The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  Term limits, enshrined in several African constitutions since the 1980s, are helping to change that. As their terms have run out, bad presidents, such as Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, have been forced out. And a couple of reformists, such as John Kufuor in Ghana and (one hopes) Mwai Kibaki in Kenya, have been ushered in. Term limits can be scrapped, as happened in Namibia. But changing constitutions is harder than changing laws, so they do act as a check on the big man’s power.

  Liberal economic reforms (known as “structural adjustment”), however, have been hugely controversial. Critics point out that African countries that have attempted to embrace the free market at the behest of the World Bank have not grown much less poor, if at all.

  This is true, and rather depressing. The problem is not the policies themselves, which are largely sound. Donors offer soft loans to distressed governments, which in return are supposed to spend within their means, abolish price controls, stop tethering entrepreneurs with red tape, and come up with plans for easing the plight of the poorest. The difficulty is that although many African leaders promise to do all these things in return for a cash injection, they rarely follow through. Donors are in effect asking vampire governments to give up the very powers that enable them to feed on their fellow citizens. Or, as one author put it: “In most cases in Africa, [structural adjustment] amounted to reorganising a bankrupt company and placing it, together with a massive infusion of new capital, in the hands of the same incompetent managers who ruined it in the first place.”15

  Good policies cannot be imposed on unwilling governments. Several African leaders have grown skilled at enacting the letter of reform while sabotaging its spirit. State firms are “privatized,” but too often this means being sold for a trifle to cronies of the ruling party. Red tape is slashed but re-imposed informally. Sound budgets are passed but not adhered to. Belt-tightening measures hurt schools and hospitals, but ministers still get their Mercedes limousines, and the military budget is never cut. Sensible laws are passed but repealed or overridden once the aid check has been cashed. Robert Mugabe has broken countless promises to donors. Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president for twenty-four years, grew adept at “selling” the same package of reforms several times.

  The African vampire state is hard to reform because most necessary reforms would reduce the power and wealth of the people in charge. And the people in charge do not, on the whole, want to lose their privileges. Even business leaders, who you might expect to favor market reforms, are often so reliant on state patronage that they actively oppose them.

  In most African countries, the best chance of proper reform comes with a change of government. New leaders are not always better. Even Mobutu’s successor, to everyone’s surprise, wasn’t. But when people can freely ditch their rulers, it gives those rulers an incentive to govern a bit better. Sadly, men like Robert Mugabe fight fiercely and cunningly to resist the popular will.

  As I write, Zimbabwe is undergoing a severe food shortage. President Mugabe blames the weather, which has indeed been dry. But drought is turning to famine largely because commercial farmers, who saw the country safely through all previous droughts, have mostly been driven off their land.

  Half the people of Zimbabwe are dependent on grain donated by foreigners to survive. To punish those who dared to vote against him, Mugabe has barred aid agencies from operating in areas where opposition support is highest and used the government’s legal monopoly on grain distribution to make sure that ruling-party members are fed, while the MDC are not. Some of his cronies do not even bother to hide what they are doing. Abednico Ncube, the deputy foreign minister, told villagers in Matabeleland: “As long as you value the government of the day, you will not starve, but we do not want people who vote for colonialists and then come to us when they want food. You cannot vote for the MDC and expect ZANU-PF to help you.… You have to vote for ZANU-PF candidates … before government starts rethinking your entitlement to this food aid.”16

  Most chilling of all, Didymus Mutasa, the ZANU-PF organizing secretary, mused that “We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle. We don’t want all these extra people.”17

  The population of Zimbabwe is about twelve million.

  2. DIGGING DIAMONDS, DIGGING GRAVES

  How mineral wealth has impoverished Africa

  What scared me most about Congo was not the shouting, stone-throwing crowds, nor the rattle of gunfire, nor the occasional dead body slumped by the side of the road. It was the sight of a boy soldier – he looked no more than twelve, but he might have been a malnourished fifteen – sitting on a step, resting his chin on the barrel of his AK-47.

  Teenagers with guns are always terrifying. An older soldier is more likely to ask himself, before shooting you, whether there is any point in doing so. Children are more unpredictable and harder to reason with, especially when drunk or drugged. All this I knew. But the sight of the boy idly pointing an automatic weapon at his own brain made me gasp with anxiety. If he is so careless of his own life, I thought, how careful will he be of mine?

  I was in Kinshasa, the bougainvillea-garlanded capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in August 1998. A great war was breaking out, one that would soon suck in most of the countries in central Africa. A rebel army was advancing on the city, and everyone expected them to capture it, probably within days. The Congolese government was in a panic. The regular army was in disarray, and Congo’s president, Laurent Kabila, was recruiting a militia of jobless youths to defend his regime. Thousands of these militiamen were gathered in Kinshasa’s main soccer stadium, drinking beer all day, waving knives, and loudly spoiling for a fight.

