Why my wife chained up the vicar

There's no easy way to say this. The other day I found my wife chaining up the vicar. In broad daylight. In the high street.

It was, she tells me, in a good cause - yet isn't that what the Camelot fat cats say about the lottery as they award themselves their big bonuses? As it happens, she was on about winners and losers too.

The idea was that the clanking clergyman was symbolising how Third World countries are imprisoned by debt. It's a serious issue, so stand by for some statistics. Their debt has just topped $2,000bn, twice as much as in 1990. Africa owes more than its entire annual output: a third of its annual export earnings goes to try to pay it off.

Money now flows from poor to rich: in 1993 the so-called developing countries spent three times more in servicing debts than they got in aid. They can't even pay the interest, so the crisis grows. Between 1983 and 1990, for example, they paid out $673bn on a debt of $644bn - and still owed $950bn.

The money devoted to this financial treadmill is lost to things that really matter. In Africa, four times as much is spent on it as on health and education. Unicef estimates that just pounds 49m of debt relief in Uganda would save the lives of nearly 400,000 children and give another two million primary education.

And so on. But, you may say, Third World countries embraced their debt by borrowing, just as the vicar was willing to be chained up. Certainly, a lot of the money did go on arms, misconceived projects, and downright boondoggles - encouraged by the lenders.

This joint imprudence became a crisis for the poor when the rich's interest rates shot up. Every extra 1 per cent added $5bn to annual repayments. (And six million jobs were lost in industrialised countries in the 1980s because money that used to be spent on our products had to go to servicing debt instead.)

It's a largely forgotten crisis. One Economist cover ran: "The debt crisis - RIP". And in a nice Orwellian touch, the World Bank - which is responsible for much of the mess - has changed the name of its annual World Debt Tables to the more upbeat Global Development Finance.

o MARTIN DENT is an honorary chief of the Tiv tribe of Central Nigeria, and a descendant of Thomas Buxton who, after William Wilberforce's death, got Britain to abolish slavery. And he has had a simple idea.

Ancient Judaism established jubilee years, at long intervals, when debts were annulled. Why not, he asks, have a one-off cancellation of the most onerous Third World debt to mark the Millennium? This would lift an intolerable burden and, as an unrepeatable event, would not fatally sacrifice financial principle.

His Jubilee 2000 campaign - allied with Christian Aid, the World Development Movement, other development groups, religious leaders, and trades unions - is spreading through Europe, and on to our high street. It suggests forgiving the unpayable debt - about one-third of the total - of some 50 of the world's poorest countries, depending on their satisfactory economic perform- ance. The nominal cost would be $100bn-$150bn, about half of 1 per cent of global GNP.

During the election, Tony Blair promised: "International debt reduction will be a top priority," adding that the proceeds should be "invested directly in poverty reduction".

Wouldn't that be a better way to mark the Millennium than that blasted dome at Greenwich?

o MIND YOU, some ministers are floating a plan that could justify the dome. They suggest bringing together world leaders on the Greenwich time line at the turn of the Millennium to pledge to end poverty.

Not another talking shop? It needn't be. For the OECD, the rich nations' club, has already agreed to target aid to cut the number of extremely poor people in half by 2015. Mr Blair endorsed this in a last-minute addition to his barnstorming speech at the New York Earth Summit last month. ("Is it achievable?" he asked International Development Secretary Clare Short before writing it in. "It is if the OECD says so," she replied.)

Ms Short and the veteran Dutch aid minister Jan Pronk put together a plan to reverse the recent decline in aid by the Millennium which could have rescued the summit. But Mr Pronk did not adequately allow for France and Germany, which, obsessed with meeting the Maastricht criteria, promptly shot it down. "I gather it only lasted two minutes," I said to him. "You're wrong," he replied. "It was two seconds."

o CLARE SHORT is the antithesis of one of her predecessors, Neil Marten, put in by Mrs Thatcher to slash the aid programme, who didn't seem much interested in "abroad". He once greeted a delegation from Swaziland by asking about their country's "offshore industry". When the visitors had gone, a bold official reminded him that Swaziland is landlocked. "I know that!" he retorted. "I thought they were from Botswana."