HAHA yah experienced - HAHA - you crack me up El Mat. One of those african princes was in my physics courses - really great guy - one of the nicest people I met in college - he was telling me why they had so many wives - see the man gonna get his sex every night, but the woman have her period - so he take a second wife that can service him while the first on her period - well medical studies have shown that women who live together - their cycles come into alignment - so every so often to service that man for the week the women were in period he had to keep taking new wife who in turn this womans cycles would line up with the group - so this guy - KOGO - he had like 20 wives I think. Maybe that is why he was always so happy and smiling and really nice - hehe. He told me shades you come over to my kingdom and I give you a few wives - you always a good friend to me - hehe. I was tempted El Mat. Do you not see any breakdown in the aggregate of the regimes after all the efforts by the west the past few years? Over another decade or 2 can the transnationals make a serious influx into the area if we concentrate efforts to stabilize things in that regions as George claims he wants to do?
My foriegn exchange folks were trying to get me to go to tanzania many years ago in a college exchange program - they had just murdered many and I said what did I do to piss you off instructor - hehe - he said no Shades, these are a great people - just bad governments - they will do you no harm - you will be like a god - I said false gods are the first to go in regime change - no thanks - hehe.
freeafrica.org You are right about the idependance:
After years of mismanagement, a huge credibility gap has emerged between the people and the leadership. Most African countries today are poorer, in terms of income per capita, than they were at independence in the 1960s. This is not a justification for colonialism but a statement of fact. Between 1965 and 1987, the average annual growth rate of GNP per capita was 1.1 for all of Africa, 0.4 for Sub-Saharan Africa, and -0.1 if Nigeria is excluded. Between 1986 and 1991 real GDP fell by 0.7 percent a year in Africa (including Arab North Africa, but not South Africa).
The performance of sub-Saharan or black Africa has been the worst in the Third World. Between 1980 and 1989, black Africa's real GDP per capita contracted by an average 1.2 percent while East Asia grew by 6.2 percent and South Asia by 3.0 percent (World Bank Development Report, 1991; p.3).
According to Africa's own elites, including such veteran African leaders as Diouf, Julius Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda, Africa's problems are forever external: Western colonialism and imperialism, the pernicious effects of the slave trade, exploitation by multinational corporations, unjust international economic system, inadequate flows of foreign aid, deteriorating terms of trade and now "marginalization."
But a new and angry generation of Africans reject this self-serving claptrap and lay greater emphasis on internal factors: misguided leadership, systemic corruption, capital flight, economic mismanagement, senseless civil wars, tyranny, flagrant violations of human rights and military vandalism.
These internal factors are themselves products of defective economic and political systems established and retained by many African leaders after independence. Most of these systems are characterized by extreme concentration of both economic and political power in the hands of the state -- and ultimately one individual.
In Africa, the state reserved for itself the right to intervene, plan, and restructure almost every conceivable aspect of Africa's economy and society. Socialism may be dead but statism lives in Africa. The preponderant state hegemony in the economy has now become the bane of Africa's development, suffocating and devoring its productive base.
The centralization of economic power in Africa turned the state into a huge patronage machine and bred elite cronyism. Lucrative state jobs were parceled out to cronies and government largesse doled out to loyal supporters. In African pork barrel politics, avaricious elites absconded with the goods, leaving the people to starve.
The labryinth of controls and regulations instituted by the state provided the ruling elites with a rich opportunity for illicit enrichment. To help the unwary navigate the stifling maze of regulations, enterprising ministers demanded bribes and extorted "commissions." In many African countries, the World Bank and the IMF arrived too late. The state treasury had already been "privatized" by the elites.
By concentrating so much political power at the center, the state also became an irresistible prize for which all sorts of groups and individuals competed to capture. Once seized, the instruments of state power were used by these groups/individuals to enrich themselves and further the interests of their own ethnic groups or professional class. All others are excluded.
It is this competition or fight for state power that has been the source of Africa's inane civil wars and chronic political instability - not colonialism or Western "exploitation" or "marginalization." In almost all African systems, the peasants, the real people of Africa and producers of its real wealth, were milked by the state and excluded from participation in the political decision-making process. They were betrayed, not once but thrice.
