Voici un article de L’hebdomadaire Britanique “The economist” analysant les problèmes africains. L’article est en Anglais et je m’excuse de ne pouvoir vous en procurer la traduction pour le moment. Neanmoins, vu la qualité et la pertinence de l’article, j’ai estimé qu’il méritait d’être transmis aux frères et soeurs Gabonais(es). La question fondamentale de l’articles est: “pourquoi l’Afrique a tant de peine à amorcer le moindre progres mais sombre si facilement dans le chaos et l’anarchie?”
The hopeless continent
What is it about Africa? The crisis in Sierra Leone is only the latest in a catalogue of horrors. The continent is plagued with floods and famine, poverty, disease and state-sponsored thuggery. The West cannot solve these problems, but should try harder to help
AT THE start of the 19th century, Freetown was remote and malarial, but also a place of hope. This settlement for destitute Africans from England and former slaves from the Americas had become the main base in west Africa for enforcing the British act that abolished the slave trade. At the start of the 21st century, Freetown symbolises failure and despair. The capital of Sierra Leone may be less brutalised than some other parts of the country, but its people are nonetheless physically and psychologically scarred by years of warfare, and this week they had to watch as foreign aid workers were pulled out. The United Nations’ peacekeeping mission had degenerated into a shambles, calling into question the outside world’s readiness to help end the fighting not just in Sierra Leone but in any of Africa’s many dreadful wars. Indeed, since the difficulties of helping Sierra Leone seemed so intractable, and since Sierra Leone seemed to epitomise so much of the rest of Africa, it began to look as though the world might just give up on the entire continent.
It was in response to accusations of indifference towards Africa that the UN Security Council, at America’s behest, started this year with a “month of Africa”. It went well. AIDS, refugees and wars were all on the agenda, and there were signs that the new concern was not just a 31-day wonder. The Clinton administration, for instance, has since pressed ahead with plans to combat AIDS, doubling its budgetary requests to Congress. Congress, for its part, is backing a bill that will ease or abolish trade restrictions for 48 African countries. The World Bank and other donors showed last month that they were ready to intensify the fight against malaria, a disease that causes misery in Africa. And the UN has gone ahead with its peacekeeping plans, sending 8,000 troops to Sierra Leone and pledging another 5,500, all being well, for Congo.
All, however, is not well. Since January, Mozambique and Madagascar have been deluged by floods, famine has started to reappear in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe has succumbed to government-sponsored thuggery, and poverty and pestilence continue unabated. Most seriously, wars still rage from north to south and east to west. No one can blame Africans for the weather, but most of the continent’s shortcomings owe less to acts of God than to acts of man. These acts are not exclusively African—brutality, despotism and corruption exist everywhere—but African societies, for reasons buried in their cultures, seem especially susceptible to them (see article).
Sierra Leone manifests all the continent’s worst characteristics. It is an extreme, but not untypical, example of a state with all the epiphenomena and none of the institutions of government. It has poverty and disease in abundance, and riches too: its diamonds sustain the rebels who terrorise the place. It is unusual only in its brutality: rape, cannibalism and amputation have been common, with children often among the victims. For this it can thank, above all, Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader brought into government in an ill-advised “peace” deal last July.
In itself, Sierra Leone is of no great importance. If it makes any demands on the world’s attention, beyond the simple one of sympathy for its people, it is as a symbol for Africa. Yet the UN has sent troops to Sierra Leone. Mr Sankoh wants them out, so that he can plunder and torture at will. He has therefore done his best to terrify them, and their political masters, by capturing several hundred. The Security Council, meaning the great powers who can render it useful or supine, is torn by all the usual arguments. It agonises that it cannot stand idly by, as it did in Rwanda in 1994. Moreover, it cannot, after all its fine words in January, turn its back on Africa. But neither can it keep a peace that does not exist, nor intervene in every war in every corner of the globe. It must beware of mission creep, and fight only where it can win. African wars are, above all, matters for fellow Africans.
