The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  The economic resources available to African governments to finance their dreams were limited. Most countries depended for their income on primary products such as cocoa and coffee or minerals such as copper and iron ore, all of them vulnerable to shifts in world prices. Government revenues were thus subject to sharp fluctuations. Trade and industry too were largely under the control of foreign companies and businessmen. Most economic activity was confined to coastal areas or mining concessions inland. The vast interior remained largely untouched by modern development, lacking even a basic infrastructure. Fourteen African states were landlocked, relying on long and tenuous links to the sea hundreds of miles away.

  Nevertheless, the launching of the independence era inspired a real sense of new hope and new purpose which made such obstacles seem less daunting. As the old colonial order passed away, Africa came alive with a host of development projects. Encouraged by an influential school of Western economists, African governments favoured industrialisation as the route to economic success. Industrialisation, it was thought, would enable African states to break out of their colonial trading patterns, ending their dependence on a narrow range of commodity exports and manufactured imports. It would have a far more ‘modernising’ impact than agriculture, providing higher productivity and creating urban employment. Agriculture was considered incapable of providing the engine of economic growth. Because the private sector in Africa was deemed to be too weak to make an impact, the prevailing view was that government direction and control of the economy was the only way forward to promote economic development. Western economists frequently referred to the ‘big push’ that was needed to break the mould of African poverty.

  From the outset, African leaders were also preoccupied with the problems of political control, of holding the state together, of simply staying in power. For a relatively brief period, the anti-colonial cause had provided a unity of purpose. Nationalist politicians had successfully exploited a variety of grievances to galvanise support for the cause. In pre-independence elections, Houphouët-Boigny in Côte d’Ivoire, Senghor in Senegal, Modibo Keita in Mali, Julius Nyerere in Tanganyika, Hastings Banda in Malawi, all swept the board; others won similar victories. But once the momentum they had achieved in their drive for independence began to subside, so other loyalties and ambitions came thrusting to the surface. ‘We have all inherited from our former masters not nations but states,’ remarked Houphouët-Boigny, ‘states that have within them extremely fragile links between ethnic groups.’ Whereas nationalist politicians started out proclaiming nationalist objectives, in the post-independence era they came to rely on ethnic support as their main political base and exploited it ruthlessly for their own ends. In a continent where class formation had hardly begun to alter political loyalties, the tribal factor became all-important. Few states escaped such divisions.

  In their quest for control, many African leaders insisted on the need for one-party rule. New states facing so many challenges, it was said, needed strong governments which were best served by concentrating authority with a single, nationwide party. Only a disciplined mass party, centrally directed, was an effective means to overcome ethnic and tribal divisions, to inspire a sense of nationhood and to mobilise the population for economic development. Multi-party politics, it was argued, usually deteriorated into a competition between tribal blocs and alliances. Since opposition parties tended to rely on tribal groups for support, they undermined the cause of nation-building and weakened the efficiency of the state. ‘Democracy is a system of government for virtuous people,’ explained Houphouët-Boigny, in his defence of a one-party system. ‘In young countries such as our own, we need a chief who is all-powerful for a specified period of time. If he makes mistakes, we shall replace him later on . . .’

  In practice, one-party systems were used by African leaders to suppress any sign of opposition and to keep themselves in power. The parties they led served only as a stronghold of privileged elites. Stage by stage, they accumulated ever greater personal power, preferring to rule not through constitutions or through state institutions such as parliament, but by exercising vast systems of patronage, dispensing jobs, contracts and favours in exchange for political support. Parliaments, where they survived, were packed with placemen, chosen for their known obedience. Government bureaucracies were staffed by party loyalists. Trade unions and farmers’ organisations were subordinated to the interests of the government. The press existed merely as an outlet for government propaganda. Political debate became a matter of platitudes and praise-songs. Rarely was criticism of any kind tolerated. With few exceptions, one-party rule came to mean no more than government by a ruling elite with a monopoly of political power. ‘System? What system?’ retorted President Bourguiba, when asked about Tunisia’s political system. ‘I am the system.’

  Personal dictatorships soon became a common phenomenon. In Egypt, Nasser concentrated all power in his own hands. The organisation of the state and its policy was determined by his will alone. Every aspect of government came under his remit. On his orders, Egypt nationalised industry, transport, financial institutions, large hotels and department stores and introduced central planning of the economy. His control extended to the media, trade unions, professional syndicates, youth organisations and religious institutions. He tolera ted no opposition, crushing communists and Muslim Brotherhood alike, relying on his secret police – the mukhabarat – to track down dissenters. Some Egyptians likened him to a modern pharaoh.

