Big Men Little People
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Critics liked to question the idea of a renaissance as mushy sentiment. It was all too easy to talk about one without articulating what it might mean. Many African commentators derided the idea on the grounds that it suggested the sub-Saharan sub-continent was united when in fact it includes a vast range of different climates, topographies and political systems – not to mention vastly differing economies and trading blocs, the bane of multinationals trying to target the market. But for all the continuing difficulties facing the subcontinent, from Ghana and Nigeria in the West, to Tanzania, Ethiopia in the East and Zambia even in the South, by 2013 it was clear that business sentiment and economic indicators were flourishing. South African intellectuals, an ideological engine room of the African Renaissance thesis, rightly pointed to the bloody political upheavals that accompanied and followed the Renaissance in Europe and point out that it was hailed only in retrospect. 'What of the Wars of the Roses?' they cried. 'What of the fighting between Italian city states? Their analogy was valid.
Conclusion
Mbeki was a committed 'Renaissance' man. Halfway through Mandela's presidency he staked his claim as the standard-bearer of the dream in a lyrical address to parliament to mark the adoption of the final post-apartheid constitution. But in the opening address to a conference on the 'Renaissance' he cautioned there was no way people could speak of a rebirth given Africa's endemic corruption. He also bemoaned the businessmen who came 'with bags full of money' from countries 'beyond our shores and participated in the process of purchasing our souls so that they win tenders and contracts or gain special favours to improve their bottom lines'.
He was quite right to caution against the corrupting potential of big business: the ANC was hardly unaffected. It approved a multi-billion dollar arms deal which enriched several senior officials, embroiled the party in a colossal corruption scandal and cast a long shadow over the new democracy. Years after the deal was done it remained unclear why exactly the ANC had felt South Africa needed to spend such sums upgrading its military when it faced so many other pressing challenges. Jacob Zuma himself, Mbeki’s successor, was caught up in the affair. In 2007 he was indicted on multiple charges of corruption via his relationship with an ANC wheeler-dealer who had been convicted two years earlier on a range of counts including soliciting a bribe for Zuma from an arms company. The charges were later dropped shortly after he took office as president.
Such sagas afflicted several of the newly emerging African economies including Tanzania, and possibly most of all, Angola which a decade into the new millennium had all the hallmarks of a kleptocracy as a small elite creamed off many of the profits of the phenomenal wealth in natural resources. “The country is rich but they don’t allow us to develop,” Joao Domingo told me in 2007 as he looked out from his squalid shack over the harbour of Luanda, Angola’s capital. In the tropical haze I could make out the outlines of dozens of container ships from China, the latest “colonial” partner, waiting to dock. Domingos had backed the ruling party in the 1970s when it had led the anti-colonial struggle.
Now he had long since lost faith in his liberators. He was not going to vote in the forthcoming elections. “It’s like living under a dead dog.”
The arrival of the Chinese as a major force in the continent was indeed not an unalloyed blessing. Beijing’s investments in and relations with many African states were deliberately opaque, suiting both sides. Beijing pointedly eschewed the growing Western trend of imposing conditionality – namely arguing that trade and investment were affected by a country’s human rights record and the accountability of the government. But nonetheless the dramatic reengagement of China with Africa in the first decade of the 21st Century was the most significant development in the continent since the end of the Cold War. Not only did Chinese loans for infrastructure deals lead to a flurry of road, school and railway building across the continent, but their engagement sparked something of a new scramble for Africa as other emerging powers, India and Brazil in particular, and America and the old colonial countries were prompted to reassess Africa.
Jacob Zuma was to prove a particular enthusiast for the new partner. In 2009, the year he took office, China became South Africa’s leading trade partner. Just a few years earlier it had been fifth. When in 2013 I asked Zuma about the relationship and raised western businesspeoples’ argument that there was a risk of a new colonial dependency, he brushed aside such talk. Western businesspeople and diplomats needed to learn lessons from China, he said. “I’ve said it to the private sector from the western countries: “Look. You have got to change the way you do business with Africa if you want to regain Africa. If you want to treat Africa as a former colony. Then people will go to new partners who are going to treat them differently.”
