2010 or tripling aid by 2015 just doesn't work. What happens in the intervening years when there are no interim goals? The world has to be made to understand that the target set at Glen Eagles

are critically flawed on two grounds. They won't be reached and they're not high enough. Consider this. The G8 countries vowed that they would double annual aid to Africa by 2010, that is, another $25 billion a year. But UNAIDS, the United Nations body which coordinates all of the agency activity in combating

the pandemic, UN AIDS has recently released a definitive report indicating that by 2008, two years before that deadline, HIV AIDS alone will require $22 billion a year, most of it, for African countries. what immediately becomes clear is that the G8 target is unacceptably low. Where is the money for poverty, hunger, education, water, sanitation, nutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, other diseases, the fight against infant malnutrition and mortality and environmental sustainability. They needed an extra $50 billion a year by 2010, not $25 billion, and they were afraid to ask for it. afraid even though the $50 billion would simply reflect the target of 0.7% of gross national product

to which all Western governments are supposedly committed. The pittance promised by the United States doubling $3 billion annually, the current U.S. level of aid to Africa, to $6 billion by 2010, instead of $16 billion, which would represent their fair share, dooms the G8 bargain. It's the old story. Set your sights low enough to increase your chances of success and hope that no one notices. I'm not such an oath. I'm not so curmudgeonly as to diminish the achievement of modest additional foreign aid. It's important. But it should be accompanied by expressions of abject, near-gruveling apology, not by expressions of insufferable self-congratulation.

And there's something else that must change about the way in which the world works. At the 11th hour at Glen Eagles, the Japanese government, which had been resisting an increase in its annual contribution, suddenly promised to double aid to Africa in three years. It's actually a relative pittance since, as I noted in the first lecture, Japan gives so little now, approximately 1.5 billion a year. And what's more? Everybody recognized that Japan's sudden change of heart was tied directly to its pursuit of a seat on the security calendar. I would like to propose, therefore, that when and if Japan is elected to the Security Council, there be a written caveat which says that if the money to Africa is not identifiably doubled

by July 31, 2008, Japan forfeits the seat. Undoubtedly, that would unleash the winds of consternation, but it would also serve notice that the betrayal of the commitments made to Africa over the years will no longer be tolerated. Now, inevitably, I've begun this array of recommendations for Africa by addressing trade, debt, and aid because the G8 summit still sits high in people's minds. But that's just the beginning. Let me turn to other concrete proposals which strike to the heart of social change, and nothing lies closer to that heart than the plight of women. I therefore offer a recommendation, the second of the series, that speaks to this most important issue of all.

There must be created a true and formidable international agency on behalf of women as part of the multilateral United Nations system. It can start with a coalition of activist organizations outside the system and then muscle its way in, but we simply cannot continue to ignore more than half the world's population. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that as part of the reform mandate of the United Nations, The world must come to grips with the need for an overall agency for women. The difference such an agency would make to Africa alone knows no bounds. At long last, it would be possible for grassroots women leaders to do what they have forever wanted to do,

bring together community activists from each and every country in Africa and build a mass women's movement across the continent. The major international conferences of the past two decades have provided abundant proof, if only in teasing glimpses, that every country yields women of vibrant leadership capacity, were they ever to be given the opportunity on a regular basis to network, plan, share, and plot with their women colleagues in other countries, they could turn the continent on its head.

We're talking here about a whole new locus of power, the unleashing of a feminist dynamic to transform Africa and in the process, rescue the women of Africa from the cauldron of AIDS. It constitutes a tremendous opportunity. It constitutes a tremendous opportunity for the United Nations to move the sputtering engine of gender equality from neutral into high gear. I don't know how often over the last four years I've heard the phrase, women and girls are an endangered species.

It's uttered by women's advocates. It's intoned by academic experts. It's used by high-ranking government officials. It's invoked by UN colleagues. Behind the words, there lies an inviolable truth. The MDGs are doomed unless we make gender inequality history. The way in which AIDS exacerbates and accentuates inequality leads me to my next series of proposals for Africa.

They are based on the premise of universal treatment for all AIDS patients. Thus, third, we must maintain the momentum around what is called three by five. That is the brilliant design by the World Health Organization, WHO, to put three million people into treatment by the end of this year. We now know that the target will not be reached. It matters not. By the end of this year, we will be verging on one and a half million people in treatment, people who would otherwise be dead. By the time we reach the International AIDS Conference,

in Toronto in August 2006 will be very near the three million figure. It demonstrates that setting goals and targets remains one of the best possible strategies, and in this instance, the proof is in the living. In fact, the time has come to set parallel targets akin to that of treatment, beginning with a goal for voluntary counseling and testing, and another for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission. It is, of course, Heartbreaking that treatment is being rolled out so slowly. It is heartbreaking that vast numbers of people will die before treatment is available. It is heartbreaking that we're still dealing with user fees for treatment when it should be free.

