The Africans

by David Lamb

  Then came the inevitable coup de grâce to economic stability, the black market. The inflated prices for goods created an artificial economy for the local currency. The real economy came to be based on the illegal transactions of foreign currency and on smuggling. But to gain access to this economy, one needed “hard” money such as British pounds or American dollars, something only the privileged few and the foreigners possessed. So the average African had to live on the inflated economy—and pay its sky-high prices—while the elite converted its foreign exchange at illegal rates and paid realistic prices.

  These money markets are controlled by the Lebanese in West Africa and the Indians in East Africa, who usually own legitimate businesses in addition to their moonlighting venture. They will exchange their local currency at a discount rate for your hard currency—cash, traveler’s checks or personal checks—which they then smuggle to European banks.

  Consider Uganda as an illustration. In 1980, before the International Monetary Fund ordered a devaluation as part of an unsuccessful economic recovery package, seven Ugandan shillings equalled one American dollar at the legal rate. But the black-market merchants gave you 140 shillings for that dollar, or twenty times what the bank offered. At the time a room in Kampala’s International Hotel cost about 1,000 shillings a night. So if you were an African who only had shillings, the room cost the equivalent of $142. But if you had a convertible currency and changed it with the Indian importer who slipped through the hotel each morning with a suitcase full of Ugandan shillings, the cost became $7. Thus two economies operated in tandem—one for the unlucky majority that was based on Ugandan shillings, the other for the fortunate few who had access to foreign currency.

  The struggle for foreign currency is so intense in countries such as Tanzania and Ghana that hotels insist guests pay their bills in something other than African currency. Kenya Airways, the national carrier, will not accept Kenyan shillings on its flight for the purchase of a cocktail—foreign currency, only, please. In Guinea, departing nonresidents must pay the $8 airport departure tax in currency other than the local syli (pronounced “silly”). In almost every country, airline tickets can only be purchased with foreign currency.

  Africa’s funny-money underscores the desperate condition of the continental economy. In absolute terms, the average African’s standard of living is declining, particularly in relation to that of the ruling soldiers and the bureaucracy. The per capita income of $365 in Africa—or $1 a day—buys less than it did a decade ago. The food supply is dropping, while agricultural production declined an average of 1 percent each year through the 1970s, the population grew at an annual rate of 2.9 percent. In Zambia (where 280 white settler farmers produce more than half the food grown in the country) the per capita income has dropped 14 percent since 1970, exports have fallen 25 percent and consumer prices have risen 70 percent. A French agronomist, René Dumont, concluded after a lengthy study that what Zambia needed to revive its agricultural sector was not more expensive tractors or sophisticated techniques, but rather, he said, more reliance on oxen and carts, organic manure and more crop rotation with legumes to obtain higher yields and to save foreign exchange. His advice was ignored and the minister of agriculture, Alexander Chikwanda, denounced him as a “sham radical from Europe who wants us to be perpetual drawers of water and hewers of wood.”

  The response was an unfortunate one—and one that was very reflective of both the problems and the mood of Africa. The scars of slavery and colonialism run so deep, the suspicions of white motives are so great, the sensitivity toward any primitive part of the past is so numbing that black Africa is willing to stumble blindly into the future, oblivious of the consequences, finding almost masochistic pleasure in making its own mistakes.

  The greater the public discontent becomes over economic conditions, the greater the social control that Africa’s leaders exercise to retain power. The greater the national debt becomes, the greater Africa’s reliance grows on foreign governments whose grants and loans—currently running about $10 billion a year—keep regimes in power. It is a destructive cycle that discourages the emergence of fresh faces and competent minds in the leadership hierarchy, leaving Africa’s new generation of restless, educated youths with little role to play in their countries. When one of Liberia’s top financial advisers tried to explain to the sergeant who ran the country, Samuel Doe, why a rise in gasoline prices was necessary, Doe balked. Finally the adviser said, “You don’t sign this paper, country go blooey.” Doe understood and signed.* (The adviser, a bright young man with a business degree from an Ivy League college, did not relish communicating with Doe in pidgin indefinitely and soon found an exile home in the United States.)