  With similar relentlessness, Kwame Nkrumah set up his own personal dictatorship in Ghana, instituting a personality cult that reached grotesque proportions. Every day the press extolled his intellectual brilliance, his foresight, his integrity. He assumed grand titles and created an official ideology calling it Nkrumaism. His presence became inescapable: his profile embellished coins, banknotes, postage stamps; framed photographs adorned shops and offices; his birthday became a public holiday. He built around himself a citadel of power, extending his reach to farmers’ organisations, trade unions and the civil service and using emergency powers to imprison critics and opponents. Intending to establish Ghana as a modern industrial state, he commissioned one project after another at reckless speed, ignoring advice to proceed more cautiously. To ensure direct personal control, he transferred more and more functions of state to his presidential compound in Accra, establishing ‘secretariats’ there which bypassed the work of government ministries. Under his personal auspices came such matters as higher education, foreign trade, parliamentary business, African affairs and internal security. He was deemed to be omniscient. In the words of an official portrait published in 1961: ‘Kwame Nkrumah is our father, our teacher, our brother, our friend, indeed our very lives, for without him we would no doubt have existed, but we would not have lived.’

  In Malawi, Hastings Banda’s grip extended not just over the government and the economy of the country but even over the moral standards under which the population was required to live. His own strict puritan code became the nation’s way of life. Men were forbidden to wear long hair; women were forbidden to wear short skirts or trousers. Films, foreign newspapers, magazines and books were strictly censored to prevent ‘decadent’ Western influences from harming the population. Banda insisted on directing even the smallest details of Malawi’s affairs. ‘Everything is my business,’ he once said. ‘Everything.’ He was equally forthright about the extent of his power. ‘Anything I say is law. Literally law. It is a fact in this country.’ He tolerated neither dissent nor criticism and regularly ordered the detention of opponents. ‘If, to maintain the political stability and efficient administration, I have to detain ten thousand or one hundred thousand, I will do it,’ he said in 1965. He encouraged party youth activists to hunt down dissidents, giving them licence to act virtually as they saw fit. He personally controlled government departments and appointed or dismissed at will members of parliament, party officials and civil servants. His rule was sometimes compared to that of one of the old M
aravi kings, complete with divine right and absolute authority.

  Whatever the circumstances of independence, the new African elite were quick to use their position to great advantage. The very first legislative act of the Congo’s parliament in Leopoldville, for example, was to raise fivefold the annual salary of parliamentary deputies. Politicians lost no opportunity to accumulate wealth and privilege. Many were more preoccupied with their own business deals, with contracts, commissions and money-making than with government affairs. Civil servants filling the posts vacated by departing colonial officials insisted on the same high salaries and perks – pensions, housing allowances and cheap loans. Government budgets soon became burdened with the huge cost of salaries, allowances and presidential expenses. Independence also gave the elite control of land registration, credit, taxation, marketing boards, public investment, import requirements and negotiations with private capital – all providing further scope for self-enrichment. They were able too to take full advantage of the patronage systems that African leaders used to maintain their hold on power.

  As the scramble for wealth intensified, African states were increasingly afflicted by the blight of corruption. In Ghana, Nkrumah’s ministers were well known for pushing through contracts with foreign corporations for a 10 per cent fee. ‘It was the order of the day,’ one of Nkrumah’s officials recalled, ‘for every minister connected with a government contract to take a cut for himself.’ In Nigeria, politicians once in office looted public funds, amassing fortunes large enough to pay for bribes to win the next election. The practice of bribery and embezzlement spread from top to bottom, from politicians to tax collectors, customs officers, policemen, postal clerks and dispensary assistants. It affected everything from job applications to licences, scholarships, foreign exchange and the location of factories. A senior Nigerian civil servant recalled: ‘You bribe to get your child into school; you pay to secure your job and also continue to pay in some cases to retain it; you pay ten per cent of any contract you obtained; you dash [bribe] the tax officer to avoid paying taxes; you pay a hospital doctor or nurse to get proper attention; you pay the policeman to evade arrest. This catalogue of shame can continue without end.’

  The wealth the new elite acquired was ostentatiously displayed in grand houses, luxury cars and lavish lifestyles – ‘platinum life’, it was called in Abidjan. In Ghana, Nkrumah’s ministers openly boasted of the size of their fortunes. ‘Socialism doesn’t mean that if you’ve made a lot of money you can’t keep it,’ remarked Krobo Edusei in 1961. He gained particular notoriety when his wife ordered a gold-plated bed from a London store. In later years, Edusei confessed to owning fourteen houses, a luxurious beach house, a long lease on a London flat, several expensive cars and six different bank accounts. In Kenya, a new tribe appeared, cynically known as the WaBenzi, in description of rich politicians, officials and businessmen who drove about in expensive Mercedes-Benz cars. Kenyatta’s young wife, Ngina, used her connections to the president to build a business empire that extended to plantations, ranches, property, hotels and the ivory trade. She eventually reached billionaire status.

  A study of trade figures of fourteen francophone states in 1964 showed that the amount spent on importing alcoholic drinks was six times higher than that spent on importing fertiliser. Half as much was spent on perfume and cosmetic imports as on machine tools. Almost as much went on importing petrol for privately owned cars as on the purchase of tractors, and five times as much on importing cars as on agricultural equipment.

  Although politicians in power still issued promises about social equality and spoke eloquently about the needs of the common man, the gap between the rich elite living in plush villas, elegant apartment buildings and town houses, and the masses surviving in slums and bidonvilles on the fringes of town, became ever more noticeable. For the vast majority of the population, independence brought few of the changes they had been led to expect. ‘A peasant’s life,’ noted a prominent critic in the Central African Republic, ‘is worth a month and a half of that of a member of parliament.’