Caution versus credibility
There is merit in each of these propositions, though some of them are contradictory. Fortunately, not all. The proper course for the Security Council now is to authorise troops to snatch Mr Sankoh and put him on trial, for recent crimes if not for the ones committed before he was given an amnesty. The UN must be given enough troops, with enough equipment, training and sophisticated leadership, to quell the rebels. Realistically, that means that some of them must be first-world soldiers, drawn at least initially from the British force already there, with a mandate to fight. And once any fighting is finished, the UN must stay on in Sierra Leone, as it is staying on in the Balkans, to wage peace. In short, it must win.
It must do so, first, for the people of Sierra Leone; second, for the people of Africa; and, third, for the people of any country similarly threatened in the future, which is another way of saying for its own credibility. A Somali warlord, Muhammad Aideed, sent the Americans scuttling from Africa in 1993. If another thug can with impunity see off the entire UN, the organisation may as well go out of business. That does not mean that it should also send troops to Congo: the situation there is far more complex, and even more dangerous. But if the UN, whose recent hisdory is littered with meaningless vows of protection in “safe” areas, is forced by the parsimony or fears of its first-world members to cut and run in Sierra Leone, warlords everywhere will take it as a licence to act at will. In Africa especially, nothing would do more to justify despair.
The heart of the matter
Africa’s biggest problems stem from its present leaders. But they were created by African society and history
FLOODS in Mozambique; threats of famine in Ethiopia (again); mass murder in Uganda; the implosion of Sierra Leone; and a string of wars across the continent. The new millennium has brought more disaster than hope to Africa. Worse, the few candles of hope are flickering weakly.
For a brief moment in the mid-1990s, there were signs of improvement. World Bank figures showed a clutch of African countries achieving economic growth rates of more than 6%, enough to lift most of their people out of poverty in years rather than, as more usually predicted, in decades.
At the same time, multi-party democracy spread across the continent. A new crop of leaders emerged: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia. This “new breed” wanted to make life better for all their people by providing basic health care and education. They seemed to understand that peace and good government were essential. Though most of them had been socialists, they embraced the free market. Democracy and liberalisation seemed to flourish. There was talk of an “African renaissance”.
It was an illusion. The new leaders became embroiled in wars, some with each other, and the cheerful statistics were the result of good rains and bad accounting. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole had a growth rate of less than 3% in that period, which just about kept step with the rate of population increase. So no one was getting richer.
The figures—not to mention the recent crop of disasters and wars—now suggest that Africa is losing the battle. All the bottom places in the world league tables are filled by African countries, and the gap between them and the rest of the world is widening. According to Paul Collier of the World Bank, only 15% of Africans today live in “an environment considered minimally adequate for sustainable growth and development.” At least 45% of Africans live in poverty, and African countries need growth rates of 7% or more to cut that figure in half in 15 years.
Only three countries in sub-Saharan Africa—Congo-Brazzaville, Angola and Rwanda—are growing that fast. The first two are oil producers, and oil is notorious for destroying other economic life forms in Africa. Rwanda’s growth is aid-driven. Last year, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole grew by only 2.5%. Most of these countries cannot do better, says the Economic Commission for Africa, because, apart from South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius, they lack the basic structures needed to develop. AIDS deaths are rising, especially among the young urban middle class who could bring about Africa’s political and economic revival. The next generation will be more numerous, poorer, less educated and more desperate.
Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and incapable of development? Some think so. They believe Africa’s wars, corruption and tribalism are “just the way Africa is”, and that African societies are unable to sustain viable states. In the past, outsiders would have described Africa’s failure in racial terms. Some still do. They are wrong, but social and cultural factors cannot be discounted.
Others blame the way the rest of the world has treated Africa, citing exploitation going back to the slave trade and European colonial rule. They blame cold-war rivalry for propping up greedy dictators in the first 30 years of African independence, and now they trace the continent’s failures to debt, exploitative trading relations and too-strict demands for economic reform from the IMF and the World Bank.