In many African countries, those who took over the reins of power after independence were worse than the colonialists they replaced. In Somalia, the civilian administration that assumed power at independence in 1960 was hopelessly corrupt and incompetent. It was overthrown in a coup (Oct 21, 1969) by Major-General Mohamed Siyad Barre, who adopted the designation "Jalle" or "Comrade" and socialism. Government was centralized under a "Supreme Revolutionary Council" and Somalia turned to the Soviet Union for tutelage for the period, 1970-77.
Barre played one superpower against the other to extract maximum aid benefits. In August 1980, for example, Barre offered the Carter administration the use of military facilities at the port of Berbera in exchange for $20 million in credits for purchase of military equipment, $5 million in budgetary support and $20 million in general credits. So much aid poured in that Somalia earned the title "The Graveyard of Aid."
Socialist policies failed to engineer economic development. Although Somalia did become a major supplier of bananas, the economy was in tatters by 1979. The IMF was summoned in 1980. But after 8 years of government policy zig-zag and posturing, a frustrated IMF pulled out, declaring Somalia ineligible for further borrowing in June 1988.
For two decades, 1965-87, living standards remained stagnant. GNP per capita grew at a miserable 0.3 percent per annum. Food production per capita declined an average of 2 per cent from 1975 to 1985. By 1987, consumer prices had risen 1,000 percent over the level in 1980.
An increasingly unpopular and corrupt Barre regime resorted to brutal force to remain in power. Torture, mass executions and pillage were the regime's signatures. Entire regions were devastated by a military regime engaged in combat against its own people. In May 1988, for example, it dropped bombs on its own citizens. The third betrayal occurred after Jan 1991 when those "liberators" who drove Barre out of office began fighting among themselves, sowing further carnage and confusion. But sadly, Somalia is not the exception. Angola, Liberia, Mozambique, Sudan, Uganda and Zaire lay in ruins. Would African leaders call for U.S. military intervention in these countries too?
More distressing, many other African countries are heading down the same path of corruption and self-destruction. Libya ought to have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world with a population of only four million and vast oil wealth estimated at $10 billion in 1990. But mismanagement, misguided foreign exploits and corruption so eroded the country's economic base that Libya sometimes defaults on its foreign bills and some government employees go unpaid for months.
In Algeria a "former prime minister, Mr. Abdelhamid Brahimi, said recently that officials of the ruling Front de Liberation National had pocketed $26 billion in bribes and commissions on foreign contracts. The present prime minister, Mr. Mouloud Hamrouche, called the charge `grossly exaggerated' but did not deny its gist.
In Sierra Leone, a special commission recently detailed how the ruling elites plundered the country's resources with impunity. Former Inspector General of Police, James Bambay Kamara, owned 37 pieces of land, with the most expensive valued at Le7.5 million when his salary was only Le182, 250 a year. He operated three bank accounts with one in London.
Under various programs, the World Bank, IMF, and other international agencies have been nudging African governments toward reform. But the commitment to genuine reform has been supercilious and languid. Free-loaders and patronage junkies fiercely resist a dismantling of the statist behemoth and a reform of the political process. In Sierra Leone, Mr. Musa Gendemeh, the former deputy agriculture minister, said on the BBC "Focus on Africa" program (April 24, 1990), that "he won't give up his present privileged position for the sake of a multiparty system nor would one expect a policeman or soldier to give up his one bag of rice at the end of every month for the same reason." And why should he or any other corrupt official on the receiving end of Western largess? Such ministers oversee the disbursement of over $12 billion in foreign aid largesse pumped annually into Africa.
One solution is to take power away from the center or the state and give it back to the people (decentralization). Another is to monitor foreign aid much more closely, or to direct it only where free-market reform is a viable reality. The best solution to all this nonsense, however, has been best expressed by Amina Ramadou, a Zairean peasant woman. "We send three sacks of angry bees to the governor and the president and some ants which bite," she suggested. "Maybe they will eat the government and solve our problems."
George Ayittey, |