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  COUPS AND DICTATORS

  The first upheavals of the independence era were seen as isolated events rather than as harbingers of a more perilous future. In 1963, Togo’s autocratic president, Sylvanus Olympio, was shot dead by a group of ex-servicemen led by a 25-year-old sergeant, Étienne Eyadéma, after he refused to employ them in the Togolese army. Olympio’s assassination, marking as it did black Africa’s first coup d’état, was denounced vociferously throughout Africa, though in Togo itself there was little mourning.

  A spate of coups followed in other francophone states: Dahomey (Benin); Upper Volta (Burkina Faso); and the Central African Republic. None attracted much attention. Dahomey was encumbered with every imaginable difficulty: a small strip of territory jutting inland from the coast, it was crowded, insolvent and beset by tribal divisions, huge debts, unemployment, frequent strikes and an unending struggle for power between three rival political leaders. When the army commander, Colonel Christophe Soglo, a French army veteran, stepped in to take control in 1965, it seemed to offer some sense of reprieve. Both Upper Volta and the Central African Republic were impoverished, landlocked states run by corrupt governments. In the case of Upper Volta, crowds of demonstrators implored the army commander, Colonel Sangoulé Lamizana, another French army veteran, to intervene. Coup leaders like Soglo and Lamizana saw themselves in the tradition of de Gaulle and the Fifth French Republic, replacing ailing regimes with a salutary spell of military rule. The coup in the Central African Republic had more personal overtones. On learning that his cousin, President David Dacko, intended to replace him, the army commander, Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a former sergeant in the French army, seized power instead, explaining: ‘I gave him valuable advice which he did not heed.’

  Former French colonies seemed especially prone to disorder and civil strife. French army units stationed in Africa, in accordance with defence cooperation agreements which France signed with almost all its former colonies, were called upon time and again for help, often deciding the outcome of local struggles. When Congo-Brazzaville’s first president, Abbé Fulbert Youlou, a former priest, asked French troops to crush demonstrations against his notoriously corrupt regime, de Gaulle turned him down and told him to resign. When Gabon’s first president, Léon M’ba, was deposed by a group of dissident officers in 1964, French troops were used to rout the rebels and reinstate him. A French spokesman explained that it was not possible ‘for a few men carrying machine guns to be left free to seize a presidential palace at any time’.

  East Africa had its own set of difficulties. In 1964, armed African gangs in Zanzibar incited an uprising against the Arab ruling elite, forcing the sultan to flee in his yacht. Some 5,000 Arabs were killed, thousands more interned, their homes, property and possessions seized at will. A revolutionary council, led by Abeid Karume, a former merchant seaman, appealed for assistance from China, the Soviet Union and East Germany. Hundreds of communist technicians duly arrived, prompting Western fears that the island might become an African ‘Cuba’. On mainland Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, worried about the prospect of Zanzibar being drawn directly into the Cold War and anxious to exert a moderating influence, proposed a union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar. The union was subsequently named Tanzania.

  Once in power, Karume set out to crush the remaining Arab community. Thousands were forcibly deported, packed into dhows, some old and unseaworthy, and sent to the Arabian Gulf. The prosperous Asian community also became victims. The population at large was subjected to dictatorial control. Ruling by decree, Karume declared a one-party state and ordered all adult Zanzibaris to sign up as members of the party. Anyone who complained, even about food or consumer shortages, was liable to be denounced as an ‘enemy of the revolution’.

  The revolution in Zanzibar was followed swiftly by a series of mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya, precipitated by grievances over pay, promotions and the continuing pres
ence of senior British officers rather than by political resentment of the three governments. In each case, British troops were required to bring the mutinies to an end.

  Whatever the cause, army coups and interventions in Africa became a familiar occurrence. Within a few years of independence, they spread like a contagion across the continent, striking down not only regimes that were inherently weak and unstable but afflicting even the giants of Africa.

  Under Nkrumah’s leadership, Ghana sank rapidly into a spiral of economic chaos and decline. His grand design for industrialisation and the corruption that went with it burdened Ghana with a vast, unwieldy structure of loss-making state enterprises – factories, steel-works, mining ventures, shipyards – all weighed down by greedy and incompetent managers appointed by Nkrumah’s hierarchy. His agricultural policies were equally disastrous. He favoured mechanised state farms and diverted huge financial resources to sustain them, neglecting the needs of peasant farmers. His state farms were an overwhelming failure. Cocoa farmers, meanwhile, were forced to accept successive cuts in crop prices and saw their incomes reduced by half over a ten-year period. The mass of the population fared no better: beset by rising prices, higher taxes and consumer shortages, they suffered increasing hardship. Food queues became a common sight; hospitals ran short of drugs. An official survey showed that by 1963 the standard of living of unskilled urban workers had fallen in real terms to the level of 1939. The overall result was calamitous. From being one of the most prosperous tropical countries in the world at the time of independence in 1957, Ghana by 1965 had become virtually bankrupt.