Neither theory, by itself, can explain why Africa is the way it is. Those who see the continent as the victim of external forces must accept that parts of Asia, too, were subject to rapacious colonialists and have, within a generation after independence, established viable states and successful economies. Even where they fail, Asian countries do not blame their past imperial masters. Those, on the other hand, who think Africa is self-destructing must accept that its failings are not unique. There is tribalism in Bosnia and Ireland, dictatorship in North Korea, corruption almost everywhere. In short, Africa’s troubles are not exclusive to Africa. But their combination is.
Nature’s bad hand
Africa was weak before the Europeans touched its coasts. Nature is not kind to it. This may be the birthplace of mankind, but it is hardly surprising that humans sought other continents to live in. The soils are often poor and thin, lasting only a few planting seasons. The sun burns and the rain either does not come at all (Ethiopia) or comes in floods that wash everything away (Mozambique). The beasts and bugs are big, and they bite. Diseases fatal to man—and to his crops and animals—thrive.
The few humans who survived in Africa lived in small, hardy, Iron-Age communities in a huge variety of social organisations speaking thousands of languages. Most were small kingdoms, deeply conservative; they were geared to survival in Africa’s fickle climate, not to development. When nature allowed, they tended to celebrate rather than plan for a tomorrow that might never happen. Today, still, Africans’ strongest qualities are fortitude to the point of fatalism, close family and communal ties, tolerance and an ability to enjoy life. But their societies are also distrustful and bad at organisation. Most African businesses are one-man-bands that rarely survive the death of their founder.
By the mid-19th century, when Europeans began to penetrate the interior, Africa was reeling from upheavals, caused mostly by the demand for slaves. In the east, Arab slaving gangs cut deep into central Africa. In the west, slaving kingdoms and roaming warlords seized millions of men and women for sale in other parts of Africa and the Americas. In the south, the Mfecane, a massive movement of fleeing and marauding peoples, wiped out hundreds of other small communities and produced the Zulu empire. No wonder the Europeans, using mostlyAfrican troops, found it so easy to take over Africa. The continent was already exhausted by predatory bands and wars.
The most damaging impact of imperial rule on Africa was neither economic nor even political. It was psychological. In most places, effective European rule lasted a couple of generations or less: just long enough to undermine African societies, institutions and values, but not long enough to replace them with new ways of life or establish new systems of government. Colonialism, in short, undermined Africa’s self-confidence. A full 40 years after independence, it still looks to Europe and America for aid, goods, services and guidance. One example: the East African reported recently that a white foreigner had been appointed to head the Kenya Commercial Bank, since “it became clear that the appointment of an indigenous Kenyan might lead to a run on the bank.”
African states were not forged by ethnicity, nationalism and war. They were simply bequeathed by departing imperial powers who left highly centralised, authoritarian states to a tiny group of western-educated Africans who rushed in and took over. Some of those states, such as Congo, were established by Europeans as businesses to be milked for profit. Their successors simply continued the practice. Africa has an abundance of valuable minerals and some good land, attracting outsiders to extract the raw materials and ignore the rest. Independence often meant little more than a change in the colour of the faces of the oppressors.
Tribalism at the top
The new rulers made few changes on the surface, except to tweak constitutions to favour those in power. The African state, as invented by Europeans, has been neither deconstructed nor reconstituted. In some places, however—as in Somalia—it has been destroyed. The new elite proclaimed national unity and denounced tribalism; but they soon found, like the imperial powers before them, that manipulating tribal affiliation was essential to preserving power.
It is not just unluckly coincidence that Africa has had such a poor crop of leaders. Leaders emerge from a society, and they remain a part of it. The proof of this can be seen every day in the waiting rooms of Africa’s presidential palaces. Slumped on the sofas will be diplomats waiting for an audience, foreign businessmen—often dodgy ones—looking for a contract, and members of the president’s family or clan in search of money for school fees or a funeral. Whatever the diary says, most presidents try to satisfy the family first. The demands of Africa are more powerful than those of the outside world.
