The Challenge for Africa (7 page)

It was in the 1970s, however, that the continent's economic fortunes began to decline. In an analysis published in 2003, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a U.S. nongovernmental organization (NGO), indicated that while the world economy grew by an average of almost 2 percent a year between 1960 and 2002, in Africa GDP growth was negative from 1974 to the mid-1990s.
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By 2003, average sub-Saharan GDP was 11 percent lower than thirty years previously. Whereas in the
early 1960s only 10 percent of the world's poor were African, by the year 2000 50 percent were.

In the forty-year period between 1960 and 2001, according to the World Bank, the Republic of Korea's average per capita annual growth rate was 5.8 percent a year, while China's and Singapore's was 5.6 percent. By contrast, over the same period, Côte d'Ivoire's rate was only half a percent, Zimbabwe's a third of a percent, and Nigeria's a fifth of a percent. Conversely, average per capita annual growth rates in Ghana, Senegal, Chad, the Central African Republic, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Niger, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were all negative. Given the fact that the population of the continent increased more than threefold, from 277 million in 1960 to over 900 million in 2008, not even those economies that grew were able to meet the basic needs of their people. Botswana, whose economy expanded by an average of 6.4 percent per year from 1960 to 2001, remains an exception to the anemic economic performance of the rest of continental sub-Saharan Africa.
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Like other developing regions, Africa has had to contend with a set of external conditions imposed by the industrialized world that were meant to combat poverty and foster growth, even though they sometimes had precisely the opposite effect. For decades, African states were offered or even urged to accept loans to finance large-scale development projects. Many of these were inappropriate to Africa's needs or simply fronts for official corruption. As the debt and interest payments mounted, African states were more often than not returning more funds to the industrialized countries than they were receiving in aid. In spite of their demonstrable corruption and lack of democratic bona fides, many leaders of African countries continued to receive funding from international agencies and donor nations, inhibiting the prospects
for development and further impoverishing the African people.

In the 1980s, in part as a response to the vicious cycle of indebtedness that had been created between the rich and poor worlds, the international financial institutions, principally the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, launched “structural adjustment policies.” In order to receive more loans or development aid, states were required to drastically cut back government expenditures, privatize state-owned companies, reduce inflation, charge fees for services like health care and education, and endeavor to create export-oriented economies rather than focus on the immediate needs of their people for food and essential services. While these policies were, in part, an effort to root out the corruption that by this time riddled many government agencies in Africa and elsewhere, the budgetary austerity forced on poor nations often led to the gutting of essential services like agricultural extension, infrastructure, health, and education. Despite the broad application of structural adjustment, from the perspective of most African citizens, governance did not measurably improve. Nor did the quality of their lives.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 removed one of the blockages to development in Africa. African leaders no longer had to pledge allegiance to either the Soviet or the American axis—whether they had an ideological commitment or not. These events put African governments on notice that even they could not continue to deny democratic space to their citizens indefinitely. The two superpowers encouraged leaders to accept, in theory at least, the proposition that the one-party rule that had been the norm for decades hadn't fulfilled the aspirations of the
African peoples, and that multipartism was worth trying. This was initially resisted. The reintroduction of multipartism in many African nations resulted from demands by donor nations, as well as from the many years of struggle by African civil society for better governance.

Another powerful sign that the Cold War was over and that entrenched systems could change was the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 after twenty-seven years in prison, followed by the formal end of apartheid in South Africa four years later. Mandela's release also fulfilled one of the main aims of the much-maligned Organization for African Unity: the political decolonization of the entire African continent.

The end of apartheid heartened citizen-activists in Africa and, indeed, around the world. In many African nations, civil society intensified its challenge to the policies of dictatorial governments and engaged in opposition politics. Citizens of the industrialized nations also grew less accepting of their governments' support for despotic regimes, particularly as details of some of the leaders' depredations became more widely known. Governments began to deliver loans and aid to African heads of state with demands that they respect human rights, improve governance, end one-party political rule, curtail corruption, and focus on poverty reduction.

During this period, some of the “Big Men” whose personas came to dominate the political life of their country were leaving the stage: President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who had ruled Côte d'Ivoire for more than thirty years, died in 1993, and Hastings Banda, Malawi's leader for three decades, was defeated in a democratic election the following year. In 1991, presidents Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Mathieu Kérékou of Benin allowed multipartism and soon after left office. (Kérékou was reelected to the presidency in 1996, and served for a further decade.) Others had their power wrested from them by other would-be Big Men: Muhammed Siad Barre of Somalia and Mengistu
Haile Mariam of Ethiopia were both forced from power in 1991; in Zaire, the ailing Mobutu Sese Seko was forced to give way in 1997 to the rebel fighters of Laurent Kabila.
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However, while the iron grip of the first generation of African Big Men and their successors loosened, it was not fully freed. Nor was Africa's crisis of leadership over. The relieving of tensions frozen by the Cold War and the end of some regimes threatened the very existence of a number of nation-states. Some collapsed, while, uncertain and threatened, those in charge of such weakened states succumbed to corruption. More and more, African states came to resemble a crumbling house from which both the owner and the onlookers scrambled to escape with whatever could be looted. Citizens became prisoners and refugees within their own borders, denied freedom of speech, movement, assembly, and association, and treated with less respect than foreigners in their own land.

Governments that felt at risk from a stronger civil society and growing demands both domestically and internationally to open their political systems responded by, in some cases, using ethnicity to set communities against each other. This was the situation in Kenya throughout the 1990s and, on a far more devastating scale, in Rwanda in 1994. No one was safe. Leaders tried to hold on to resources that had become personal fiefdoms.