Zuma’s ebullience encapsulated the new mood of self-confidence coursing through African capitals. Marked improvement in governance and the global commodity boom, fuelled primarily by the breakneck expansion of the Chinese economy, had primed a decade of sub-Saharan growth.
The World Bank’s chief economist for Africa, Shanta Devarajan, predicted in an article in the Times of London in April 2013, that growth in sub-Saharan Africa would reach five per cent by 2015. Devarahan also highlighted the rapidly increasing investment flows citing that in 2012 net private capital flows increased by 3.3 per cent to $54.5 billion, in spite of the overall global decline of capital flows to developing countries. This growth remained broadly dependent on commodities and China’s all but insatiable appetite for Africa’s mineral wealth. But the mobile phone revolution which led to several hundred million people in sub-Saharan Africa gaining access to the internet and online banking in just a few years, transforming their potential to thrive, was helping to set in motion a more lasting transformation.
In 2011 I travelled with Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, to Tanzania to inspect an agricultural project he was championing. With funds from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation his Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was aimed at the millions of smallholders whose efforts in Africa have traditionally provided little more than a subsistence livelihood. By encouraging the use of hybrid seeds, abetting the access to markets, and providing decent storage facilities, Agra oversaw some model projects which transformed the lot of farmers and turned many into successful small businesspeople. While the decrepit system of roads and rail, and the fractured regional markets still inhibited expansion, the mobile phone revolution had clearly played a critical part in ensuring the viability of this breakthrough.
The truth is that Africa has seen many failed promises and dreams in the last hundred years. When Pierre Sane, the Secretary General of Amnesty International, toured South Africa ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the UN's Charter of Human Rights in 1999, he ridiculed the idea of a new dawn. It was not that he did not want to see a rebirth. It was just that unfounded optimism was as dangerous for Africa, he implied as knee-jerk pessimism.
'Renaissances have been promised by African leaders since independence,' he said. 'In the Sixties we heard of Renaissance. In the Eighties with the moves to democratization we heard of it. The reality of Renaissance to the ordinary people will come [only] when human rights are a reality ... and when the right to food and access to health care is a reality. As long as those are not the case it will remain what it is, just talk. (‘2)
South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, itself set a stuttering example to its peers as it prepared to mark 20 years of democracy in 2014. In August 2012 police shot dead over 30 striking miners who were demanding higher pay at the Marikana platinum mine. The television footage of police shooting dead protesters, sparked memories of the Sharpeville killings of 1960 – an uncomfortable parallel for the ANC which had of course come to power promising to right the wrongs of the past.
Speaking to me in his Cape Town presidential office a few months later Mr. Zuma dismissed such comparisons and insisted investors need not look elsewhere. People thought after Mari
kana that “South Africa was such a bad place,” he said. Yet investors should stay the course. They had a democracy and “a system in which even if there are mistakes they can immediately be corrected”. He dealt with questions on sensitive topics with his trademark easygoing charm but after four years in power his government needed more than silky political skills. Mr. Zuma’s Finance Minister and the governor of the Reserve Bank were both widely admired at home and abroad but still the country was failing to make inroads into its unemployment, variously estimated at between 25 and 40 per cent. With social inequality as acute as anywhere in the world there is fertile material for the populists to exploit.
Yet for all the justified caveats by 2013 the fundamentals underpinning the economy and politics of sub-Saharan Africa were more stable and enduring than in living memory. Kofi Annan rightly cautions leaders that for the continent truly to prosper and develop, autocrats need to oversee true freedoms, in particular the right to vote in an alternative leader. But he also happily accepts and trumpets that the continent is broadly embarked on an encouraging path, as it benefits in particular from the interest of the emerging powers and the rise of “south-south” trade. Some of Africa’s “new” leaders were not as enlightened I had originally hoped they would be. In many countries the “Little People” were still facing a stiff struggle to have their views heeded. But the era and ethos of the Big Men is at last all but at an end.
