Madonna is making headlines again, only this time it isn’t her latest daring video and she isn’t kissing another female celebrity. She hasn’t even published a book of simulated acts of bestiality. She’s adopted a child.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad, you say. It’s kind of nice actually, except when you look closely at the situation.

The boy isn’t an orphan for one thing, although he resides in an orphanage. His mother died shortly after he was born, but his father is living. His father is just too poor to be able to take care of him. And so his father presented him to Madonna, apparently as part of a group of children that were lined up for her to choose from. Little David Banda was the one who won the American Idol, Madonna, as a mum.

Madonna does plan to help the community, in a Madonna sort of way. She is setting up a charity that will found an orphanage. The children there will learn Kabbala, Madonna’s religious phase at the moment.

Malawi is a country ravaged by poverty with hordes of children orphaned by an AIDS epidemic. Unfortunately not all of them will find a rich, self-indulgent celebrity to adopt them. Malawi could use an orphanage that cares for 1000 more children, but in whose interest is Madonna really acting?

David Banda is 1 year old. He will leave the country of his birth, his father will hope for his future as the son of a wealthy woman. Madonna will have satisfied a whim.

Madonna has circumvented the law in Malawi that doesn’t allow adoptions unless the applicant has fostered a child for two years while living in Malawi. She has an “interim” adoption that lets her keep the child for a year at which time, if she is a good parent, the adoption will become permanent.

Foreign adoptions of African children are on the increase as agencies spring up to meet the demand of American and European wealthy would-be parents who can afford the price of an international adoption.

Madonna can afford it. She could afford to change the lives of every man, woman and child in that small village in Malawi. She could afford to give David Banda’s father the means to keep and raise his son. She can also afford to convince a desperate father to give her his child and a judge to allow her to take him.