Along with the political changes brought about by the end of the Cold War, a new economic consensus emerged that free markets and free societies would reinforce each other and that the integration of the global economy through trade and information sharing (“globalization”)—now unhindered by the long-standing barriers between West and East—would lift poor countries, along with eastern Europe and the nations of the former Soviet Union, out of their economic doldrums.

Throughout the 1990s, Africa and other poor regions were assisted by donors and encouraged by development agencies to
accept the free trade agenda of the newly formed World Trade Organization. In effect, this meant orienting their economies to increase exports, while further opening their markets to foreign goods. When such largely unregulated liberalization failed to make much of a dent in poverty or spur high rates of growth, however, the IMF, World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department prescribed new measures. In what became known as the Washington Consensus, poor countries were encouraged—in some cases mandated—to further liberalize their policies on trade and the free flow of capital. In order to accelerate GDP growth, nations were urged to continue privatization programs, curtail government functions, and deregulate their industries.

In the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, some African economies did begin to grow. But by 2001, the number of people in Africa living in extreme poverty had nearly doubled to 316 million, from 164 million twenty years before.
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And along with international campaigners advocating fair trade and working against debt and poverty, a growing number of economists, among them the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, began to view the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus as neither concerned enough with equity—who benefited from these policies—nor focused sufficiently on the economic sustainability of global GDP growth and its political, social, and environmental ramifications.

As the twenty-first century began, many African nations had relatively new heads of state. These rulers, a number of whom came to power through coups or civil wars or both, may not have been as oppressive to their peoples as those they succeeded, but they did not usher in the needed revolution in leadership. In 1999, Côte d'Ivoire underwent a military coup followed by a civil war that pitted the north against the south in what was once considered one of Africa's most successful nations (its capital, Abidjan, was long known as the Paris of
Africa). From the late 1990s to early in the twenty-first century Africa's first “world war” consumed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, eventually including soldiers from nine other African nations. The toll was grisly: while many combatants were killed, civilians were the prime victims; thousands of women were raped as a tactic of war; hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are still in refugee camps; and five million or more have succumbed to basic diseases or malnutrition that went unaddressed.
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In the main, however, Africa's current heads of state are an improvement over those of the previous four decades. Few African leaders today dare to be as autocratic as their predecessors. In nearly all sub-Saharan African countries, democratic space has increased and opposition movements are stronger than they were (although, of course, this varies by region and country). More leaders than ever before in postindependence Africa have their actions scrutinized or checked by an increasingly vocal and sophisticated civil society, and a freer and at times vibrant press. In addition, more heads of government have their time in office limited by set terms and elections—although these are not always accepted to be free and fair, as recent votes in Ethiopia, Guinea, Nigeria, Kenya, Togo, and Zimbabwe demonstrate.

Despite the emergence of more responsive leadership on the continent, the benefits Africans see in democratic countries in other parts of the world have yet to become tangible. Although in 2008 the average growth rate across sub-Saharan African economies was expected to reach 6.7 percent
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—above the global average—the fruits of better management of state affairs have yet to reach most people and are not spread equally around the continent or even within countries. Unlike in China and India, millions have not been lifted out of poverty.

As of 2005, half the population of sub-Saharan Africa (approximately
380 million) live on the equivalent of $1.25 a day or less—a proportion that matches the 1981 level.
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Average income in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa is about what it was in the 1970s.
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In 2006, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that a quarter of African children under five were underweight. Because of the AIDS pandemic, average life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by only seven years (to forty-seven) since 1960. According to the World Health Organization, nearly twenty-five million people in sub-Saharan Africa are living with HIV.
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Botswana, so long a beacon of political stability and economic growth, is challenged by the fact that a quarter of its citizens are HIV positive, a key factor in the decline of the average life expectancy from sixty-five years in 1995 to forty years in 2005.
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In the 2007/2008 UN Human Development Report, all of the twenty-two lowest-ranked countries—in terms of life expectancy at birth; adult literacy rates; combined gross enrollment ratio for primary, secondary, and tertiary education; GDP per capita; life expectancy index; education index; and GDP—were from Africa south of the Sahara. Alone of sub-Saharan African states, the island nations of Mauritius and the Seychelles were ranked in the top one hundred of the report's Human Development Index.
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A definite hunger for the reintroduction of democracy exists among African peoples after being denied it for so many years. At the same time, some of the current so-called democracies are deliberately weak or still unfolding. Too often, the term “democracy” has simply become a bromide offered during voting, rather than a means of enhancing the capacities of governmental
and nongovernmental institutions, providing basic services to the people, and empowering them to be active partners in development.

All political systems, institutions of the state, and cultural values (as well as pathways toward, and indicators of, economic growth) are justifiable only insofar as they encourage basic freedoms, including human rights, and individual and collective well-being. In that respect, democracy doesn't solely mean “one person, one vote.” It also means, among other things, the protection of minority rights; an effective and truly representative parliament; an independent judiciary; an informed and engaged citizenry; an independent fourth estate; the rights to assemble, practice one's religion freely, and advocate for one's own view peacefully without fear of reprisal or arbitrary arrest; and an empowered and active civil society that can operate without intimidation. By this definition, many African countries—and, indeed, many societies in both the developing and developed worlds—fall short of genuine democracy. Likewise, “development” doesn't only entail the acquisition of material things, although everyone should have enough to live with dignity and without fear of starvation or becoming homeless. Instead, it is a means of achieving a quality of life that is sustainable, and of allowing the expression of the full range of creativity and humanity.