EDITORIAL: Material Girl is doing good

While some may speculate on which is the worse fate - being raised in a Malawi orphanage or becoming a cute fashion accessory for a contemporary Madonna (and child) - such cynicism overlooks the fact that whatever her motive, the Material Girl is doing good. And that ought to be acknowledged.
Madonna (who famously said she protects her own 10-year-old daughter, Lourdes, from the same baneful influences the rock star herself has inflicted on everyone else's) can be criticised for hypocrisy and for her relentless egotism. One has even more reason to be sceptical because of the reassurance by Malawi officials to 13-month-old David Banda's family that Madonna - who staged a lavish mock crucifixion during her last world tour and has drawn complaints about blasphemy with her raunchy antics on an altar in her Like a Prayer video - is "a good, religious woman".
However, the reality is that everyone is better off from the adoption.
Tut-tutting and outrage at the preferential treatment given Madonna and husband film director Guy Ritchie for their pay-off that allows the couple to acquire the infant on probation (inter-country adoption by foreign nationals is forbidden in Malawi) are able to be silenced by her plans to spend millions of dollars on improving the lives of many Malawi children.
Over time, possibly tens of thousands of children will benefit from the school and orphanage that David's strange new mother is financing: the shared rewards of celebrity. The Bishop Elect of the Anglican Diocese of Lake Malawi, Nicholas Henderson, said the adoption flew in the face of Malawian governmental policy as well "as what might be construed as natural justice", adding that "it looks like yet another example of Western and indeed American colonialism muscling in to 'do good', seemingly oblivious of local opinion and culture".
There is no "natural justice" or nobility in impoverishment when the opportunity is available to improve the lot of so many. Much of the criticism is mean-spirited. Those pointing the finger need to ask themselves how much more they might have done for the welfare children in Malawi, one of the poorest countries on the African continent, whose people have been ravaged by an AIDS epidemic and 10 years of famine made worse by drought and where the median age is just 16 years (New Zealand's is 33.5).
The young there urgently need help from a world that shows a disturbing lack of interest in the nasty things that happen in Africa.