  Some African countries are so inherently poor that there seems little hope they can ever survive without a tin cup extended. The gross national product for, say, Cape Verde (population: 350,000) is only $50 million a year. But what of the other countries? How did a continent of such great potential wealth, including 30 percent of the world’s known mineral reserves, end up being the most economically depressed cluster of beggar states on earth? The answer lies in both the legacy of colonialism and the conduct of independence.

  When Europe ran the continent, African peasants were forced to produce export crops to satisfy the import needs of Europe and to help pay the colony’s bills. The colonial economy—and later the national economy of individual African countries—was more often than not based on a single commodity such as cashew nuts or cocoa and was deprived of the cushion that diversification provides. Each country, in effect, had all its eggs in one basket. If disaster struck, in the form of drought, famine, crop failure or mismanagement, the fragile economy shattered.

  Kenya, for example, gets most of its foreign currency from coffee and tea, but in just one ten-month period, between 1976 and 1977, the price for a ton of coffee ranged from $1,636 to $3,958, and what may be a boom for Kenya one day is a bust the next. Nigeria gets 85 percent of its government revenue from oil. Zambia gets 96 percent of its export earnings from copper and cobalt. Guinea-Bissau doesn’t produce much of anything besides groundnuts.

  Africa, then, suffers twice in any international recession: first when its export earnings fall because of depressed world prices over which it has no control, and again when inflation forces up import bills for oil, food, spare parts and other commodities it needs to sputter along economically. The industrialized West can adjust for inflation and higher oil bills by charging more for goods; Africa, which produces so little, has no such luxury. It just grows poorer. In 1970, only 10 percent of Africa’s export earnings went to pay for oil imports. By 1980 the figure was 22 percent. Uganda earns $10 million a month in government revenues (mostly from coffee) and spends precisely the same amount for oil. Tanzania has cut back its oil imports to 700,000 tons a year, less than it used in 1972, but is paying ten times more than it did a decade ago. National development becomes virtually irrelevant in such circumstances. Only survival counts. When Africa goes shopping it has the diminished buying power of a man who takes a wage cut year after year.

  • • •

  Ghana is a case in point. Black Africa’s dreams were born in that West African country; they are also buried there, temporarily at least, in the folly and greed of soldier chiefs whose misrule spanned a decade. The Ghanaians, a proud, extroverted and educated people, shake their heads in wonderment today over what their country has become. Can this destitute, demoralized place, they ask, be the once thriving “Black Star of Africa,” which in 1957 became the first black African nation to win its independence?

  Known as the Gold Coast when it was a British colony, Ghana is shaped roughly like a shoe box and covers an area about the size of the United Kingdom. It is located on the Gulf of Guinea, just a few degrees north of the equator. Half the country is less than five hundred feet above sea level. The scrub-covered plains are criss-crossed by the mighty Volta River and numerous streams, most of which are navigable only by canoe. A tropical rai
n forest extends northward from the shore to the heavily forested northern hills, where the climate is so steamy-hot that it feels as though it were drizzling even when the sky is a cloudless, crystal blue. This area, once part of the Ashanti kingdom, produces most of Ghana’s cocoa, timber and minerals.

  There is no great treasure chest of gold in Ghana (the term “Gold Coast” actually refers to the money that slave traders made raiding the population) but the country is blessed with immense natural wealth. At independence Ghana was the world’s largest producer of cocoa and the world’s largest exporter of manganese. The British wanted Ghana to be an African country, and it was. No Europeans were allowed to settle there, or even to seek employment without specific government approval. British administrators in the colony numbered fewer than four thousand, and the people were left pretty much alone to “enstool” and “destool” (elect and dethrone) their own chiefs. This was done by popular vote in a state council.