In most countries, a man standing for office tries to demonstrate that he shares the concerns of the common man. In Africa, a politician has to show that he has escaped from ordinary life: that he is a “Big Man”, powerful and rich, a benefactor far above the people whose support he seeks. Many African leaders grew up in dire poverty, and like to demonstrate their change of circumstances through conspicuous displays of western wealth. Few African palaces have anything in them made in Africa.
By personalising power, African leaders have undermined rather than boosted national institutions. The recent apparent spread of democracy in the continent is often a sham. Traditionally, African societies, with a few exceptions such as those of the Somalis or the Ibos in Nigeria, were not very democratic, though many had checks on the powers of the ruler. Today, only a few countries have a middle class, a body of professionals and businessmen with an allegiance to a national entity, laws and institutions which they regard as greater than the ruler or his party. Zimbabwe, which should have such a middle class, has shown in recent weeks that, apart from a few brave judges, officials consider their allegiance is owed to the president, not to the state.
Not only officials think this way. So do most Africans who live, as many do, at subsistence level in the countryside. Their loyalties are regional or tribal, and they support the president because he is the big chief. “I will vote for you when you are president,” challengers are sometimes told.
The state and the president are often viewed as the same thing. Most African presidents make no distinction between their party and the government, using the panoply of state institutions in their election campaigns. They do not find it hard to win. Abdou Diouf of Senegal, who accepted defeat in an election in March, was only the third African president to do so since independence four decades ago.
So there are elections in Africa, but little democracy. Some rulers, like Uganda’s Mr Museveni, argue that party elections are actually bad for Africa, because parties divide people along ethnic lines. Aid donors have finally rejected Mr Museveni’s no-party democracy, and are sceptical of Ethiopia’s opposite experiment with parties based on ethnicity. Nor have other African countries taken up these ideas. The aid donors, whose support is essential for African rulers, demand multi-party democracy on a western model. But they have applied it inconsistently. Cynics call it donor democracy—just enough fair voting and respect for human rights to satisfy the aid donors. Certainly, there would be few elections in Africa were it not for outside pressure.
Yet democracy does not have much to offer Africa. Democracies there are no more stable than dictatorships, and civil wars are just as common. In the economic sphere, autocracies may find it easier than democracies to keep to IMF and World Bank conditions such as tight money supply, low inflation and fewer civil servants. Sudan, an international pariah with no democracy and no international assistance, is doing as well as anyone these days, with a current growth rate of more than 7%. Much of Africa is ruled more by rainfall than politics.
Shell states
The African ruler finds himself trapped. He wants power and control; but the outside world makes demands about democracy, human rights and good governance, which weaken his position and could cost him his job. If he cannot use the treasury as his private bank account and the police as his private army, he tries to create alternative sources of wealth and power. This is why more and more African rulers are turning their countries into shell states.
On the outside, these have all the trappings of a modern state: borders, flags, ministers, civil services, courts. Inside, they have been hollowed out. The supreme master of the shell state was Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, which was renamed Congo when he was thrown out in 1997. During Mobutu’s 35-year rule, Zaire had ministers and a cabinet, ministries and governors, officials and diplomats. These appeared to make up the structure of a government. In fact, they were Mobutu’s personal networks, through which he stole the wealth of Congo.
In the early 1990s, the Ministry of Mines in the capital, Kinshasa, was empty except for one floor. Its officials used their positions for the perks: an office with a telephone, perhaps a car. During office hours, however, they engaged in other business. On the top floor, the minister presided, protected by a couple of soldiers (“A little sweet for us, please,” they would ask each visitor), and a secretary. The waiting room was packed with Zaireans coming to beg favours, many of them relatives, and half-a-dozen Europeans clutching bulging briefcases. They were there to bribe the minister for mining permits. He could keep the money for himself, unless Mobutu called him to ask for cash; in which case, he would have to disgorge some of his takings.
