The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  South Africa, notoriously, has ethnic problems too. Under apartheid, the white tribe treated blacks so badly that the rest of the world was moved to sever trade links with South Africa. Since 1994, the country has been ruled by the African National Congress (ANC), the biggest of the parties of liberation, whose leaders see their task as righting the wrongs of apartheid by narrowing the wealth gap between black and white South Africans. They do this partly by taxing the rich and spending the proceeds on schools, clinics, and pensions in poor areas. But they also use more controversial methods, such as compelling companies to favor blacks in hiring and promotion and allowing black-owned firms to charge more and still win public works contracts.

  Black executives and construction-firm owners do well out of this, but poor blacks suffer. Because the government pays a premium to black contractors, the budget for building houses for poor people stretches to fewer houses. Because employers are obliged to hire people on a basis other than ability, South African firms become less competitive, the economy grows more slowly and the jobless stay that way. Most worrying, the ANC’s policy of positive discrimination, coupled with increasingly frequent appeals to black solidarity, has spoiled the harmony of the Mandela years and re-polarized South African politics along racial lines. This is unlikely to lead to violence; whites who don’t like it can emigrate. But it is unlikely to promote prosperity either.

  I devote the longest chapter in the book to these issues for two reasons. First, you cannot understand African politics without grasping the influence of tribal hucksters. Second, because my proposed solution is highly controversial. It is an article of faith among many in the West that governments should favor certain ethnic groups, especially those who have been discriminated against in the past. But after seeing what quotas and ethnically divisive laws have done in Africa, I have to disagree.

  Smarter aid, more trade

  Any discussion of Africa’s poverty has to take into account its relations with the rest of the world. For half a century now, the continent has been deluged with aid, but this has failed to make Africans any less poor. The problem is that donors have opened their wallets with scant regard as to whether the money will be sensibly spent. They have bankrolled tyrants, such as Gnassingbé Eyadéma in Togo, or idealists with hopeless economic policies, such as Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Both types of aid have been wasted.

  Some people argue that aid to poor countries is always wasted and that we should cut it altogether. This is too simplistic. There is good evidence that aid works if directed to countries with sound economic polices and functioning institutions of government. Meanwhile, rich countries could do more good, more quickly, if they ripped down their trade barriers. Africa has terrific agricultural potential: fertile land, sun when the northern hemisphere is frosty, and cheap labor. The continent also has a comparative advantage in textiles, which are simple to make but require lots of labor. By exporting crops and shirts to rich countries, Africa could start on the path to growth. But imported food and textiles are precisely the things that rich countries most vigorously shut out of their markets.

  Farm products face meager quotas and steep tariffs. Worse, rich countries subsidize their own farmers so lavishly that African producers cannot compete. The total value of agricultural subsidies in developed countries is almost a billion dollars a day: more than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. This wastes Western taxpayers’ money and greases the ladder up which Africans are trying to clamber out of poverty.

  That ladder is slippery enough in any case. Africa needs more successful businesses, but doing business in Africa can be tricky. Bad roads, punctuated by road blocks manned by bribe-hungry policemen, make it slow and costly to move goods even short distances. Frequent power and water cuts force Nigerian firms to resort to what local businessmen call BYOI (“Bring Your Own Infrastructure”).

  Surprisingly, foreign investors in Africa make better returns than on any other continent. But this is partly because the perceived risk of doing business in Africa is so high that firms only invest in projects that promise a quick reward. And a recent trend to demonize Western companies that operate in poor countries, encouraged by campaigning charities and protectionist Western trade unions, has deterred many from putting money into Africa.

  Local firms, meanwhile, have been held back by arbitrary government, dysfunctional legal systems, and the difficulty, for those without political connections, of raising capital. Persistent and ingenious African businessfolk prosper despite all these obstacles, but many more would do so if the obstacles were removed.

  If the examples of most developed countries are anything to go by, Africa’s future prosperity will depend in part on the speed with which it adopts and adapts to new technologies. There are millions of wonderful ideas out there waiting to be borrowed, but so far Africa has been slow to train the necessary engineers and technicians to make use of them. As for original innovations, the continent produces depressingly few. But in several African countries, people recognize the need to embrace new technology. Even in backwaters such as Swaziland and Madagascar there are Internet cafés and pirated anti-malarial drugs.

  Technology does not mean only high technology. Simple devices can also change people’s lives. Take the rolling plastic water barrel, for example. Cheap but tough, the barrel is attached to an axle and frame, like a wheelbarrow. It can be filled with water and then pushed along the bumpiest of tracks. This enables women who previously had to carry water on their heads to transport much greater volumes of the precious liquid with less effort. Women who used to spend two hours a day fetching water are able to perform the same task in one hour a week.14

  Several African countries are trying to leapfrog from the pre-industrial present into the information age. For example, most of the fixed-line telephone networks in Africa are awful, so many Africans are jumping straight to the latest mobile-telephone technology. Being largely privately owned, African mobile telephone firms have to satisfy their customers or go out of business. In theory, Africans could leapfrog to the latest technology in many areas. Having few factories, the continent has few factories with outdated technology that people might hesitate to close. The question is, how can Africa keep pace with a world that won’t slow down?