  But Ghana was brought to its knees after independence by its own leaders, men who pillaged with unabashed thoroughness. For many, what mattered was not that Ghana prospered and grew, but that they got their cut, deposited in European bank accounts. One head of state alone, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, was accused of—and later executed for—amassing an overseas fortune of $100 million. The Cocoa Marketing Board was unable to account for half of its foreign exchange earnings between 1975 and 1979. The ruling soldiers flew scores of Mercedes-Benzes into Ghana for personal use (cost $110,000 each, plus shipping charges) and squandered so much money that soon there was no more foreign exchange. The transportation system broke down, the stores displayed little but empty shelves, the legitimate economy was replaced by a black-market system known as kalabule* (cheating and smuggling), and when the inflation rate fell to 70 percent one year, the government declared an economic victory. Twenty-five years earlier, the people in Ghana had talked about their ability to achieve; now they speak only of their capacity to endure.

  “The great thing about us,” said Essilfie Conduah, a Ghanaian journalist, “is that we’re never violent, even if the situation seems to call for violence. We keep our cool. There’s a resilency in the people, an ability to get clobbered and still survive. The Nigerians call us the eleven million magicians.”

  The irony of Ghana’s economic collapse is that like so many African countries, it is not inherently poor. Its exports (mainly cocoa) still top $1 billion a year. Its overgrown farmland is potentially productive. Its waters are rich with fish, its forested interior holds diamonds, bauxite, gold and manganese.

  But by the late 1970s, Ghana had been stripped bare, cannibalized like a car whose working parts had been stolen by thieves. As the economic situation worsened, the country produced its own version of boat people, peasants fleeing not repression but poverty, moving north in little homemade boats to the Ivory Coast and Liberia. When the Accra government offered free transportation home to the 50,000 Ghanaians living and working in Nigeria, no more than a handful accepted. And each day an average of fifty Ghanaians, the majority students, lined up at the American embassy in Accra to seek permission to enter the United States. Nearly half the applicants were rejected out of hand for submitting fraudulent educational documents. (Two firms in Accra supply, for a fee of $180, professional test-takers to ensure a passing mark on the government-administered education examination.) Nevertheless, more than 2,000 Ghanaians entered the United States in 1979 to study at American universities, and another 828 immigrated for noneducational reasons. Many of the students try to drag out their studies as long as possible, and if you spend a day riding taxi cabs in Washington, D.C., I guarantee that at least a dozen of your drivers will be from Ghana, Nigeria or Ethiopia.*

  It is a grievous state of affairs compared with what President Kwame Nkrumah had promised for Ghana in 1957. A man of extraordinary energy, idealism and patriotism, Nkrumah had spent a decade in the United States traveling and studying during the thirties and forties, and after leaving at the end of World War II, he wrote: “I saw the Statue of Liberty with her arm raised as if in personal farewell to me. (I said silently) ‘You have opened my eyes to the true meaning of liberty. I shall never rest until I have carried your message to Africa.’ ” And carry it he did. Campaigning on the slogan “Self-Government Now,” he quickly became a national hero—and nearly as quickly was jailed by the British on sedition charges. Later freed on orders of the British governor, Nkrumah was hailed as another Nehru, even a “Modern Moses.” He was a handsome, charismatic figure whose jubilant people were spearheading political advancement in colonial Africa. His vision of black consciousness was instrumental in independence movements throughout the continent and in influencing civil rights initiatives as far away as the United States.

  Nkrumah, who referred to himself as The Redeemer, believed that black people would never escape the bondage of servitude until they ended their dependence on agriculture and moved toward a manufacturing economy based on finished products. It was, in retrospect, the first of many Nkrumah decisions that transformed Ghana from the African model of freedom and prosperity to the African prototype of repression and poverty.