If Mobutu thought someone was becoming too powerful, he would sack him or even jail him. Once back in favour, however, he might be posted to another lucrative feeding ground. The state treasury probably never saw a cent; the people were robbed, often directly and brutally, by junior officials, soldiers and policemen in the street. When Mobutu was under pressure to democratise in the early 1990s, he urged his unpaid army to go and loot. They did, destroying what was left of the country’s commerce and creating chaos—which Mobutu promptly used as an excuse to postpone elections and make his rule indispensable.
Many people blame corruption for Africa’s ills. But that suggests rottenness in a clean system. In parts of Africa, corruption, like an advanced form of cancer, has taken over the whole body. Liberia, originally founded by freed American slaves and provided with a constitution modelled on America’s, is a case in point.
There are parts of Liberia that appear to be normal functioning institutions of a conventional state. Some ministers are not corrupt, and Mr Taylor himself can talk to visitors well enough about his worthy aims for the country. The visitors are often impressed. But are they right to be? What is happening on the surface may be no clue to the way the country is run behind the scenes. Mr Taylor recently passed a law that gives him the right to dispose of all “strategic commodities”. These are defined as all mineral resources, all natural forest products, all art, artefacts and handicrafts, all agricultural and fishery products and anything else the president chooses to call “strategic”. Liberia is, in fact, Charles Taylor Inc.
In Kenya and Zambia, powerful politicians, not necessarily the presidents, use their political positions to amass fortunes which they then use for political ends. They work through hidden networks, with their placemen in key positions in important ministries. Kenya still has the remains of a credible civil service, which, though corrupt, still handles the country’s official paperwork. At the same time, a hidden network intervenes and blocks whatever is inconvenient for the men who are really in charge. Zambia has such a network too, more powerful than the state.
Outsiders, particularly the aid donors, have great difficulty dealing with such states. Officially, World Bank and IMF officials judge all countries on their stated policies and plans. They deal with the appropriate ministers and officials. In countries such as Kenya and Zambia, however, that reassuring surface betrays little about the way the country is run. Presidents Daniel arap Moi and Frederick Chiluba are both adept at saying what the aid donors want to hear and, to an extent, delivering what the donors want to see. But time and again, as soon as the donors’ attention has moved on, a different agenda comes into play.
Donors hope that, in the long run, law and good practice will drive out corruption. But this seems unlikely as long as Africa is getting poorer. Prices for most of Africa’s commodities have fallen unsteadily but continually since the 1960s, and sub-Saharan Africa is still mainly a primary producer. For the moment, industrialisation has passed most of the continent by. Besides, the money accumulated by the politicians and crooks in Africa is rarely reinvested there. Most of it, like Mobutu’s loot, is either spent on conspicuous consumption or invested in Europe and America.
So how should the world deal with Africa? Aid is ambiguous in its effects. When disaster strikes, it is hard to refuse to help. But aid also increases dependency and can deflect recipient governments from the urgency of the task. In the Horn of Africa, for example, the aid that helps famine victims also frees money for Eritrea and Ethiopia to spend on fighting each other. Abolishing debt would help to create a fresh balance- sheet, but for many countries debt-relief would only benefit Ukrainian arms-dealers.
Can Africa change? Yes, it can. There are instances from all over the continent that, in the right circumstances, Africans can greatly improve their lives. Until the floods in March, Mozambique had been growing at 5% a year since its civil war ended, culminating in nearly 12% growth in 1997-98. Uganda too had growth rates of 7% in the 1990s. But real change needs something deeper than quick spurts of growth.
More than anything, Africa’s people need to regain their self-confidence. Only then can Africa engage as an equal with the rest of the world, devising its own economic programmes and development policies. Its people also need the confidence to trust each other. Only then can they make deals to end wars and build political institutions: institutions that they actually believe in.
Sierra Leone’s agony
Who can, or will, save the country from its savage rebels?