  Congo’s state radio had told them to kill members of the Tutsi tribe because the rebels were backed by Rwanda, where the government was dominated by Tutsis. “Wherever you see a Rwandan Tutsi, regard him as your enemy,” went one broadcast. It then urged loyal Congolese citizens to “bring a machete, a spear, an arrow, a hoe, spades, rakes, nails, truncheons, electric irons, barbed wire, stones, and the like, in order, dear listeners, to kill the Rwandan Tutsis.” In the prevailing atmosphere of alarm neither mobs nor soldiers made much distinction between Rwandan Tutsis, Congolese Tutsis, and anyone else suspected of supporting the rebels.

  The government also accused foreign journalists of “spreading dismay,” of being “less than human” and of somehow being partly responsible for the war. A mob gathered outside the Hotel Memling in the center of Kinshasa, baying for a French radio reporter inside to come out and be lynched. The security forces dragged some BBC journalists from their hotel room and roughed them up for filming from the balcony. A French television crew was put through a mock execution in front of the information ministry. A Reuters cameraman was stripped, beaten, thrown into a cell for several hours, and threatened with death.

  I stayed out of trouble, more or less. If I moved around after curfew, I did so only with government permission and in a large armed convoy. During the day, I hired a rusty old car and a driver who knew Kinshasa well. The Belgians had thought the city so picturesque, with its wide boulevards and white walls, that they called it Kinshasa la belle – “Kinshasa the beautiful.” But after four decades of decay, the boulevards were scarred with potholes and strewn with garbage and dead dogs. Locals now referred to their city as Kinshasa la poubelle – “Kinshasa the trash can.” The only new and shiny objects on display were huge posters showing President Kabila’s bowling-ball-shaped head, with the doubtful caption Voici l’homme qu’il faut – “Here is the man we need.”

  I had entered Kinshasa by boat, across the Congo River, and was regretting it. I am not a war correspondent. I get no thrill from being shot at. This sets me apart, I suppose, from the large number of foreign correspondents in Africa who spend half their working lives wooing death. The photographers and cameramen, particularly, have to stick up their heads when the bullets are whizzing, or they won’t get good picture
s. If the pictures are poor, as the snappers say, you aren’t close enough.

  My employer, on the other hand, requires no heroics. Articles in the Economist are anonymous. Economist writers are supposed to aim for objectivity, which means, among other things, not dwelling on our personal experiences. If I spend the night in a ditch ducking shrapnel, there is no chance that the Economist will feature the incident on the front page, so I have no professional incentive to do it. While the real war reporters try to find out where the action is, so they can snap it, I prefer to hang back and talk to people – in the hope of figuring out why they are fighting.

  The impression I’ve gained from talking to combatants is that a lot of wars are about economics. Poverty seems to breed war, especially civil war. Rich democracies occasionally use force to settle foreign disputes, but they almost never suffer armed conflict at home. The same is true, albeit to a lesser extent, of middle-income countries. But the poorest one sixth of humanity endures four fifths of the world’s civil wars.1

  Africa is worse afflicted than any other continent. In 1999, one African in five lived in a country racked by civil or cross-border war. Ninety percent of the casualties were civilians. Nineteen million Africans were forced to flee their homes. And an estimated 20 million landmines lurked beneath African soil.2

  Why is this? The available evidence tends to support the idea that there is a strong link between war and poverty. Researchers at the World Bank, after looking at all the world’s civil wars since 1960 to try to figure out what they had in common, found that poverty and economic stagnation were two of the main risk factors. When income per person doubles, they calculated that the risk of civil war halves. For each percentage point by which the growth rate rises, the risk of conflict falls by a point.3

  Poverty and low growth are often symptoms of corrupt, incompetent government, which can give people a reason to rebel. They are also common in immature societies, where people have not yet learned to live together in peace. And it is not hard, as the saying goes, to give a poor man a cause. Neither regular armies nor rebel ones have much trouble recruiting in Africa. For young men with few prospects, a soldier’s pay, or the opportunity to loot a neighboring village, can seem appealing.

  A thin young veteran of the Congo war, who said his name was Kaseleka Wabo, explained to me why he fought. I met him in a refugee camp in Tanzania, a 170-kilometer ferry trip from eastern Congo. He mumbled and scratched his face nervously as he spoke. He said he had joined Kabila’s army for the wages and deserted when he stopped receiving them. He switched to fighting with the rebels, who did not pay him at all. He survived by “living off the land.” I don’t think he meant gathering roots and fruit. The United Nations, which ran the camp, kept Wabo apart from other refugees for fear that someone might take revenge on him. He admitted that, while in uniform, he had killed several of his fellow Congolese. “It’s normal,” he said defiantly. “I’d do it again.”

  Not only does poverty breed war, but war exacerbates poverty, too. The World Bank estimates that a typical civil war reduces average incomes by 2.2 percent each year.4 In laymen’s terms: if soldiers steal your cows, you have nothing to sell on market day. War even affects African countries that are at peace. Many investors regard the continent as an undifferentiated whole. If Burundi is in flames, they may be wary of setting up safari lodges in neighboring Tanzania, even if Tanzania has been tranquil for decades.

  African wars start for all sorts of reasons. During the Cold War, Soviet-backed Marxist regimes fought equally vicious American-backed rebels who claimed to be pro-capitalist, and vice versa. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ideology has more or less ceased to be a motive for war in Africa. New conflicts are more likely to spring from ethnic antagonism or from a tyrant’s desire to distract attention from troubles at home.

