by Guy Arnold
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Western critics often take African leaders to task for shielding one another or refusing to criticize individual state or leader deficiencies: the reluctance to condemn Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe for his land policies at the turn of the century is a good example and implicit in such criticism is the suggestion that Africans cover up the corruption or other shortcomings of their continental peers. This Western attitude is doubly hypocritical. In the first place, most Western governments have been prepared to deal with leaders and governments whose corruption is often notorious when it suits them to do so. More important, however, is the comparable reluctance of Western governments to criticize each other. President Chirac of France and Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy both have reputations for corruption that would place them high in any pecking order, yet their European counterparts, who readily denounce corruption in Africa, deal with their European counterparts without qualms or complaints.
Some aspects of corruption have a lighter side to them. It was only possible to salute the brazen impertinence of Nigeria’s Gen. Abacha as he despatched Nigerian troops under ECOMOG to restore to power the democratically elected government of President Kabbah in Sierra Leone. The notion that it was better to keep the Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers outside the country also played a role in the decision. In any case, ‘Kabbah’s government was as corrupt and neo-patrimonial as any other, but as in the case of Liberia a former rebel leader had been given legitimate status in order to stop the fighting’. Sierra Leone, indeed, has a long history of corrupt practices to its credit. ‘…the parallel economy in Sierra Leone, which exceeded the official economy in size, expanded as a consequence of the systematic corruption, theft of state revenues and personalist rule of President Siaka Stevens between 1965 and 1985.’39 In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, unfortunately, the Nigerian troops became as mired in corruption and self-seeking as the regimes they were supposedly coming to discipline. There is little evidence to suggest that democratic elections reduce corruption though, for a time, they may lead to greater openness so making it easier to spot the corruption that is taking place. Chabal and Daloz, already quoted, suggest that some corruption may be regarded as an habitual part of everyday life, an expected element of any social transaction. ‘Provided the beneficiaries of graft do not hoard too much of what they accumulate by means of the exploitation of the resources made available to them through their position, and provided they redistribute along lines that are judged to be socially desirable, their behaviour is deemed acceptable.’40 In other words, there is unlikely to be much censorship of corrupt practices if their fruits are suitably redistributed to the patron’s followers. Condemnation is reserved for cliques who appropriate public resources for themselves purely out of greed.
One final comment is worth making. In developed societies such as those of Europe high levels of corruption can be subsumed by the system and only occasionally do they erupt to become major public scandals. In developing countries where most systems remain fragile and the majority of the people are extremely poor corruption is at once more apparent and often more necessary to the working of the system as a whole. And here it is worth pointing out that there is nothing to prevent those Western countries that so readily condemn African corruption from seeking out the secret accounts of money laundered out of Africa by corrupt rulers to return such funds to the successor governments for the provision of social services such as schools or clinics.
CHAPTER FORTY
Century’s End: Globalization
The 40 years from 1960 (the annus mirabilis of independence) to 2000 were a period of momentous changes for the whole African continent. Most African countries achieved their independence in the 1960s, though not the white-dominated South, but freedom, as they soon discovered, was a relative term. Poverty, lack of trained personnel and poor – in some cases non-existent – infrastructure meant a continuing reliance upon the former metropolitan powers for aid and it soon became clear that aid only came with strings attached. It was Africa’s misfortune to achieve independence at the height of the Cold War with the result that its newly independent states at once found themselves being drawn into a global confrontation that was none of their concern. The determination of the West to ensure that Africa was attached to its camp was in reality a policy designed to control Africa’s resources on the one hand and ensure that African economies remained tied to Western prescriptions on the other. What the West did not want and managed largely to avoid was an ‘independent’ Africa able to go its own way. Manipulation of weak states, the provision or withholding of aid, the presence of a growing number of expatriates as advisers, and the proliferation of aid agencies and non-government organizations between them ensured that there were more expatriates helping Africa to be independent than ever there had been to administer it in colonial times. This, in sum, was the neo-colonialism that Nkrumah had denounced. The influx of newcomers happened at great speed, with the Cold War as its raison d’être. Thus Africa faced both the former colonial powers and the new Cold War warriors – the US, the USSR and China – each in pursuit of its own economic and strategic interests.
