This from The Observer:

Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer | The Observer

The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high. His paper, published in the British Journal of Health Psychology, compares IQ scores with indicators of ill health in 126 countries and claims that nations at the top of the ill health league also have the lowest intelligence ratings.

[...]

Having examined the effects of economic development and income inequality on health, he was ‘surprised’ to find that IQ had a much more important impact, he said. ‘Poverty, lack of sanitation, clean water, education and healthcare do not increase health and longevity, and nor does economic development.’

[...]

Assuming for a second that his data are correct, and that IQ measures something significant (what we generally understand by the term “intelligence”), the above seems to suffer from that old precaution about correlation and causality. There is no reason provided (at least stated in the article — I guess I have to hold down the gag reflex and go read the full paper) to justify the use of the results of a particular test (IQ) as a cause, rather than as an effect.