The Africans (51 page)

The West has poured billions of dollars into Africa in the past twenty years, attempting to elevate living standards. Most of the money has been wasted and many of the projects have been counterproductive. First, Africa cannot possibly afford the Western-style medical technology that has been forced on it by foreign governments and private donor agencies. (The health budgets of most African countries range from $1 to $10 per person; the United States spends about $800 per person.) Second, many of the development projects actually have
lowered
health standards instead of increasing them. For example, irrigation schemes and dams are intended to improve food production, but what they usually end up increasing is snail fever, the parasitic disease that drains the energy of 200 million people in the Third World.

Fortunately almost everyone now agrees that Africa must get back to basics in health care. Efforts to make Africa economically stable will fail until attempts to make Africa tolerably healthy succeed. There is no middle ground. In many ways the problem is more educational than medical and its genesis is at the lowest grass-roots level. Increasingly Africa itself recognizes this and is taking steps to change the emphasis of health care.

Nigeria plans to build 285 rural health clinics and has boosted its national health expenditures over a five-year period from $350 million to $2 billion. Mozambique inoculated more than half of its 10 million people against cholera and smallpox in one impressive nine-month campaign. Liberia has installed clean, piped water in six of its cities and now has ten hospitals and 220 clinics operating through the Ohio-sized country. In Kenya alone, more than 700 young Africans are studying medicine at the university level.

But Africa cannot do the job alone. The foreign powers which enslaved Africa, which colonized it and sent countries such as Chad and Guinea-Bissau reeling into independence without a single indigenous doctor, which exploit its minerals today and supply guns for its wars—all of them have a moral obligation to provide the personnel and monetary assistance the continent needs to escape the bondage of medieval health conditions. I remember touring a hospital in rural Zaire one day. Two and three patients shared the same bed. There was no air conditioning and most lay perspiring heavily, too weak to brush away the buzzing flies. Entire families camped around the bed of their sickly relatives. What, I thought, if the West never built another airport for an African government, never bought
another gun, never underwrote another foolish project to pad the personal coffers of some soldier-president? What if the West—and even the East—concentrated instead on waging war on the conditions that cripple the bodies and spirits of Africa. A naively idealistic thought perhaps, but how exciting the results could be!

T
HE
CHARTERED
CARGO
JET
from London arrived in the dead of night, taxiing past the deserted passenger terminal and whining to a stop at the far end of Ghana’s Kotoka International Airport. A platoon of heavily armed soldiers moved quickly to take up their positions around the Boeing 707. Within seconds, word of the plane’s arrival was flashed to a command post in nearby Accra, the capital, and the government broadcast an urgent message over the state radio station: the airport, all seaports and the international borders were closed until further notice.

Was this another coup d’état? Was the head of state returning from some secret mission or an unannounced vacation at his European estate? Not at all. In this hush-hush operation in 1979, Ghana was changing money, not governments. Its currency—the cedi—had been battered beyond value and would in the days ahead be banned, bundled and burned. In the plane was $690 million worth of new, redesigned cedis to replace the old money.

The Ghanaian cedi is among the frailest of Africa’s currencies, but it has lots of company in the financial sick bay. From the birr of Ethiopia to the kwanza of Angola, currencies in black Africa are under siege, the victims of inflation, mismanagement, rising import costs and unsteady export prices. Most are as worthless as yesterday’s newspaper and are neither accepted in neighboring countries nor exchanged for convertible currency at any foreign bank in the world. Just imagine that the dollars you used in California were useless
in Nevada, New York and Washington, D.C., and converting California dollars to, say, Nevada dollars was a process that required several levels of governmental approval. You probably would not trade with Nevada, you would not travel to Nevada, you might not even communicate with Nevada. That is precisely what has happened in Africa where Monopoly-money currencies isolate countries economically and socially as surely as a border strewn with land mines.

Africa’s general response to the weakening of its overvalued currencies has been to print more money. Nigeria increased its money supply between 1975 and 1977 by 180 percent. Ghana increased its supply 80 percent in 1976 alone and in one fourteen-year period (1965–1979) devalued its cedi seven times. And when the Ugandan finance minister told President Idi Amin that his treasury was out of money, Amin replied, “Well, print more.”

With more money suddenly chasing fewer available goods, the annual inflation rate soars—it is regularly over 100 percent in countries such as Zaire and Uganda—and a dizzying rise in the cost of living destroys any sensible relationship between wages and prices; the poor became even poorer. The price of food in Ghana increased twenty-three-fold between 1963 and 1977, and in 1981 a single car tire cost the equivalent of $360, a tube of toothpaste $6.50. In Zaire a copy of
Time
magazine sells for $10, a loaf of bread for $2. In Zambia a laborer must spend seven days’ wages to buy a crude cooking pot. Ghanaian laborers earn an average of $1.50 a day, but according to one Western study, it costs them $11 to buy a decent meal for a family of four.

“How do people survive?” asks Yaw Saffu, a University of Ghana professor, who served me a glass of water in his home, apologizing that he could not afford coffee. “With difficulty. They cut back to one meal a day. They get a second job. Their children get milk less often. They go to the countryside on weekends and pick bananas. Some go back to a barter economy. They buy nothing but absolute essentials in the stores.

“Of course, there’s almost nothing available in the stores, anyway. And when something does show up—say a luxury, like a can of dried fish—it’s so expensive you can’t afford it. These cedis in my pocket don’t mean anything, because they can’t buy anything.”

One survival technique is a lack of wastefulness; the African puts everything to use. Discarded wax-coated milk containers make far
better starters for a charcoal fire than the fluids American supermarkets sell for $2 a can. Plastic sandwich bags brought to Africa by expatriates are washed over and over and seem to last forever. Old rubber tires are turned into sandals. Empty whiskey bottles are sold for a penny and filled with kerosene. Newspapers are recycled. Clothes are stitched again and again. Kitchen sponges are used until they disintegrate. Tin cans become patches for car fenders. Human waste is collected to fertilize the garden. Cardboard boxes become the walls of shanty homes. In many countries you cannot buy a beer to take out of a grocery store unless you first turn in an empty bottle.

The strength of any currency, in the developed or underdeveloped world, is dependent on the power of the local economy to produce goods and services. Thus South Africa’s rand remains strong because that country’s economy is bullish. And Liberia has a built-in cushion because it uses U.S. paper notes as its official currency. But in most African countries, production is declining at the same time that the money supply is increasing, and in twenty of them, according to the World Bank, the per capita income actually decreased during the decade of the 1970s. So with nothing to back the face value of its currencies—such as gold reserves, an accepted international currency, or the ability to produce goods and services—Africa’s money has no more buying power than a barrel of penny postage stamps. When Pan American World Airways ended its service to Zaire in 1978, it had $3 million in local currency in its Zairian bank accounts. Pan Am could no nothing with the money other than pay a few bills in Kinshasa.

At independence, most African countries inherited a monetary system based on the English pound, the French franc, the Portuguese escudo or the Belgain franc. Nationalistic pride, however, got in the way of financial practicalities, and one country after another cut itself adrift from the backing of European currencies and began turning out a mind-boggling array of nonconvertible local currencies: the pula in Botswana, the dalasi in Gambia, the ekuele in Equatorial Guinea, the lilangeni in Swaziland, the naira in Nigeria, the ouguiya in Mauritania, the zaire in Zaire. If nothing else, the new presidents got a chance to put their picture on a paper bill, but most were overthrown before long and the notes had to be redesigned with a portrait of some other head of state.

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.