The Challenge for Africa (12 page)

The lack of fish protein in the diets of some sub-Saharan Africans is also one of the drivers in the trade and consumption of bushmeat—the capture and killing of wild animals, such as small mammals, antelope, and primates, and occasionally larger species as well. A 2004 study found that in Ghana consumption of bushmeat increases when supplies of fish fall; more bushmeat is seen in markets and more poaching occurs in game reserves when fish catches have been low.
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People researching the bushmeat trade believe that this link exists in other countries along the coast of West Africa, including Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, and Senegal.

The policies now guiding the management of Africa's fisheries have even broader implications for Africa's economic development. In a 2008 survey of Senegalese, more than half of the respondents said they would leave their country permanently if they were able to.
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Senegal once had a thriving, small-scale fishing industry. But its fish stocks have declined dramatically in recent decades. Senegal's government estimates that the fish catch fell from 95,000 tons to less than half that (45,000 tons) between 1994 and 2005. In 2006, the country did not renew fishing agreements with the European Commission. But this measure to protect its fishing industry is undercut by ships from Europe and other regions violating agreed
quotas. Senegal, like most African nations, does not have an effective coast guard to patrol its waters.
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As of the middle of 2008, Mozambique had only one patrol boat for its 1,500 miles of coastline.
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Senegalese fishermen, unable to compete with the foreign trawlers and seeing no prospects for other livelihoods, are, along with young men from Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia, risking their lives every day by climbing into leaky boats and crossing treacherous seas to gain a foothold in Europe.
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In 2007, an estimated six thousand Africans died trying to reach the Canary Islands.
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Those who survive the crossing attempt to make their way to mainland Europe—as if following the fish—where they believe they have a better chance of earning a living. (Many who are caught are repatriated.) A few get through—to the continent that is, in part through its fishing policies, involved in making their lives in Africa that much harder in the first place.

The decline of much of Africa's fishing industry provides an unhappy glimpse into an economic order that continues to place commodities first and communities last, in which a problem like overfishing in the northern Atlantic and other regions of the world is exported to Africa, where it has led to African fish stocks and livelihoods being decimated. It is an example of how the world's interactions with Africa are not necessarily motivated by altruism, but by the self-interest of states seeking to maximize their opportunities and minimize their costs, often at the expense of those who are not in a position to do either.

Even though awareness of some of these inequities is greater than it was in the 1980s or '90s, the situation has not changed significantly—not least because African governments are still acceding to them. African countries remain caught in a web of relationships with international lending and aid agencies, the
World Trade Organization, and leading and emerging global powers in which a premium is put on the extraction and export of raw materials, with only minimal benefits for the majority of Africa's peoples.

Despite the best efforts of the global Jubilee 2000 Campaign, which I cochaired in Kenya, and subsequent good-faith citizen-and celebrity-led initiatives, many African countries continue to be burdened by huge and unfair debts that inhibit government action to meet their people's pressing needs for the Big Five and other development investments.

From 1970 to 2002, Africa received over half a trillion dollars in loans from the World Bank, the IMF, and individual wealthy nations, and paid back roughly the same amount. However, because of the interest on that debt, by 2002 $300 billion was still outstanding.
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Throughout this period, the international community continued to provide more loans to African states so they could pay back the old ones. More recently some of these loans came with economic “conditionalities”—requirements to curtail government spending, to open markets to foreign goods, and to restrict the money supply. These restrictions forced governments to slash budgets for health, education, and other essential services for their citizens.

The issue of debt relief encapsulates the differences in perspective that challenge both Africans and the international community. Any individual who goes to a bank to take out a loan would expect the bank to ask for their credentials so that the individual can be assessed for creditworthiness. Likewise, the banker would expect the person to whom money is being lent to be responsible enough to know whether or not they can pay the loan back. If that individual's creditworthiness is an
issue, it is appropriate for the lender to impose conditions on the recipient to encourage them to spend their money wisely and restrict their ability to misspend it.

From the 1970s onward, however, the donor community was aware that it was dealing with governments that, once freed from the constraints of accountability, could act completely irresponsibly. The banks and governments that loaned African leaders huge sums are, therefore, as culpable as those to whom they gave the money. They knew very well that the recipients were not creditworthy. Yet capital was extended over and over again, either to prop up “friendly” leaders during the Cold War or to encourage favorable business arrangements between the governments and the donor countries.

The supply or withholding of international aid provided a useful means of controlling Africa's leaders to the advantage of the industrialized world. Another outcome was that African leaders relied so much on the regular supply of foreign loans that they were more accountable to the international donors than they were to their own people, a situation made easier because most African citizens were living under repressive regimes. Not only were the people unaware of what was happening, but neither they nor civil society had the capacity to protest or hold anyone accountable, precisely because the regimes were so repressive. All issues dealing with the government were shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, one word for “government” in Kiswahili is
sirikali
, which means “a big secret.” This practice of sealing deals “under the table” was a leftover from the colonial administrations. Even if civil society or the people themselves weren't struggling under autocratic rule, it would have been difficult for them to know what was taking place. But the lenders knew. In this and other ways, the normal relationship between lender and creditor was suspended when it came to African governments and the international community.