African awareness of its weakness was the driving force behind the search for African unity but this failed in the face of the individual nationalisms of the new states whose leaders above all relished their newfound power. In the years that followed, almost all African states experimented with different political forms – the bequeathed Westminster democratic pattern, French-style presidential rule, the one-party state, military rule, populist dictatorship – and many such experiments, inevitably, led to violence. By the 1990s African populations had become tired of overbearing rulers and there was a continent-wide move back to democracy. More than half the states of Africa experienced wars, whether with neighbours or internal civil wars, during these years and the military – the soldier in his battle fatigues clasping his Kalashnikov – became a familiar symbol of the continent. None of this should have been surprising. The rapid withdrawal of the imperial powers, which at best left inadequate structures behind them, created a vacuum that could not easily or quickly be filled. In any case, the return of the imperial powers as aid donors and the arrival of the Cold War warriors put intolerable strains upon the new governments that were ill-equipped to deal with the pressures levelled upon them. It would be quite unrealistic to expect an entire continent that had been relieved of its colonial masters over an incredibly short period of two decades to be able to settle down as viable nation states without upheavals and violence. Empires do not disappear that easily. It is worth considering, even if unproductive, what would have happened had Africa achieved its independence when there was no Cold War confrontation and the major powers had simply left the continent to its own devices.
The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed some remarkable developments in Africa as well as some depressing re-runs of past failures. On the plus side was the final end of apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa to be followed by the uniquely humane presidency of Nelson Mandela while continent-wide demands for greater democracy marked the passing of an age in which dictatorial rulers were any longer to be accepted as the norm. On the debit side was the continuing violence that had come to be seen as the apparent hallmark of much of Africa: civil wars in Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Algeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone that between them encompassed irreconcilable differences inherited from the colonial age, simple power struggles between warlords, ideology against religion and the collapse of state structures. The Cold War may have come to an end but big power interventions had not ceased and Africa remained the world’s weakest economic region, aid dependent, and subject to endless pressures to accept World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programmes designed to maintain the West’s economic grasp on the continent. Part of Africa’s problem has always depended upon external perceptions: how it is seen from outside has done a great deal to perpetuate the straitjacket in which the continent is bound. If the major Western powers insist that
Africa is an investment risk such an attitude all but ensures that it does not obtain the investment it needs. People and nations believe what they want to believe and relentless denigrating media coverage of Africa has not helped the continent overcome its problems.
Much publicity has been given to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa and its devastating effects have yet to be fully realized. In South Africa, some 4.7 million of the population in 2002, or one in nine, was HIV positive, with a higher mortality rate among women than men. A study by Statistics SA found that the overall proportion of deaths due to HIV/AIDS had nearly doubled from 4.6 per cent in 1997 to 8.7 per cent in 2001. From a policy perspective the government continued to send out mixed signals on the means to fight the disease.1 An ILO paper which examines the impact of AIDS upon the working populations of African countries affected by the pandemic comes to a gloomy conclusion about prospects in the early years of the twenty-first century.
The losses of human capital will not be confined to those with the greatest level of education and training so that the costs of the epidemic will be much greater than those normally estimated by economists. Since the system requires many levels and types of skills and capacities – both of men and women – it becomes even more necessary to ensure that mechanisms are strengthened to supply the levels and mix of skills that are needed for development. This is the policy problem: to ensure that skills are created as appropriate and labour supplies maintained as the HIV epidemic threatens to erode them. The problem is compounded by the fact that the epidemic systematically undermines the capacity to achieve these objectives, at precisely the time that labour supplies are most threatened. This is the challenge facing developing African economies…2
Here, set out in dry language, is one of the major problems overshadowing advance in sub-Saharan Africa.
The UNDP Human Development Report 2003 highlights the ongoing problems that most affect development in Africa, beginning with the trade policies in rich countries that remain highly discriminatory against developing country exports. The report looks at the 1980s and 1990s when ‘globalization was seen as the great new motor of worldwide economic progress. Poor countries were assumed to be able to achieve economic growth as long as they pursued good economic governance, based on the precepts of macroeconomic stability, liberalization of markets and privatization of economic activity.’ These precepts for development proved hugely inadequate for many parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa. To give one example, ‘Poor, remote countries like Mali generally connect to the world economy by producing a few traditional primary commodities. But slow world market growth, unchanging technologies and often volatile and declining world prices for these commodities offer much too narrow a base for economic advance.’3
In a relatively upbeat assessment of African economic advance, Transforming Africa’s Economies, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) claimed that Africa made impressive economic progress in the 1990s:
The climate became more conducive to domestic and foreign investment. Capital markets broadened and deepened. Demand for African manufactured goods increased in Europe and the United States. And in the second half of the 1990s real GDP growth in Africa averaged 4 per cent a year, exceeding the continent’s high population growth rate of 2.8 per cent a year. Export growth nearly doubled to 8 per cent a year. Real GDP grew by 3.2 per cent in 1999, up from 3.1 per cent in 1998.4
There followed many caveats but like other international bodies appraising African performance, the ECA broadly supports the orthodox line linking development to good governance.
