by Guy Arnold
A major source of income both during and after the colonial period came from the export of tropical foods in which Africa had a clear economic advantage and it was argued very strongly at the time that maximizing such exports would provide capital needed for development. The process was not that simple. Efforts to increase agricultural exports meant neglect of food crops for home consumption with the result that a continent where 80 per cent of the people lived on the land found itself spending a steadily increasing amount of foreign exchange to import food that it failed to produce for itself. A different case concerned copper in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Between 1930 and 1964 (the year of Zambian independence) copper production boomed and the GDP expanded; yet at independence 80 per cent of the population still lived and produced exactly as they had done prior to the copper boom. This posed the question of just what benefit to the people of the colony had been the huge production of copper over these years. ‘What this kind of boom really meant can be demonstrated by two facts. About half of the total capital surplus generated in the Northern Rhodesia economy was annually transferred abroad, mainly as copper-mining dividends. Secondly in 1964 on the day of independence, Zambia inherited exactly one secondary school capable of carrying Africans to the level of the Senior Cambridge certificate.’ Further, the new states ‘remain dependent on world markets in which they have little or no say on prices; and the terms of trade have continued (with some exceptions) to move against them’.7 By the time Africa became independent the world economic system had created a huge gap in wealth and power between a minority of rich countries at one end of the scale and apparently ever-increasing poverty at the other end. Sometimes the gains that appeared to accrue from growth in a particular sector of the economy were cancelled out by other factors. As Basil Davidson argues in relation to Ghana: ‘Thus the annual quantity of cocoa produced in Ghana during the past ten years or so has repeatedly passed all previous records. But so has Ghana’s annual burden of foreign indebtedness, and, in consequence, Ghana’s helplessness within the general system that was shaped in colonial times.’8
Development plans were very much in fashion during the 1960s but only continental planning would have ensured that the gains from economic growth that such planning produced could be evenly distributed. Smaller common markets – the East African Common Market was a good example – were likely to result in the strong sectors (in that case Kenya) getting stronger at the expense of the others. Plans, in any case, were about classifying priorities; in most cases development plans were drawn up by foreigners who believed they must be dependent upon aid inputs. In fact, what tended to happen was that the donors ignored the plans and chose the desirable projects that best suited their aid policies. The plan was no more than a framework. Although it would have made macro-economic sense to draw up a plan to cover the whole continent there were insuperable obstacles to doing so at the time. Vice-President Rashid Kawawa of Tanzania explained this very well: ‘The real problem is that each of the separate nations has the fear that in a United Africa it might become a backward and neglected area, exploited for the benefit of another part of this great continent. This is not a stupid objection or a selfish one.’ At one level the proliferation of plans through the 1960s appeared rather like a process of wish fulfilment, as though the mere existence of a national plan would make things happen. The economist, Professor Arthur Lewis, wrote as follows towards the end of the decade:
Development planning has not made much contribution to economic growth. This is partly because most plans are so grandiose and unrealistic that nobody takes them seriously, including the people who draw them up. But there is also the more fundamental reason that the rate of economic growth depends not so much on government expenditure as it does on whether farmers plant more, the businessmen build more factories, and the mines increase their investment. If conditions are favourable to the expansion of such activities, the economy will grow rapidly whether there is a Development Plan or not.9