  Great sums, much of it in foreign aid, were lavished with remarkable speed to fulfill Nkrumah’s dreams of personal and national greatness. More than $16 million was spent on a conference hall to host a single meeting of the Organization of African Unity. Another $9 million went for a showcase highway that was only a few miles long and usually deserted, $8 million for a state house, $17 million for a drydock. Within seven years (1958–1965), foreign-exchange reserves of $481 million had turned into a $1 billion national debt, and as the people grew restive and angry, Nkrumah became ruthless and suspicious. He jailed his opponents, made himself president-for-life, reduced the parliament to a single-party rubber stamp, passed a law permitting the imprisonment of dissidents for five years without trial and moved closer to the Communist world. When he was overthrown in 1966 while headed for China—where, he said, he intended to find a solution to the Vietnam war—his people shed few tears. They tore down his statue and sent his portrait to the sixty member countries of Interpol (the international police agency), charging him with extortion and corruption. It was indeed an inglorious ending for a man who once held such hope as a leader of global stature, a man whose gravest error may have been that in the final years he began believing he really was all the things he said he was.

  Nkrumah lived in exile until he died of cancer in Guinea, where President Sékou Touré had taken the unusual step of making him a “co-president.” His obituary read like that of so many other African presidents. “Nkrumah could have been a great man,” wrote Colonel Akwasi Amankwa, one of the leaders of the 1966 coup. “He started well, led the independence movement and became, on behalf of Ghana, the symbol of emergent Africa. Somewhere down the line, however, he became ambitious, built a cult of personality and ruthlessly used the powers invested in him by his own constitution. He developed a strange love for absolute power.”

  The removal of Nkrumah, though, did not solve Ghana’s problems; in an African country the first coup is seldom the last. The soldiers who toppled him surrendered power to a democratically elected civilian government three years later. But in 1972 the civilians were overthrown by General Acheampong, a devout Roman Catholic who frequently appeared at morning meetings sweating profusely, chain-smoking and drinking whiskey. Acheampong was ousted by his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Frederick W. K. Akuffo, in 1978. The next year Akuffo was overthrown by a thirty-two-year-old air force lieutenant, Jerry Rawlings, who had Acheampong and Akuffo executed after a secret trial as part of his “coup of conscience” to clean up Ghana. “Action, action, finish them all!” yelled the crowd as the former heads of state and several other top officials were blindfolded and bound to execution posts. Three months later, in September 1979, Rawlings surprised a good many people by handing over power, as he had promised to do, to an elected civilian government headed by President Hilla Limann, a caree
r diplomat who had once served with the overseas arm of Ghana’s secret police.

  Shortly before Limann took office, an American diplomat asked the president-elect what he was going to do to encourage the foreign investment Ghana so desperately needed. “Encourage it?” Limann asked. “We won’t have to. As soon as we have a civilian government, foreign investment will pour into Ghana.”

  It didn’t. Admirable as Ghana’s return to civilian rule was, by 1982 the country had slipped so far backward that no one, least of all the Ghanaians, had any faith left in its future. Ghana’s national debt at the time was nearly $2 billion; it was eighty-nine months behind on its loan repayments; its inflation rate topped 100 percent a year. Shortages of essential commodities were so severe that, as a Christmas present, nearby Nigeria sent Ghana twenty-three truck-loads of food and medicine. Even Limann was not sure that he could hold the place together. “I am sitting on a time bomb,” he said.

  On New Year’s Eve 1981, the bomb went off. Jerry Rawlings, who had been scuttled into retirement by Limann’s civilian government, stepped from the shadows with gun in hand and the support of the army. Within six hours Limann had been placed under house arrest, accused of corruption and mismanagement, and Rawlings had taken power for the second time in twenty-seven months. Ghana’s overjoyed soldiers promptly went on a looting rampage in Accra, cleaning out the shops of anything that wasn’t nailed down. “We are asking for nothing more than proper democracy,” Rawlings said somewhat inexplicably in a broadcast to the nation.