In 2000 The World Bank produced a report, Can Africa Claim the 21st Century.5 Gloomily, it makes the following points: ‘Moreover, many development problems have become largely confined to Africa. They include lagging primary school enrolments, high child mortality, and endemic diseases – including malaria and HIV/AIDS – that impose costs on Africa at least twice those in any other developing region. One African in five lives in a country severely disrupted by conflict.’ The AIDS pandemic, in particular, is eating into the continent’s much-needed and fragile class of educated technocrats and other skilled personnel. As always, defining the problems is easier than prescribing solutions and there is a certain déjà vu quality about statements such as ‘investing in people is also essential for accelerated poverty reduction’. Of course this is true but the World Bank has been saying such things for years. Africa must increase its competitiveness, reduce its aid dependence and so on. As this report also points out, ‘Africa’s average output per capita (in constant prices) had changed little by the end of the 1990s from 30 years before’ yet the Bank and other external organizations rarely ask why there has been so little change or, even more important, whether the policies they have advocated may have been part of the problem. Having enumerated more problems and posed the question, is it credible to ask whether Africa can claim the twenty-first century, the report suggests that Africans and their development partners must reverse the economic marginalization and exclusion of recent years. This suggestion goes to the root of the matter, for it assumes that Africa cannot solve its problems on its own. Further, given the arguments advanced throughout this book that manipulation by the external ‘partners’ is one of the continent’s main problems, it is time for Africa to face up to the fact that prescriptions from outside – to take the World Bank route – are no more likely to solve the continent’s problems in the new century than they were in the century just past. Accompanied by a splendid diagram of inter-connecting circles, the report6 suggests that Africa should focus development efforts on four groups of issues with strong cumulative interactions as follows: improving governance and resolving conflict; investing in people; increasing competitiveness and diversifying economies; and reducing aid dependence and debt and strengthening partnerships. Such prescriptions read well yet, despite periodic attempts to change its approach, the World Bank has always spoken oracularly as from on high and readers of such a report are left with the sense that there is no African input, no understanding of what is happening on the ground and why. One last quote from this report is worth recording because if the advice it offers is followed it will help to accelerate the collapse of state structures that are doing so much to create Africa’s ‘failed states’. Having made the highly debatable statement, ‘Consensus is emerging that aid should be used to reduce poverty’, the report lays down: ‘To make aid more responsive to the needs of the poor, its delivery must be deconcentrated to local governments and communities. At the same time, these entities need to be strengthened to improve their capacity to manage development programmes.’ Bypassing governments is no solution to Africa’s problems however culpable or inefficient such governments may be. It is not the business of aid donors, whether the World Bank at one end of the spectrum or NGOs at the other, to decide that governments should be bypassed and aid be provided independently at the discretion of donors. That way can only lead to greater disintegration of weak states and pave the way for yet more intervention from outside. Those who take it upon themselves to ‘aid’ Africa are almost without exception believers in the inevitable forward march of globalization and it is to this topic we must now turn.
GLOBALIZATION
Those who argue that globalization is an inevitable process never explain why. If it becomes inevitable, in the sense that it dominates the entire world system of trade and investment, this will be the result of international bullying by the major economic powers, led by the United States, in order to force open all markets to corporate interests. One definition of the process is provided in Our Global Neighbourhood.7 ‘The term globalization has been used primarily to describe some key aspects of the recent transformation of world economic activity. But several other, less benign, activities, including the drug trade, terrorism, and traffic in nuclear materials, have also been globalized. The financial liberalization that seems to have created a borderless world is also helping international criminals and creating numerous problems for poorer
countries.’ It continues: Technological advances have made national frontiers more porous. States retain sovereignty, but governments have suffered an erosion of their authority. They are less able, for example, to control the transborder movement of money or information. They face the pressures of globalization at one level and of grassroots movements and, in some cases, demands for devolution if not secession at another. In the extreme case, public order may disintegrate and civil institutions collapse in the face of rampant violence, as in Liberia and Somalia. Although many would agree that there is need for global management of population, consumption and the environment, the forces working to globalize the entire world economy are very powerful, driven by corporate greed, while the forces working to control the environment on behalf of everybody are thwarted by the greed of the same forces that would globalize the world economy.