If we examine a few sample countries at the beginning of the decade the extent of the problems becomes clear. The violent upheavals in the Congo dominated the political headlines about Africa for the first part of the 1960s, yet economics, and above all the Belgian determination to maintain its grip on the country’s wealth, lay behind the politics. ‘Authoritarianism was the basic vice of the system, as of all Belgian colonialism. It was based for too long on the monstrous slogan, “no elites, no problems”. As an application of this principle, higher education was closed to the Congolese until 1955. They were forbidden to go elsewhere for study, and unable to do it at home.’10 Ghana, which as the first black African colony to achieve independence drew much attention to itself at this time, also suffered under colonialism though not in the extreme form of the Congo. ‘In no case were the Africans themselves permitted to achieve anything like full development of their own resources. Education and social services lagged, and the African was limited predominantly to unskilled wage labour or to the traditional sector.’ This judgement stands despite the generally better educational achievements of British West Africa than elsewhere on the continent.11
There were plenty of signs in Ghana immediately after independence that Western businessmen at once expected the Ghanaian government to conform to Western, capitalist policies, even though the country was determinedly neutralist and had adopted a socialist path of development. The West, the source of most aid and investment, believed that in the end the pressures it could mount would overcome African attempts to pursue indigenous African development paths. And when Nkrumah was overthrown in February 1966 economists ‘sorted’ out the ‘chaotic inheritance’ so as to present a case for help to the IMF. Between 1959 and the end of 1965 Ghana’s foreign debt had risen from £6 million to £237 million. At this point Western Africa watchers and economists could, perhaps, have been excused for saying ‘I told you so’ and yet by 1971, Ghana’s moderate pro-Western leader Kofi Busia could say plaintively that he, or rather Ghana, had done everything the West had told it to do but was not receiving the assistance it needed. ‘They had been lectured, but endlessly, on the absolute need to eschew “experiments”, to refrain from “adventures”, to accept obediently the patterns of behaviour of their senior partners overseas.’12 When African states in trouble did do what their senior partners overseas told them to do the rewards appeared to be minimal.
Nigeria had much greater potential. An indication of its industrial possibilities can be gained from the fact that between 1947 and 1958 exports grew from £44 million to £136 million and imports rose even more sharply from £33 million to £167 million while keeping pace with this expanding economy were the per capita earnings of the population. Even so, despite average income per head rising by one or two per cent a year between 1950 and 1960, it was still low by any common sense yardstick; at the beginning of the decade it stood at approximately £30, less than one tenth the average for every man, woman and child in Britain at that time. The total national product of Nigeria at £1,000 million then exceeded the combined products of Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, the Rhodesias and Nyasaland to make Nigeria the largest economy on the African continent after South Africa. In March 1960 the Shell–BP Development Company of Nigeria Ltd said it hoped oil output might reach 10 million tons a year by 1970 to make Nigeria one of the Commonwealth’s major oil producers, second only to Canada. Nigeria in fact was to become a much larger oil producer than was then envisaged, but in its case the politics of tribalism were to intervene before any serious advances in the economy would be possible.
At the other side of the continent Kenya had the best potential economy although it was still primarily an agricultural country, relying upon coffee, tea, sisal, wattle products, pyrethrum, wheat, meat and dairy products and soda ash as its main exports. Some light engineering had also been developed, and food processing. Its most valuable agricultural exports were coffee, tea, sisal, maize and pyrethrum. It also had a substantially better transport and commercial infrastructure than
its two neighbours – Uganda and Tanganyika – and this was to be a cause of problems once the East African Common Market had been formed. To the north of Kenya, Ethiopia entered into a substantial trade agreement with the Soviet Union in 1960, giving Russia the rights to undertake extensive geological surveys throughout the country, to construct gold mining installations and gold processing plants, to build an oil refinery at Assab on the Red Sea and so to break the Western oil firms’ (Shell, Caltex, Agip, Standard) monopoly of supply. Writing in the Guardian at the beginning of September 1960, Clyde Sanger said that Tanganyika needed to double its national income within 10 years. He was optimistic. ‘The value of exports is more than 13 times what it was in 1938 and in 1959 the national income increased by 6 per cent to £177 million. Nevertheless, this country of nine million people is still appallingly poor, with a per capita income of less than £20 a year.’ These and other country assessments demonstrated the range of problems to be overcome.
