Africa, as they say, is en vogue. Huge concerts in the cause of alleviating the continent’s wide-scale poverty were held this past weekend in several industrialized countries. It’s unlikely that the vast majority of 800 million Africans got to see those concerts on television, let alone show gratitude for the musical contributions of well-meaning rock stars troubled by growing poverty and disease.

Tomorrow, the Group of Eight leaders who will meet for three days at Scotland will be exhorted by their host, Prime Minister Blair, to increase aid to sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries by $25 billion, a tripling of the current figure.

The G-8 leaders may not quite agree on that figure – which would be half of the total annual aid now given by the world’s 30 wealthiest countries to the 135 poorest ones – but they may well pledge a tad more to regenerate sustainable economic development in Africa.

If such aid is approved, it will come on the heels of the G-8’s announcement last month that Britain, Japan, Canada, America, France, Italy, Germany, and Russia would write off all the multilateral debts of 18 poor nations, including 14 in Africa.

That would amount to $40 billion, a fraction of the $1.5 trillion owed by developing states to mostly Western governments and financial institutions, but no small change either. Is any of this generosity going to make the slightest difference in stimulating economic growth in Africa?

Scarcely. Because, with the exception of South Africa, the huge continent lacks capital markets that are essential to economic velocity. Morgan Stanley Capital International’s influential emerging markets equity index doesn’t list any corporations north of South Africa until Egypt and Morocco.

“You have a limited number of countries … where you have stock markets,” Credit Suisse’s vice president of asset management, Robert Parker, told Reuters yesterday. “Where you do have stock markets … the size of the markets is small, liquidity is small, corporate governance is a problem. What the G-8 has not focused on is the development of local capital markets.”

That’s another way of saying that unless foreign direct investment and the involvement of the domestic and international private sector are dramatically enlarged, Africa’s development is likely to stay stagnant – no matter what warm and fuzzy rhetoric Mr. Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer, the excitable Gordon Brown, employ.

The efficiency and accountability that the private sector brings cannot be instituted by states that cling to the socialist dogma that their post-colonial satraps imposed, often violently and with the benediction of leftist European governments. Between 1960, when Europe’s African colonies started to gain independence, and 2004, Western donors poured more than $600 billion into the continent’s coffers. The beneficiaries? Mostly bureaucrats, kleptocrats, plutocrats, and povertycrats. And yes, also Swiss banks that welcomed the contents of plundered national treasuries. A continent rich in natural resources rapidly became capital poor.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reckons that in 2000, FDI was $1.4 trillion, of which Africa received but $19 billion. By 2002, global FDI had fallen to $651 billion, mostly because of the bursting of the technology bubble and the weakening dollar. That year, Africa got barely $11 billion.

Now FDI appears to be increasing, according to the OECD. Last year, the figure was $667.8 billion, a 12% increase from 2003. Investors in rich countries began to see enticing opportunities in emerging markets of the Third World, including China and India, but hardly any in Africa – with the exception of South Africa, Uganda, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt.

That’s six countries. But what about the other 42?

What G-8 leaders need to do beyond displaying their compassion for a continent that has 13% of the world’s population but 28% of its poverty, where 13 million people died last year from AIDS – and 26 million of the world’s 39 million AIDS patients live – is to demand the following in exchange for their largesse.

There’s been a decades-long feud over conditionality, which Third World officials have long considered that a dirty word. And not all conditionality makes sense. The most important is to focus on reforms that permit incentives to work and free markets to operate. Punitive measures against corruption, the end of subsidies, reductions in direct and indirect taxation, particularly at the top margins, i.e., on the next dollar earned. And, importantly, maintaining a convertible currency.

This is the same recipe that President Bush recommends for the American economy, so there need be no reluctance on the part of the administration to plump for these conditions. This is the leadership that will matter. Too many African leaders are taking the benevolence and tolerance of Western donors for granted. Certainly America and other G-8 members should show love toward a despairing continent. But that despair is largely self-inflicted. It’s time for tough love. No reforms, no rewards.

Mr. Gupte, a veteran journalist and author, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.