  The country with the best chance of catching up is South Africa, the most advanced industrial nation on the continent. Since the relatively peaceful passing of apartheid in 1994, anyone concerned about Africa’s future has been watching South Africa carefully, for its success or failure will have a profound influence on its neighbors. A liberal, democratic South Africa would set an example for others to follow. A prosperous South Africa could provide the engine for the whole continent’s economic growth, much as Japan did in East Asia.

  South Africa’s early years as a democracy have not been easy. The euphoria that most South Africans felt under the presidency of Nelson Mandela has given way to confusion and tension under his successor, Thabo Mbeki. The economy has failed to grow fast enough to create jobs for the third or more of the South African workforce who are unemployed. AIDS threatens to kill millions. Education for black South Africans, deliberately neglected under apartheid, has barely improved under the new order. Crime, once kept more or less in check through brutality, has flourished now that the police can no longer kick confessions out of suspects, but most have not yet learned other ways of securing convictions.

  And yet there are reasons for optimism. In startling contrast to some of its neighbors, the new South Africa has enjoyed sound fiscal and monetary policies. Put simply, the government has not spent much more than it raises in taxes and has not printed money to pay its bills. A party that was once funded by the Soviet Union and determined to nationalize mines and to arrest speculators has made the hard transition to realism. South Africa still has the best roads, telephone lines, power stations, and restaurants in Africa. Its financial markets are more sophisticated than most of Latin America’s. Many of its companies are advanced enough to list on the Lond
on stock exchange. A takeoff is possible. It needs only wise leadership to let it happen.

  In the long run, I believe that Africa will prosper. Any country can make the transition from poverty to comfort. We know this because it has been done before, in countries as different as Italy and Japan. The technology that underpins prosperity already exists, and much of it is free. Want to know how to build a car, a microchip, or a factory for antibiotics? Walk into a library, or browse through old patent applications. The political, legal, and economic arrangements of rich countries are not exactly secret, either. When Japan’s rulers decided, in the nineteenth century, that they had to modernize to avoid being colonized, they sent their brightest officials to Germany, Britain, and America to find out how industrial societies worked. They then copied the ideas that seemed most useful and rejected the Western habits that seemed unhelpful or distasteful; within a few decades Japan was advanced enough to win a war with Russia – the first non-white nation to defeat a European power in modern times.

  Japan’s example should be important for Africa, because it shows that modernization need not mean Westernization. Developing countries need to learn from developed ones, but they do not have to abandon their culture and traditions in the process. No one who has seen a Shinto priest blessing a new bullet train would argue that Japan is a Western country, but the engineering that went into the train is of universal applicability. Africans face the same challenge now that Japan faced in the nineteenth century: how to harness other people’s ideas and technology to help them build the kind of society that they, the Africans, want.

  Some readers may find my arguments too narrowly materialistic. Money is not everything. Despite their poverty, Africans are not obviously less happy than, say, Japanese salarymen. The man in a suit on the Tokyo subway earns far more than a Cameroonian peasant, but the peasant seems less stressed and has more time to sit in the shade eating papayas and enjoying the company of his family and friends. Which of the two is better off? There is no reliable means of measuring this.

  Probably most Africans desire at least some of the material goods that are so abundant in industrialized societies. But are they prepared to undergo the wrenching changes necessary to industrialize? Some may not be, which is fair enough. Many subsistence farmers undoubtedly want to remain as they are. In their villages, they enjoy the familiarity that comes of living as their parents did and the warmth and security that comes from belonging to a community whose members look out for each other.

  For the most part, peasants who wish to remain peasants are free to do so. The problem in Africa is that there are not enough opportunities for the large number of people who want something more. Economic growth brings not only greater material wealth but also greater choice. In peasant societies, children usually start work in the fields before they reach puberty and carry on planting and harvesting until shortly before they die. In industrialized societies, children start school young and continue their education into their twenties, broadening their minds and preparing themselves to pick one or more of a dizzying range of careers. Some pine for the days when life was simpler, but no one ever voluntarily goes back to being a peasant.

  So the question is, how can African societies evolve so that more Africans have options other than growing yams? I think the answer is largely political: if Africa were better governed, it would be richer.

  Politics matter, as can be shown by looking at Germany or Korea. South Korea shares 5,000 years of history and culture with North Korea. West Germany had almost as much in common with East Germany before the nation was divided. During the Cold War, both Germany and Korea were split into communist and capitalist parts. In Korea, the division remains. In Germany, half a century of separate government created a huge difference in wealth. By the time the Berlin Wall was knocked down, West Germany was freer, happier, and four times richer than East Germany. In their occasional humorous moods, West Germans ask: “How do we know that East Germans are not descended from apes?” The answer: “No ape could have gone forty years without bananas.”

