Africa

by Guy Arnold

  NYERERE AND THE ARUSHA DECLARATION

  Although most African leaders, starting with Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, were alive to the neo-colonial threats posed by aid, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania was the one who most clearly articulated the basic dilemma posed by the need for aid and the baggage that came with it. Speaking at a state banquet in Beijing on a visit to China in February 1965, he said: ‘Those who give us loans… must do so because they wish to take part in man’s human development, not because they wish to control our young state. Tanzania is not for sale.’ Nyerere was articulating what became one of the basic arguments in the Arusha Declaration. He was also naïve in two senses: in his belief, if he held it, that big powers would act in any way other than in pursuit of their own interests; and in the underlying assumption that all African leaders would place the interests of their countries ahead of their determination to hold onto power. One sentence from the Arusha Declaration judges the immediate colonial past that was the heritage of all Africa. ‘We have been oppressed a great deal, we have been exploited a great deal, and we have been disregarded a great deal.’

  The Arusha Declaration was published on 5 February 1967 and marked a turning point for Tanzania. The first part dealt with the Tanzania African National Union (TANU) political creed and the second part with the policy of socialism. It is part three of the declaration, The Policy of Self-Reliance, that concerns us here. In it Nyerere spells out what for most of Africa would become the aid trap.

  But it is obvious that in the past we have chosen the wrong weapon for our struggle, because we chose money as our weapon. We are trying to overcome our economic weakness by using the weapons of the economically strong – weapons which in fact we do not possess.

  External finances are then analysed: gifts, which are a form of charity; loans that have to be repaid with interest; and private investment, the bulk of whose profits are repatriated. Gifts and loans, it is argued, endanger independence.

  Independence cannot be real if a nation depends upon gifts and loans from another for its development. Even if there was a nation, or nations, prepared to give us all the money we need for our development, it would be improper for us to accept such assistance without asking ourselves how this would affect our independence and our very survival as a nation.

  Examining gifts and loans further, the declaration continues:

  Gifts which increase, or act as a catalyst, to our own efforts are valuable. But gifts which could have the effect of weakening or distorting our own efforts should not be accepted until we have asked ourselves a number of questions.

  Loans, at least in theory, are better than gifts:

  A loan is intended to increase our efforts or make those efforts more fruitful. One condition of a loan is that you show how you are going to repay it. This means you have to show that you intend to use the loan profitably and will therefore be able to repay it. To burden the people with big loans, the repayment of which will be beyond their means, is not to help them but to make them suffer. It is even worse when the loans they are asked to repay have not benefited the majority of the people but have only benefited a small minority.

  On investment by foreigners:

  Could we agree to leave the economy of our country in the hands of foreigners who would take the profits back to their countries? Or suppose they did not insist upon taking their profits away, but decided to reinvest them in Tanzania; could we really accept this situation without asking ourselves what disadvantages our nation would suffer? Would this allow the socialism we have said it is our objective to build?

  This part of the declaration concludes as follows:

  How can we depend upon gifts, loans and investments from foreign countries and foreign companies without endangering our independence? The English people have a proverb, which says: ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune.’ How can we depend upon foreign governments and companies for the major part of our development without giving to those governments and countries a great part of our freedom to act as we please? The truth is that we cannot.36

  The Arusha Declaration speaks for itself. It was certainly one of the most important and thoughtful documents to come out of Africa during the decade of the 1960s. If few African leaders or governments followed its precepts this was not simply from either lack of understanding or jealousy of the source – Nyerere was seen as a prophet outside Africa rather than on the continent – but because of economic weakness. Most African states emerging to independence were desperate for the means to develop and aid in its various forms seemed the immediate and attractive answer. Later when the pitfalls of the aid trap had become apparent it was too late; and also, sadly, too many African leaders were happy to depend upon aid, no matter what it meant for the long-term future of their countries, as long as it helped keep them in power as it too often did and was designed to do.

  At the end of the decade Lester Pearson, the former Canadian prime minister, was invited to lead an international commission on the prospects and problems of aid and development assistance and to make recommendations. The Report by the Commission on International Development, Partners in Development, was published in 1969 and set the apparently reasonable target of 1 per cent of the GNPs of the rich nations as the figure they should devote annually to aid for the developing world (at a later date this target was reduced to 0.7 per cent). At that time 21 out of the 40 countries designated by the United Nations as the world’s poorest were on the African continent. As the Pearson Report stated: ‘In Africa with its very large number of relatively small countries, economic co-operation is a fundamental factor for swifter development.’ The Pearson Report was generally well received by donors: Britain and West Germany said they hoped they could meet the target, Norway announced that it would treble its aid, New Zealand pledged to meet the target, Japan to double its aid. France was already exceeding the 1 per cent figure when private investment was included. With the exception of the United States, all the main donors appeared ready to meet the Pearson target.