AFRICAN ECONOMIC UNIONS
A number of mainly economic unions were formed in the early 1960s among the Francophone states. They were over-ambitious, they reflected the former colonial ties with France, and they did not have much impact. Nonetheless, they demonstrated an awareness of the possibilities that a union offered even if they also showed up fairly rapidly the constraints that limited the effectiveness of such unions.
The African and Malagasy Union (Union Africaine et Malgache – UAM) was formed in September 1961. It grew out of a meeting held in Brazzaville the previous December when 12 Francophone countries agreed to maintain close ties with each other and a special relationship with France. The 12 countries were Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (B), Dahomey (Benin), Gabon, Côte D’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso). The aims of the UAM were over-ambitious: a common stand on international issues, the promotion of economic and cultural co-operation and the maintenance of a common defence organization. It soon became obvious that the 12 were too diverse, too geographically widespread and too immersed in their individual development problems to allow the UAM ever to achieve any real significance. In March 1964 the UAM reorganized itself as the Afro-Malagasy Union for Economic Co-operation (Union Africaine et Malgache de Coopération Economique – UAMCE) and confined its role to economic affairs. By 1966 it had become moribund. Its successor, the African and Malagasy Common Organisation (Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache – OCAM) had already been formed in May 1965 at Nouakchott, Mauritania, by the 13 Francophone countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo (B), Dahomey, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo and Upper Volta. They were subsequently joined by Rwanda and Congo (Kinshasa) to make 15 but Mauritania (the original host country) dropped out and the OCAM Charter between the 14 countries was signed on 27 June 1965 at Antananarivo, Madagascar. OCAM’s aims were co-operation in economic, social, technical and cultural development. OCAM had a troubled history. Mauritius joined in 1970, Congo (K), by then renamed Zaïre, withdrew in 1972 as did Congo (B) in 1973 while a further three members – Cameroon, Chad and Madagascar – withdrew in 1974, followed by Gabon in 1975. Some of these countries retained their membership of OCAM’s various agencies.
Other unions included the Equatorial Customs Union (Union Douanière Equatoriale – UDE), which had been created back in 1959. This was replaced by the Customs and Economic Union of Central Africa (Union Douanière des Etats de l’Afrique Central – UDEAC), which was established at Brazzaville in December 1964 and included Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo (B), Gabon and Chad. In 1968 Central African Republic and Chad withdrew from UDEAC to join with Congo (K) in the Union of Central African States (UEAC). Gabon denounced this as cutting across the existing UDEAC. This new union raised interesting issues of neo-colonialism. Paul Lewis, writing in the Financial Times, said: ‘There is little doubt that the idea of linking up the old Belgian Congo with two franc area countries originated in Kinshasa and the first question anyone asked in an attempt to elucidate the aims of the operation was who had put President Mobutu up to proposing it. According to some, the villain of the piece is General de Gaulle, who is anxious to attract the Congo into his sphere of influence as Africa’s biggest French-speaking country and a natural counter-weight to Nigeria.’13 In December 1968 Central African Republic rejoined UDEAC. These bewildering formations and re-formations were part of a search for a customs union that would work while the expressions of greater political intent, though no doubt genuine at the time, simply did not represent the existing realities.
In East Africa the three Anglophone countries of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania formed the East African Common Market (EACM) on 6 June 1967 with the object of strengthening the economic, industrial and trade links between the three countries. The EACM headquarters were established at Arusha in Tanzania, the Railways headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, Harbours at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Posts and Telecommunications at Kampala, Uganda. The three territories had a good deal in common. As British-administered territories they shared similar administrative structures and they came to independence over the two years 1961–63. They were comparable in size and at the same general levels of development. In 1948 Britain had established an East African High Commission to co-ordinate activities in the three territories and in 1961 the High Commission was replaced by the East African Common Services Organisation (EACSO) so that the framework for a possible common market already existed when the three territories became independent. However, (a recurring theme in putative common markets) between 1961 and 1967 Tanganyika and Uganda complained that a majority of the economic benefits of EACSO went to Kenya, which had a more advanced infrastructure and a better-developed industrial base than its two partners. In 1967, therefore, when the East African Community (EAC) was formed, attempts were made to compensate for this imbalance by channelling a greater proportion of community revenues to Tanzania and Uganda, the two weaker partners. However, the EAC foundered during the 1970s over political differences as well as continuing economic imbalances.