Chapter Notes
1. The King of Kleptocracy
Most of this chapter is based on interviews conducted by the author in Zaire between October 1996 and May 1997, the last seven months of Mobutu's rule.
1. Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1991, p. 678.
2. George Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, New York, StMartin's Press, 1993, p. 257.
3. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, p. 257.
4. Blaine Harden, Africa - Despatches From a Fragile Continent, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p. 49.
5. Crawford Young and Thomas Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p. 169.
6. Newsweek, 14 April 1997, article by Jorge G. Castaneda, author of Companero: The Life and Death of Che-Guevara, New York, Knopf, 1997.
7. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, p. 259.
2. The Last Days of a North London Doctor
Most of the material in this chapter is taken from visits to Malawi and Zambia in 1995. •
1. Philip Short, Banda, London and Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, p. 250.
2. Short, Banda, p. 92.
3. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, p. 26.
4. Short, Banda, p. 260.
4. The Cold War Crooner
The Nigerian interviews took place in October 1995.
l. Ryszard Kapuscinski, Another Day of Life, New York, Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1987, p. vii.
2. Fred Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa, London, Mainstream Publishing, 1986, p. 30.
3. Kapuscinski, Another Day, p. 18.
4. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, p. 319.
5. Bridgland, Jonas Savimbi, p. 60.
6. Judith Matloff, Fragments of a Forgotten War, London, Penguin, 1997, p. 75.
5. The Last White Patriarch
The material in this chapter is based on interviews held between 1993 and 1998.
1. Willem de Klerk, F.W. De Klerk: The Man in His Time, Johannesburg, Jonathan Ball, 1991, p. 140.
2. F.W. De Klerk, The Last Trek: A New Beginning, London, Macmillan, 1998, p. 264.
3. F.W. De Klerk, The Last Trek, p. 40.
4. F.W. De Klerk, The Last Trek, p. 393.
5. Professor Hermann Giliomee, Surrender Without Defeat; Afrikaners and the South African Miracle, South African Institute of Race Relations, Spotlight. Johannesburg, November 1997.
7. A Very Zulu Chief
l. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed, p. 37.
2. Henry Francis Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn, Pieterrnaritzburg, Shuter and Shooter, 1986, p. 71.
8. From Sherborne to Swaziland
l. Edward Fox, Obscure Kingdoms, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, p. 178.
2. Fox, Obscure Kingdoms, p. 160.
9. Madiba Magic
l. Steven Glover, The Daily Telegraph, 12 July 1996.
2. Martin Meredith, Nelson Mandela: A Biography, London, Harnish Hamilton, 1997, p. 67.
3. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Macdonald Purnell, 1994, p. 559.
4. James Gregory, Goodbye Bafana: The Man who took the Hatred out of Nelson Mandela, Headline, 1995, p. 6.
5. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, p. 440.
6. F. W. De Klerk, The Last Trek, p. 352.
10. Small Men
l. Financial Times, interview, 17 August, 1992.
2. Baffour Ankomah, New African.
3. Yoweri Museveni, Sowing the Mustard Seed, Macmillan, 1997.
4. Museveni interview with Chicago Tribune, 22 March 1998.
5. Mbeki, interview with the Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1996.
11. Comrade Bob
1. 'Breaking the Silence - Building True Peace', Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace & Legal Resources Centre, 1987.
2. Sunday Times, 2 February 1984.
3. Daily Telegraph interview, 8 March 2000.
4. Economist, 22 April2000.
Conclusion
1. 13 June 1994, OAU meeting of heads of state.
2. Pierre Sane, 7 December 1997, Press Conference, Johannesburg.
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