In addition, significant portions of loans and aid grants were appropriated by the leaders themselves, making a mockery of the fact that the funds were given in the name of and for their citizens. Much of the money never reached the people; instead, it was privatized by autocratic rulers. The amounts removed from the continent and the personal fortunes amassed by some of Africa's past leaders are astonishing. A French newspaper estimated that from 1989 to 1998, the back-to-back Nigerian leaders Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha accumulated $8 billion between them. Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor of Liberia netted a total of $5 billion over the course of sixteen years. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire is said to have amassed $6 billion over his thirty-three-year rule, while the late Zairian president Mobutu Sese Seko is thought to have appropriated to himself $5 billion. It is reported that between 1968 and 2004, in tiny Equatorial Guinea, with a population of five hundred thousand (in 2005), Francisco Macías Nguema and his successor, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, collected a total of $8 billion between them. In 2004, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo estimated that $140 billion had been stolen from Africa, through the privatizing of loans and aid to the state and kickbacks to corrupt officials since the main wave of independence.
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Such figures only confirm what everyone knows: that Africa is not poor, but that she has yet to learn to protect her wealth for herself.

The monies stolen from the African people and deposited in foreign accounts were then available for further lending or investment by bankers from the donor nations. The consequences of such theft are still being felt by millions of ordinary Africans on whose shoulders those debts have been placed. Even today, foreign banks operating in Africa can make larger profits than they do in their home countries by charging significantly higher fees and interest rates on loans. One has to wonder why African leaders allow foreign banks and investors to
make so much profit at the expense of their own people. (One way foreign businesses ensure their profits is by co-opting the African leaders, making them directors or giving them shares. This means everyone but the people are happy when financial statements are presented to shareholders.)

In 1996, pressure from activists in the rich, industrialized and non-industrialized countries forced the World Bank and the IMF to set up the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to reduce developing countries' debts. Because of this and other campaigns, some African countries, and countries in other poor regions, have seen their debt reduced or canceled. As of 2005, the Malawian government paid $95 million annually on its $3.2 billion debt; in 2006, the payment was reduced to $5 million. Sierra Leone's debt of $1.6 billion shrank to $100 million. Overall, as of 2008, about $88 billion of debt owed by developing countries has been canceled, although for each $1 in aid poor countries receive, they continue to return an average of $5 in debt service.
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In spite of having only 5 percent of the developing world's income, Africa still has about two-thirds of the world's debt. As of 2005, sub-Saharan Africa spent $14.5 billion annually repaying its debts.
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According to the United Nations, in 2007, Africa's debt burden stood at $255 billion.
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In 1998, the Jubilee 2000 Campaign encouraged leaders of the world's richest countries not merely to extend the relief but to cancel all debts, and not only to some African countries but to all of them. At the time of writing, comprehensive cancellation has not yet been agreed upon, and some countries on the continent still labor under heavy or significant debt burdens.

After years of conflict under the rapacious warlord-presidents Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, in November 2005 Liberians elected economist Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as their president. She inherited a ravaged country. Not only is Liberia's physical
infrastructure shattered, but it carries a $3.5 billion debt burden. “It's not fair for our young children to inherit this debt from which they've received very little benefits,” Johnson-Sirleaf has rightly pointed out.
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Liberia is now on track for HIPC debt relief. But Kenya, like Nigeria, is currently considered rich enough to be able to service its debt. As of 2004, Kenya still owed $6.8 billion, and sends back to the rich nations who loaned the money a million dollars a day in debt payments. Like Nigeria and Liberia, much of the debt that Kenya is being forced to repay was accrued many years ago by a dictatorial leadership that mismanaged the economy and probably allowed much of the money to be stolen.

It is clear that the relationship between debt, poverty, and aid needs to be rectified. It makes no sense for African governments to receive aid on the one hand, while on the other paying back debts acquired in the past by discredited regimes for projects that in the main did not benefit the African people. These illegitimate debts must be canceled, for as much as one might wish otherwise, they dilute the impact of philanthropists and donors who care about Africa and its peoples. As much as Africans are being assisted in practical ways by their efforts, some of the philanthropists' and donors' governments, as well as international lenders, are draining Africa's resources. This makes it much harder for Africa's institutions to fulfill the basic functions for which the funds that were given were intended.

Thankfully, in the last few years, civil society's success in persuading international lenders to recognize that Africans should not be held responsible for the sins of governments and lenders they had no control over is being paralleled, not only by aid being given and received more transparently and accountably, but by countries in Africa beginning to open up to democratic governance and civil society participation—conditions
that make governments more accountable to their people. Although many governments are still secretive and provide little information to the public about how they operate, greater possibilities now exist for citizens, in Africa and in the industrialized countries, to know how much money the government has received, how much debt relief has been provided, and what conditionalities apply.

Of course, after the relief of their debts, it will be up to the governments to behave responsibly, by not taking the opportunity either to divert the newly available funds away from development and antipoverty efforts or to accumulate more debt. African parliaments and civil society have important roles in ensuring that governments spend such funds appropriately.

Slowly, millions of dollars in donor funds or kickbacks on deals with multinational corporations that African leaders across the continent stole from their people are being recovered. For instance, as of 2008, $500 million from Sani Abacha's Swiss bank accounts had been returned to Nigeria.
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This is not an insignificant amount—which is why, if the international donor community is serious about helping Africa, it should compel its banks to do a full accounting of the ill-gotten gains deposited in them over the decades.

It is also incumbent upon the nations from whom the money was stolen to demand its return. However, given that a country's government must request this action, the process may take some time. In some cases, because of the longevity of many of the politicians and their tenacious hold on office, the very individuals who should be asking for the repatriation of the funds are those whose money is in question. In other instances, politicians are unwilling to launch an investigation into siphoned funds because they know they will be scrutinizing friends and colleagues, some of whom, they may hope, will protect them from potential prosecution when they lose power.