It is heartbreaking that at precisely the moment when treatment is in sight, the pandemic has killed so many health professionals that we lack the human capacity adequately to respond. it is heartbreaking. The treatment has been around for nine years in the developed world and we're only now providing it for Africa. I want to embark on a brief historical excursion at this point, which won't take long, but which has been playing restlessly in my mind,

anxious to get out for three to four years. I had just begun the job of envoy, but I traveled to Rwanda to engage in a number of meetings and field visits. As it happens, my visit coincided with the World Bank decision to make a large loan to Rwanda under its multi-country HIV-AIDS program known as MAP, and in a meeting I had with the then World Bank representative in the country, he asked me to support his effort to persuade the bank headquarters in Washington

to allow a small percentage of the money to go towards treatment. I was eager to be of assistance. It may well have been the first time any World Bank official had asked me for a favor, I was probably intoxicated by the whiff of power. And upon returning to Toronto, I phoned a very senior member of the World Bank Establishment in Washington, who happened to be an admired acquaintance from one of his former incarnations. I laid out the request. I will never, but never forget the gist of the reply.

I'm paraphrasing now, but I'm paraphrasing with absolute certitude. You see, Stephen, it's difficult. Let's face the painful truth. The people with AIDS are going to die. The money would probably be better used for prevention. It's all a matter of trade-offs. I remember nearly jumping through the phone. What World Bank potion of Hemlock had poisoned the progressive leanings of this man whom I liked and respected?

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Trade-offs, I sputtered. You speak to me of trade-offs. you have the drugs to keep people alive and you're going to let them die because of a trade-off, why don't you find more money and do both treatment and prevention and screw the trade-off? I lost the argument. Reflecting on 20 years since Stephen Lewis gave these lectures, the head of the Stephen Lewis Foundation said, and I'm quoting directly here,

at the very moment when the end of AIDS feels within reach, our hard-won gains are under threat. The story of how AIDS stopped seeming unstoppable is now also a story about the effect of sudden funding cuts. Even in 2005, the AIDS pandemic presented a mixed picture. Huge advances in HIV treatment came at the same time as a huge rise in cases. Stephen Lewis concluded his CBC Massey lectures by addressing the tension he felt between hope and fear.

The mood swings around HIV AIDS are fascinating. The same experts and commentators in any given brief period can ricochet from hope to desolation. At one moment, we're ahead of the pandemic. The next moment, we're behind the pandemic. I've often given messages so mixed that listeners must wonder where in lies the truth. But the truth is that the truth inhabits both,

ends of the spectrum. At the level of the grand design, more money, more drugs, more prevention, more care, hope is instinctive. On the ground where people live and die, where the grand design has yet to be felt, the pandemic is hell on earth. You can't avoid its cruelty. Not long ago, I visited a little unincorporated town on the outskirts of the world. Lusaka in Zambia. The citizens of the township proudly showed me their graded road in a cinder block community center, which served as well as the local school. Then they asked me to say a few words of appreciation. We gathered on the gravely knoll outside the community center, several hundred strong. And as I was surveying the crowd just about to speak, I suddenly realized something that

jolted me to my inner being. In the front row was a group of very young mothers. mostly in their older teens or perhaps their early 20s, with their infant babes at their breasts. And everyone else, except for children, was elderly. I could scarce credit it. There were hardly any people in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s. I asked the crowd, how many were grandparents? And the majority of hands shot up.

I asked how many were looking after orphaned grandchildren and a majority of hands shot up. There it was. visually, the new face of large parts of Africa, or perhaps one should say, the absent face of Africa. My own view is that the horrendous toll is yet to come. Countries will be fighting for survival 10 and 15 years down the road. It's simply impossible to tear the productive generations out of the heart of a country without facing an incomparable crisis. When people say, sometimes triumphantly, that prevalence rates have leveled off. What they mean most often is that the number

of people who have died equals the number of new infections. It's Mathematicus diabolus. I live in hope. After all, if the Millennium Development Goals are not to be a mockery, then the virus will have to be subdued. Maybe the MDGs will provide the impetus that's needed on AIDS. But I also live in rage. I've told audiences before, and I'll say it again. I'm not some sweet, innocent. I'm 67 years old. I've learned something about politics, diplomacy, and multilateralism. I thought I understood the way the world works. I don't. I'll devote every fiber of my body to defeating this viral. contagion, but I cannot abide the willful inattention of so much of the international community.

I cannot expunge from my mind the heartless indifference, the criminal neglect of the last decade, during which time countless people have gone to their graves, people who should still be walking the open savannah of Africa. In 2005, for the first time since the end of Africa, of the Cold War, the world will pass the trillion-dollar mark in the expenditure annually on arms. We're fighting, fighting for $50 billion annually for foreign aid for Africa. The military total outstrips human need by 20 to 1. Can someone, anyone, please explain to me our contemporary balance? of values.

Thank you. You just heard our special episode titled Remembering Stephen Lewis, who died on March 31st at the age of 88. His 2005 CBCMASTE lectures were called Race Against Time and are available in full on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Tom Howell.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Emily Kiervezio, Senior Producer Nikola Lukshich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.