  By 1968, with few exceptions, most African economies showed little growth and in some cases deterioration. Mineral discoveries, however, had wrought major changes in Libya and Mauritania while expectations had been raised in Botswana, Central African Republic and Niger as a result of mineral finds. Apart from South Africa, the economic pacemakers at that time were Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa, Kenya in East Africa and Zambia in Central Africa. However, a disturbing feature in much of the continent was the steady increase in military expenditure, especially in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, Congo (B), Senegal, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, the UAR and Nigeria (then engaged in the first year of its civil war). In too many cases the soldiers had seized power after mounting coups, and though they were not responsible for the underlying economic conditions that had often produced the situations that ‘justified’ a coup, they, too, had much to answer for and by the end of the decade most African countries, whether under military rule or not, had to spend more than they could afford on maintaining their armies.

  By the end of the UN Decade of Development not a great deal of development had been achieved while the rich-poor gap was widening rather than being bridged. The United States, the world’s largest and richest economy, was becoming disenchanted with aid to the extent that Canada, Europe and Japan went ahead to replenish the resources of the IDA without the United States. Martin Rosen, the Executive Vice-President of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), said in Paris on 4 December 1968 that increased private investment was essential to economic growth in the less-developed countries but added that it could only be investment that was justifiable to shareholders. There was little sign of much investment going to Africa. A Report, A Study of the Capacity of the United Nations Development System, better known as the Jackson Report, sharply criticised 20 years of aid, and spoke of ‘great inertia’ and elaborate administrative structures incapable of change and called for the rich to do more to co-operate with developing countries. The Report expressed
the hope that the trend towards using multilateral aid channels would grow. In February 1970, speaking at Columbia University, the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, said: ‘Perhaps one of the most wasteful mistakes that both developing countries and aid agencies can make is to proceed on a random project-by-project basis, rather than first to establish an overall development strategy, and then select projects that mutually support and interlock with one another within that overall plan. Our new programme for Country Economic Reports is designed to provide a foundation for such a strategy.’ Perhaps the best ‘epitaph’ on the decade came from West Africa, which pointed out that little had been done over the decade of the 1960s to bridge the gulf between French- and English-speaking countries in West Africa. ‘The two currency areas find economic co-operation as difficult as ever, the division between the EEC associates and the rest remains. All the examples of co-operation across national boundaries cannot alter the fact that the sovereignty of even the most unviable of these states is now entrenched, while xenophobia between them is more significant than any hostility to or from non-African states.’37 That judgement could well be extended to the continent as a whole.

  CHAPTER SIX

  North Africa

  North Africa, comprising Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, is distinguished from the rest of the continent by the fact that its people are Arab or Berber, and that the vast majority of them have adhered to the religion of Islam since the conversions that followed the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. Each of the countries of North Africa, apart from Morocco, had formed part of the Ottoman Empire at its height several centuries before coming under European control during the imperial expansion of the ninteenth and twentieth centuries: Morocco partly Spanish, mainly French control, Algeria and Tunisia under French control, Libya under Italy and Egypt under Britain. In the post-independence era of the second half of the twentieth century, these five countries looked more to the Arab world of the Middle East as their natural focus rather than to Africa south of the Sahara. They are also part of Mediterranean culture and many of their links historically have been northwards and pre-dated any sense that they belonged to a greater Africa to the south. As a result, these five countries are regarded internationally, and regard themselves, as Arab states first and then as African states. To the south of North Africa lie the countries of the Sahel and Horn whose peoples are intermingled: part Arab or Tuareg, part black African, where Islam tends to be the dominant religion. Of the 20 members of the Arab League, nine (Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia) are also African countries and members of the African Union (formerly the OAU). During the immediate independence era of the 1960s the Arab states of North Africa took part in all the groupings and negotiations that led to the creation of the OAU in 1963 with Morocco and Egypt playing especially important ‘radical’ roles at that time. Egypt, particularly, made a vital contribution to emergent African nationalism and its President, Gamal Abdul Nasser, was a hero to nationalists in both Africa and the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s when the Voice of Cairo radio became the ‘spokesman’ and encourager of African nationalism and independence.

