[OffTopic] AFRICA - Hope springs from marginalisation - Financial Times, Dec.6
Organic recovery will need assistance from abroad
Financial Times SURVEY - Guide To The New Millenium
By Michael Holman
Like irregular despatches from the front-line of a distant conflict, comes news
of subSaharan Africa - confusing reports, accounts of victories and defeats,
advances and retreats.
In the Horn of Africa, erstwhile allies go to battle over a disputed border. But in
Nigeria and Ghana former military leaders win multi-party elections and
become civilian presidents.
Congo (formerly Zaire) sinks deeper into conflict. Yet Mozambique, not so
long ago itself gripped by war, attracts multi-billion dollar investments and
notches up double digit growth.
Sudan's civil conflict drags on. But thriving Botswana lends its bulging foreign
exchange reserves on the European money market.
International phone lines to Nigeria are erratic. But a Lagos-based computer
company sells its software in Europe. And in impoverished Mali, a local
business woman markets her tie-dye cloth on the internet.
Is Africa - birthplace of humanity, home to an eighth of the world's population,
and treasure trove of resources ranging from oil and gas to unspoilt beaches -
on the brink of disaster, wracked by war and sapped by disease? Or is it on
the verge of recovery, undergoing a transformation as profound as any in its
history as it comes to terms with a traumatic past, and gets to grips with the
economic and technological revolutions that are reshaping the global
community?
The confusion is not surprising. There is no single front line, no single battle,
and no homogenous Africa with an all-embracing culture or a collective
identity.
It is not possible in a region with more than a thousand languages and as
many ethnic groups, all living on a vast land mass that could accommodate
China and Europe, India and the US, with room to spare for Argentina and
New Zealand.
Yet because it shares so many problems - arbitrary boundaries, crumbling
infrastructure, crippling debt, ethnic rivalries - which can only be addressed by
joint solutions, outsiders are entitled to ask questions that assume the region
shares a common fate.
At a time of taking stock of the past, as well as looking to the future, Africa
more than any other continent needs to be viewed with appropriate
perspective.
The first 500 years of the second millennium saw the emergence of an Africa
all too readily ignored or forgotten if the world is viewed through a Eurocentric
lens.
It was a period of powerful empires, from the Ashanti in west Africa to the
kingdoms of western and central Sudan, and the great city states of Zaria,
Katsina and Kano. Achievements ranged from the building of Great Zimbabwe,
the awesome stone city at the heart of the Shona kingdom, built between
1200 and 1400, to creation of what has been called the eighth wonder of the
world, the magnificent 12th century rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in
Ethiopia.
But a sea journey that began in 1485, when a Portuguese explorer called
Diogo Cao sailed up the mouth of the Congo river, marked the start of an era
that only ended in 1974, when a coup that brought down the government in
Lisbon paved the way to the independence of colonies in Guinea (now
Guinea-Bissau), Angola and Mozambique, and hastened the end of white rule
in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa.
The relationship with Europe during this period was to prove traumatic, for it
saw the burgeoning of the slave trade in which Africa was complicit and
Europe encouraged. Between 1650 and 1850 at least 11m Africans were
shipped across the Atlantic. A further 2m men, women and children were lost
on the crossing, and 7m million died before embarkation in the greatest and
most fateful forced migration in history.
More traumas were to come. The carve-up of Africa at the Berlin conference in
1884-5 saw the imposition of boundaries determined by the mining or trading
interests of the European powers.
The price is still being paid. "One of the most serious consequences of
European colonisation in Africa," writes Professor Ali Mazrui, a leading
historian, "has been the destruction of Africa's own legitimate institutions and
structures of authority."
In the course of the past five decades the continent has moved at breakneck
pace, with the lives of Africans changing more radically than in the previous
five centuries.
The mismanagement of post-independence Africa, the proxy battles between
the superpowers as the region became a cockpit of the cold war, the impact
of radical economic reforms -
"the medicine that kills the patient", as one African leader sees it - introduced
under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF, and the scourge of Aids
have proved a formidable combination.
Africa ends the century battered, and bereft of the self-confidence that South
African president Thabo Mbeki is seeking to instil under the banner of "African
Renaissance". And it is ill-equipped to handle the challenges that the next
century will bring: coping with Aids; the urgent need to become more
competitive in a globalised economy; making good environmental damage;
defusing the tensions that will arise from increasing competition for water; and
declining aid flows.
The institutions that should buttress democracy - civil service, independent
judiciary and media - are weak, and Africa's management capacity less
capable of meeting the challenges than it was at independence in the 1950s
and 1960s.
For all the signs of economic recovery in the past few years, most statistics
are grim. The continent has been marginalised: its share of world trade
remains stagnant at around 3 per cent, its share of foreign direct investment
tiny.
Per capita income levels have yet to recover to 1974 levels and it has more
refugees than anywhere else in the world.
Not only has it suffered from capital flight - much of its intellectual elite has
fled to Europe and North America, and there is little evidence of either
returning in the strength and numbers Africa needs if it is to manage and help
fund its own recovery.
But perhaps above all there is a technological gap. Fifty years ago, books,
pencils and paper were enough to fill the education shortfall. Today many
African children still lack the resources to learn "the three Rs" while their
contemporaries in the developed world use satellites and telephones and
computers and email.
But things are stirring.
From Lagos to Lusaka, the mood of the continent has altered dramatically as
the continent enters a new era. Africans have fewer inhibitions about criticising
their governments, and they speak out more confidently for human rights, and
against corruption.
At the same time, there are signs of a more effective partnership between
state and private sector and foreign investor. What was once unthinkable is
now on the agenda - from the privatisation of Lagos State water supply to
build-operate-transfer projects that put the resources of the private sector
behind efforts to rebuild crumbling roads and revive inefficient ports.
Meanwhile, scientific advances open up fresh opportunities. There are hopes
of eradicating the spider mite that damages cassava, West Africa's staple
food, and the tsetse fly that preys on cattle.
But it is doubtful whether Africa can manage its own recovery effectively. The
continent's fate lies in the hands of a new generation of better educated
Africans. But without outside help - to implement debt relief proposals, back
Africa's efforts to raise health and educational standards, give technical
assistance, and offer support for conflict resolution and peacekeeping
initiatives - it will be an uphill task.
The international commitment that this requires may emerge only when an
ailing Africa is seen as a threat to contributors' self-interest - whether in the
form of immigration to southern Europe, a rise in Moslem extremism and the
risk of terrorism or a growth in drug trafficking.
One thing seems certain: Africa may have been marginalised in the world
economy during the second half of the last hundred years, but it cannot be
ring-fenced in the century to come. |
