On a swing through Africa where he was crowned as a prince in Ivory Coast, the Reverend Jesse Jackson unveiled a plan calling on world powers to provide African countries with massive reconstruction aid in exchange for years of "colonial rape."

The plan Jackson announced in Nigeria this week would resemble the Marshall Plan enacted to rebuild war-torn European nations after World War II.

While the idea has some merit because much of the fortune that nations like the United States, England, Spain, France and Portugal now enjoy came courtesy of African slave labor, let's not kid ourselves even for a second.

This will never come to fruition.

Neither the U.S. nor European nations are going to pay for the kind of capital investment required to build roads, bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure needs of African nations thousands of miles away.

They barely make those needed investments within their own borders.

But let's say for the sake of argument that the plan did have a hope of becoming reality.

What assurances would the giving governments have that their funds would end up where they were supposed to?

To be frank, as a U.S. taxpayer, I would not endorse one dollar of my tax revenue going to African governments unless some new, very strict safeguards and conditions were put on the funding.

Jackson did mention Nigeria in this regard at the press conference and said Nigeria's people had to demand accountability from its leaders who are charged by international watchdog groups of stealing from the nation's oil wealth.

But the African corruption problem goes much further than Nigeria.

A recent report from a respected international anti-corruption group said that Africa is the most corrupt region in the world with 6 of the top 10 corrupt nations in the world. The African list of shame includes Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Burundi, Angola and Equatorial Guinea.

So it seems to me that Jesse should enjoy his new found prince-hood and work on a message for the African continent to get their houses in order on the corruption end before anyone even dreams of paying a cent for any African reconstruction plan.