  In Korea, the difference is greater still. Politics on the peninsula mean the difference between penury and excess, between fear and freedom. After fifty years of Stalinism, North Koreans are at least ten times poorer than their southern cousins. Power cuts leave northerners’ homes dark at night and icy in winter. Famine killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in the 1990s and forced survivors to subsist on boiled grass and leaves. Dissidents are locked in labor camps or shot. Ordinary North Koreans are too scared of their rulers to talk openly to strangers. Contrast this with capitalist South Korea, a country where the only people who go hungry are fashion models, where manual laborers can afford foreign holidays, and where artists can lampoon the president in the crudest terms without provoking anything more frightening than a bored audience.15

  Similar, if less extreme, comparisons can be made in Africa. Consider, for example, Zambia and Botswana. These two neighboring states may not be culturally identical, but they are certainly cousins. At independence in the 1960s, Zambia was Africa’s second-richest country, whereas Botswana was what one British colonial official described as “a useless piece of territory.”16

  Zambia had a government determined to help the poor, rich copper mines, and a torrent of foreign aid. But the country’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, though well-meaning, was convinced that socialism was the route to prosperity. So he nationalized Zambia’s copper mines, told peasants what to grow, and forced them to sell their crops to the government at artificially low prices.

  Kaunda assumed that the mines would provide an inexhaustible flow of money, whether well-managed or not. He allowed the state mining firm to become bloated and corrupt. No serious effort was made to develop alternative sources of foreign currency. When the copper price plunged, Kaunda’s costly policies suddenly became unaffordable. Kaunda was succeeded by a former trade unionist, Frederick Chiluba, who promised liberal reforms. But these reforms stalled as Chiluba’s venal cronies began to loot the country. Corruption under Chiluba held Zambia back as surely as Kaunda’s socialism. Despite huge infusions of foreign aid, Zambians are now poorer than they were at independence.

  Contrast this with Botswana. The country’s mineral wealth, in the form of one of the world’s richest seams of diamonds, was discovered after independence. Unlike Zambia, Botswana spent the windfall wisely. Diamond dollars were ploughed into infrastructure, education, and health. Private business was allowed to grow; foreign investment was welcomed. Government was astoundingly clean. The budget is usually in surplus. The president, Festus Mogae, has been seen doing his own shopping. From 1966 to 2001, income per head in Botswana grew faster than in any other country in the world, from bare subsistence to well over $3,000.

  Botswana is a wonderful success story, but it is tiny. Only a million and a half people live there, less than the population of a single slum in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. For Africa to thrive, it needs more and bigger Botswanas. And for that, the continent needs saner politics.

  1. THE VAMPIRE STATE

  Africans are not yet free

  All he did was to stuff envelopes for the opposition party, but in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, it was a hazardous job. Deligent Marowa had joined the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) because, he said, it was “time to throw the crooks out of office.” But the crooks had other ideas.

  Marowa was kidnapped after an MDC meeting in a township outside Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. As he walked home in the dark, two cars drew up beside him. A couple of heavy-set men stepped out and forced him, at gunpoint, to climb in. Marowa recognized one of his captors – the man had been pointed out to him before as an agent of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO).

  Handcuffed to a door handle, Marowa was driven to a remote patch of waste land. There, his captors threw him to the ground and kicked him until he passed out. When he regained consciousness, they pushed a sharpened bicycle spoke into his rectum and up hi
s urethra.

  They left him for dead but, somehow, he made it to a hospital. A few days later, as he lay recuperating, they found him again. After dark, they slipped into the ward where he lay, flashed a gun, and said: “Let’s go.” Fortunately, another patient saw the pistol and screamed. Nurses came running, and the kidnappers fled. Marowa can now walk again, but he will never have children.

  I met him in June 2000, a few days before a parliamentary election in Zimbabwe. He was young, lean, and angry. His ordeal was intended to scare him into abandoning opposition politics but had had the opposite effect. He waved his X-rays at me like a banner of protest and promised not to rest until the ruling party, ZANU-PF, was turfed out of power – which would have happened that very week had the election not been rigged.

  There is a connection, though it is not obvious, between Marowa’s tragedy and the theme of this book. Africans are poor largely because they are not yet free. They live under predatory, incompetent governments, which they have great trouble shaking off. Their governments impoverish them in many ways: through corruption, through bad economic policies, and sometimes, as in Zimbabwe, by creating an atmosphere of terror that scares off all but the most intrepid businessfolk. In theory most Africans have the freedom to vote their rulers out of office, but in practice they find it difficult to do so.

  Zimbabwe’s tragedy is especially poignant because the country, which was once the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, has so much going for it. It enjoys a warm, gentle climate and is so beautiful that it should be choking with tourists. Besides the sun, wildlife, and waterfalls, it has music, art, flowers, and delicious food. In springtime, the jacaranda trees carpet the streets with blue petals. The wine may be lousy, but the beer is excellent and the beefsteaks in Bulawayo are the tastiest I have ever eaten.