In May 1967, in yet another attempt to create a regional union, delegates from 12 West African states met in Accra under the auspices of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) to set up a West African Economic Community. This was the first attempt to create a union that would include both Anglophone and Francophone states: those taking part were Dahomey, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo and Upper Volta. It was not until 1975 that such a union would come into being.
These union manoeuvres, which were a feature of the 1960s, did little to strengthen African trade or the collective ability of their members to deal with the economic world beyond Africa. As much as anything they indicated African awareness of its general weakness: a continent of tiny, fragmented economies was never going to be able to match the external economic pressures to which it was constantly subjected.
The African Development Bank (ADB), on the other hand, was a precise institution that belonged to all independent African states. The idea for such a bank had first been mooted at the All Africa People’s Conference of January 1960 held in Tunis. A draft agreement for a development bank with a basic capital of US$200 million, the money to be entirely subscribed by African states, was drawn up in 1963. A formula for subscriptions of members was based on a combination of population, gross national product, foreign trade and government revenue; minimum subscription was set at US$1 million, the maximum at US$30 million. The bank would finance investment projects and programmes relating to economic and social development and would give special attention to those that affected several countries; it would also promote public and private capital investment and provide technical assistance. The Bank came into being in September 1964 after 20 countries had ratified the agreement to set it up. The Bank’s headquarters were established in Abidjan in 1965 and became operational on 1 July 1966. The capital of the ADB was entirely subscribed by African countries
in order to preserve the African nature of the Bank’s operations and the ADB was the only such regional bank to do this. The drawback to this was the limitation placed on available funds in view of the small size of most African economies.
UNITED NATIONS AGENCIES
The Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) was established by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations on 29 April 1958 in order to promote economic and social development in Africa. It was open to all independent African countries that were also members of the United Nations but on 24 July 1963 South Africa was barred from membership by the Economic and Social Council until ‘conditions for constructive co-operation have been restored by a change in its racial policy’. The ECA was sited in Addis Ababa with sub-regional offices in Yaoundé, Gisenyi, Niamey, Tangier, Lusaka and Kinshasa. Its chief officer was an executive secretary. The ECA paid special attention to agriculture and the problems of transition from subsistence to market agriculture and co-operated with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In real terms the ECA was an advisory body with only limited resources at its disposal. It promoted co-operation between Africa’s subregions and inter-African trade. It became a source of African statistics and undertook manpower training, looked at the social aspects of development, transport, communications and natural resources.
From its inception the ECA became involved in arguments between Anglophone and Francophone Africa. The second meeting of the ECA was held in Tangier at the end of January 1960 (when most of Africa had yet to achieve independence) and on that occasion there was a discussion about the impact of the European Economic Community (EEC) upon Africa. A group of states, led by Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea, argued that the association of the Francophone states and the Congo with the EEC through the Yaoundé Convention would widen the divisions between associated and non-associated states. Therefore, they insisted, Africa should create an African Common Market. These mainly Anglophone states wished to counter the stratagem of France and Belgium to maintain an economic stranglehold over their former possessions and so perpetuate divisions between former British and French Africa. Most delegates to the Tunis meeting favoured multilateral over bilateral aid although the French African members of the Community were lukewarm and expected to continue receiving French aid. The ECA then adopted a motion on International Aid to Africa that favoured multilateral aid since bilateral aid involved political pressures. (At this time few people foresaw the extent to which the multilateral agencies would become the tools of the rich Western nations led by the United States.) The delegates from Guinea argued that international assistance should ‘liberate’ the African continent economically, otherwise political independence would be a ‘façade’.