  Israel, an external factor of huge importance, helped shape the polices of North Africa at this time for as Arab states they were inexorably drawn into the confrontation between the new state of Israel, created in 1948, and the whole Arab world that would periodically erupt in warfare – the Suez War of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 – and though Black Africa generally would have preferred to avoid participating in the Israeli-Arab confrontation, it found this increasingly difficult to do. Nasser raised the issue of Israel at the 1964 OAU Conference which was held in Cairo in an attempt to persuade the OAU to adopt a pro-Arab stand on the issue and in the coming years African states were to equate Zionism with racism.

  The Arab-African relationship was often uneasy and always required delicate handling on both sides. Egypt, occupying the geographic hinge that joined the African and Asian continents, played a pivotal role in this relationship and throughout the 1960s under Nasser acted as a positive link between the two worlds.

  EGYPT

  Under the leadership of Nasser between 1952, when he led the coup that toppled King Farouk, and 1970, when he died, Egypt assumed the leadership of the Arab world and played a significant role as the advocate of both Arab and African nationalism. This role made Nasser especially unpopular in the West whose leading imperial powers, Britain and France, were fighting a long rearguard action to retain their influence. The 1956 Suez Crisis and the humiliation of Britain and France allowed Nasser to emerge as the leading political figure in the Middle East. His predominant position only came to an end following the disastrous defeat of the Arab states by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.

  By 1961 Nasser appeared to have eliminated any serious opposition to his regime in Egypt: the Communists were shattered and the power of the Muslim Brotherhood destroyed so that only the Pan-Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, although illegal, offered any opposition. The union with Syria, proclaimed as the United Arab Republic in 1958, was not destined to last long, and in fact was terminated in 1961 following an army takeover in Syria; in any case, at one level it had been little more than an expression of Arab solidarity. Wisely, Nasser did not attempt to reverse the Syrian decision. During 1961 a series of decrees were passed to give the State control over most major industrial and financial concerns. Over 300 industries were compelled to sell a half-share of their capital to the government; in addition, the government took a controlling interest in a further 95 companies and acquired all share holdings worth £10,000 or more. Nasser was then at the height of his influence and popularity.

  President Nasser’s revolutionary energy, which ran badly off course during the late nineteen-fifties, has now been redirected to the problems of social change in his own country. If the West, resenting the nationalization measures, sits back to enjoy a coming economic muddle, it may find itself sharing its smirk with the communist world. The reaction of the Arab communist parties, together with earlier warning grumbles from Moscow, indicates that the communists, at least, have recognized President Nasser’s brand of socialism as one of the more formidable barriers to the Soviet Union’s political penetration of the Arab world, and possibly of the African world too.1

  Coming as it did from The Economist, this was praise indeed for the man who was still generally seen as an anti-British, anti-Western dictator. Nasser’s prestige at this time was further enhanced by his pan-Arab and pan-African activities and his destruction of the power of Egyptian landowners. Nasser saw Egypt as an African as well as an Arab state and became deeply involved in the struggle for African emancipation and unity. He provided support for various African liberation movements, and argued on behalf of the doomed Lumumba in the Congo. He attended the January 1961 Casablanca summit whose participants became known as the ‘radical’ group of African states and refused to attend the subsequent rival conferences at Monrovia in May 1961 or Lagos in January 1962. His standing, especially with African Muslims, was very high. His main African opponent was the moderate Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, though they became reconciled in 1961 following the Bizerta crisis between Tunisia and France. As The Times Special Correspondent wrote in 1961: ‘Cairo today is the most important town in Africa – a sort of political Tangier, a free port for politicians and political ideas (so long as they keep within strictly anti-colonial lines, of course).’ Continuing hostility between Egypt and Israel, however, was to prove a constant burden for Egypt and the military requirements of this confrontation were a severe handicap to development. Nonetheless, ‘Though the revolution may have fallen far short of its promises and popular hopes, it has extricated Egypt from the economic apathy and political corruption that had imprisoned it for centuries’.2

  Egypt’s position as a leading African country at this time – a member of the radical group of countries, an opponent of colonialism in a
ll its forms and supporter of the liberation movements, and the fact that it had stood up to the imperial powers first at the time of Suez and then in 1958 in opposition to the formation of the Baghdad Pact – was due more than anything else to the charismatic leadership of Nasser. However, despite his radicalism Nasser was also a realist and this applied to his reading of the African search for unity.