  However conflicts begin, they are more likely to continue if they are fought on mineral-rich soil, and Africa is fabulously rich in minerals. Diamond mines, for example, give warlords a lucrative reason to keep fighting and often pay for their weapons, too. This makes many African wars particularly intractable. In the 1990s, at least eleven African nations fought over natural resources or the prospect of them. Among these were Angola, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, and Sudan, whose civil wars were all fueled by oil. Rebels fought for control of diamond mines in Sierra Leone, phosphates in Western Sahara, and iron, timber, diamonds, and drugs in Liberia.

  Some mineral-rich African countries – South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, for example – remain peaceful enough for ordinary citizens to benefit from their buried treasure. But on balance Africa’s natural resources have proven more of a curse than a blessing.5

  Congo’s war was typical. It began as an aftershock from the genocide in neighboring Rwanda but quickly degenerated into a scramble for loot. The country is huge, weak, and naturally rich. Congolese soil is studded with diamonds and streaked with ores of gold, cobalt, and tantalum. So there is much to steal, and it is easy for any semi-professional fighting force to steal it. Unfortunately for Congo, it is surrounded by smaller, more aggressive countries, which from the mid-1990s set about tearing it apart like jackals around a sick buffalo.

  Congo is two-thirds the size of Western Europe and thinly populated. Only about 50 million people live there, although this is a guess. Communication between different regions is tricky. Telephones rarely work, and the bush has swallowed the old colonial roads, although some of the milestones remain, poking out of the undergrowth. Only the Congo river links the western half of the country to the east. The central government in Kinshasa lost control of Congo’s provinces long ago, and the trackless rainforest is lawless.

  Congo has a long history of being badly governed. The approximate area we now call Congo was roped together into one state in the nineteenth century by King Leopold II of the Belgians. Leopold never visited Congo but ruled it as his personal fiefdom from his chateau in Laeken. His men enslaved the locals to tap rubber and collect ivory and sliced off slackers’ hands. Leopold’s misrule became such an embarrassment that the Belgian government took Congo off his hands in 1908 and ruled it somewhat less harshly until independence in 1960. Soon after, a young military commander named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power. During a dictatorship that spanned four decades, Mobutu looted the state into paralysis. He was overthrown in 1997, but the story of Congo’s current war begins three years earlier.

  In 1994, in tiny neighboring Rwanda, some of the more bloodthirsty leaders of the Hutu tribe tried to exterminate the Tutsis, with whom they lived cheek by jowl. The genocide ended when an army of Tutsis from Uganda seized control of Rwanda and drove the génocidaires away. Thousands fled into Zaire (as Congo was then called) and hid in the jungle.

  From there, they mounted frequent raids on Rwanda. The new Tutsi-led Rwandan government appealed to Mobutu to stop them. Mobutu, who had been friendly with the old Hutu regime, armed and encouraged them instead. In 1996, the Rwandan army invaded eastern Congo, hoping to scatter or kill the génocidaires and set up a buffer zone against future attacks. It was easier than they expected. Congo’s defenses crumbled so quickly that the Rwandans figured they could overthrow Mobutu and replace him with someone more pliable. Uganda, Rwanda’s ally, agreed to help.

  They picked Laurent Kabila, a Congolese guerrilla leader whose curriculum vitae included a spell running a brothel in Tanzania. At first, the alliance went smoothly. With Rwandan support, Kabila raised a rebel army in eastern Congo and sent it marching in rubber boots toward Kinshasa. The scruffy rebels and their Rwandan backers met almost no resistance. Only the lack of roads slowed their advance. Some villagers actually paid for transport to help Mobutu’s men flee so that they would go quickly instead of hanging around to loot. In May 1997, Kabila marched into the capital. Joyous crowds greeted his troops, waving palm fronds. Shots were fired, but only in celebration. Few people knew much about Kabila, but they figured that he could not possibly be worse than Mobutu.

  They were wrong.
Kabila was, if anything, more cruel than Mobutu but lacked his predecessor’s intelligence. He promised elections but never held them. He jailed and tortured suspected opponents. He tried to fine businessmen for breaking unpublished rules and to levy taxes on as yet unrealized profits. He printed money with reckless abandon, and when the governor of Congo’s central bank tried to explain to him why this was a bad idea, he had him locked up. Western governments offered aid, but he treated them with suspicion. Western mining firms came scouting for business but soon wearied of Kabila’s habit of dishonoring contracts.

  A toad tries to swallow an elephant

  Perhaps Kabila’s greatest mistake, however, was to betray his Rwandan backers. After only a year in power, he allied himself with their enemies, the genocidal Hutu militias who still lurked in eastern Congo. Furious, the Rwandans decided to overthrow their former protégé. They struck with the speed of a coiled cobra, flying troops almost 2,000 kilometers across the jungle in old Soviet transport planes and setting up bases at Kitona and Matadi, not far from Kinshasa. Within days, they had captured the hydroelectric dam that powered the capital and were threatening, with their Congolese rebel allies, to take the capital itself.