THE panic in Freetown when rebels are reported to be approaching is understandable. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) is barbaric, murdering supposed enemies and cutting off hands and feet at random. Twice its fighters have got into Sierra Leone’s capital, and twice they have been driven out. The last time, in January 1999, they butchered some 6,000 people before they were repulsed. The report last weekend that they were almost at the edge of Freetown was incorrect. But they are on the move: this week, they took Masiaka, 60km (less than 40 miles) east of the capital, chasing away 400 UN peacekeepers. With British help, the defence of the capital is being strengthened. But hundreds of RUF fighters, based in neighbouring Liberia, are now reported to be re-entering Sierra Leone.
The UN force, sent in to keep the peace that was agreed upon at Lomé last year but which is now non-existent, is in dreadful trouble. The RUF has even captured 500 of its peacekeepers, mostly Zambians. Sierra Leone is turning out to be as big a blow to UN peacekeeping as were Somalia, Rwanda and Srebrenica. Canada has agreed to ferry in more soldiers from India and Bangladesh. But the force’s mandate was to support a peace agreement. Now it needs a mandate to enforce peace and, above all, the troops to make such enforcement feasible.
This mess was predictable. Foday Sankoh, the RUF’s leader, is untrustworthy and brutal. Before the peace agreement, he had been arrested by the Nigerian-led force fighting for the Sierra Leonean government, handed over to the government, tried and sentenced to death. But he was then released to sign the Lomé peace accord.
This half-baked deal, forced on all parties by the Americans, put the elected government and the terrorists on the same footing. It brought Mr Sankoh into government with the status of vice-president, giving him immunity from prosecution for war crimes. But he mistrusted the deal. He sent only a few fighters to the disarmament camps; in particular, he did not disarm his men in the eastern diamond area from which the RUF reaps some $60m a year. When the Nigerian-led force passed its mantle to the UN troops at the end of April, the RUF quickly challenged the new peacekeepers, and began its advance towards Freetown.
On May 8th, people in Freetown organised a “peace march” on Mr Sankoh’s house in the capital. The demonstrators included many of the rebels’ mutilated victims. When they reached his house, Mr Sankoh’s guards opened fire, killing eight people. Shortly afterwards, Mr Sankoh disappeared, apparently to join his fighters in the bush.
Britain had already announced that it was sending a force of paratroopers to evacuate its citizens. This sent shock waves through Freetown. Britain, the former colonial power, has also been Sierra Leone’s closest ally in recent years. “If the British leave, we know we will be thrown to the wolves,” said one local resident. The British government was ambiguous about its intentions. It was silent when Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary-general, asked for an international “rapid-reaction force” to give his peacekeepers punch. But by May 11th it had emerged that the Britons would almost certainly stay on, at least to help the UN defend Freetown.
The Nigerians, meanwhile, were considering sending two extra battalions of troops back to Sierra Leone. The Americans argued that these soldiers could operate outside the mandate of the UN. Others, including the UN itself, wanted them under UN control. The Nigerians insisted, above all, on any new force being internationally financed.
Sierra Leone’s government, still led by President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, is incapable of protecting its citizens, or even providing a focal point of resistence to the RUF. The country’s best hope of salvation may lie, ironically, with Major Johnny-Paul Koroma, who took power after the coup that overthrew Mr Kabbah in 1997. At that time, he invited Mr Sankoh and the RUF to join him in government, and rearmed them. The following year, the Nigerian-led force drove both Mr Koroma and the RUF out of Freetown. Later, Mr Koroma re-emerged, saying that he deeply regretted his alliance with the RUF.
Now a born-again democrat, he is chairman of the National Reconciliation Commission and supports Mr Kabbah’s government. In recent days, he has sprung into action, summoning his former soldiers, known as the West Side Jungle Boys. The current Sierra Leonean army, such as it is, plus some local militias, have also rallied to Mr Koroma’s call.
Mr Koroma’s followers can be almost as brutal as the RUF. When they started beating up suspected rebels, Mr Koroma put on his uniform and shot dead two of his own men, to instil discipline. For the moment he looks like the only Sierra Leonean capable of taking a stand against the RUF. But many suspect that, should he be successful, he might again decide to seize power for himself.