by Guy Arnold
Despite the apparent acceptance by African governments that aid should be an almost indefinite ongoing process, there was much unease among intellectuals at this growing dependence upon donors whose aid was accompanied by prescriptions about the way recipients should tackle their development. By the end of the decade it had become clear that the much-vaunted concept of a New International Economic Order was a dead issue. The West had buried it: first, by the endless discussions held in Paris under CIEC auspices masterminded by Henry Kissinger; and second by increased offers of aid according to the existing pattern. The final coup de grâce would be delivered in 1980 with the publication of the Brandt Report.
AFRICA 2000
Meanwhile, at the invitation of the Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity, a Symposium on the future development prospects of Africa towards the year 2000 was held in Monrovia (Liberia) from 12 to 16 February 1979. The Symposium was made up of 40 experts from various parts of Africa, drawn from the fields of economics, science, labour, health, diplomacy and research. Their report7, which was available at the Monrovia OAU Summit that July, became the starting point for the Lagos Plan of Action (see below). First, 20 years after the annus mirabilis of independence, the report listed the abysmal state of the economy and development of the continent as a whole. As at the end of the 1970s, Africa’s gross national product accounted for only 2.7 per cent of the world product; at US$365 Africa had the lowest average annual per capita income in the world, while its infant mortality rate, at 137 per 1,000, was the world’s highest. Driven by an urban-oriented development policy, underemployment and unemployment then affected 45 per cent of the active population. While there was one doctor for every 672 inhabitants of the urban areas, there was only one for every 26,000 inhabitants of the rural areas. Worse still,
Africa is excessively dependent on other countries, even for food. Trade and commercial structures are still almost invariably in a North-South direction, a legacy from the past which fosters the laws of unequal exchange and its consequences: deteriorating terms of trade, outward-oriented production, little domestic processing of raw materials, and so on.
The Symposium participants emphasized that underdevelopment was not a natural state but that developing countries were the victims of a world economic system that was designed to benefit the more powerful nations. In addition, and more important perhaps, the developing countries were ‘the victims of misconceptions and erroneous strategies that have steered them towards ill-suited models of development that are geared neither to human needs nor to a basically endogenous development’. In the light of these considerations, the approach of the Symposium was to persuade Africa to adopt a radical change of attitude. This meant that ‘the areas which depend on domestic policies, structural changes and systems of values must be given priority attention so that a new human-being-oriented African development policy can evolve in which the continent can find its own identity and status instead of having them imposed on it’. The development approach envisaged by the Symposium entailed a number of breaks with the past. These included: a break with a number of concepts and habits, starting with excessive mimicry in every field; a break with excessive accumulation of material and financial possessions and with the persistent confusion of growth with development; and a break with the evil of deceitful slogans and paper-thin achievements in favour of a courageous attempt to tackle the embarrassing facts of life so as to be able to start today to prepare the future.
The Symposium placed great emphasis upon science and technology and argued that until ‘vigorous autonomous research’ geared to Africa’s most pressing needs was carried out on the continent, Africa would continue to be at the mercy of the kind of dependence inseparable from ‘transfer of technology’. Then the Symposium tackled the question of freedom and justice: ‘Only yesterday, the birth of a State that respected basic freedoms was one of the most important demands in the struggle for independence. Has this erstwhile dream now turned into a nightmare?’ Africa had to embark upon a strategy that gave it complete control over its own needs. Comparing the achievements of the United States, the Soviet Union, China and the European Common Market, the Symposium condemned the narrow nationalisms of individual African countries and insisted that African unity was a necessity. It called for three specific measures: the creation of an African common market; the free movement of persons and goods on the African continent and the abolition of visas among African countries; and the awakening of African public opinion to the concept of Unity. On the subject of science and technology the Symposium suggested:
The objective for the year 2000 is to rid the continent of the general approach that currently prevails and which accepts without question the concept and practice of ‘transfer of technology’ – an expression which the Symposium suggests should be stricken from the international vocabulary.
There were many specific recommendations for action and, in relation to food security, for example, the Symposium argued: ‘The Symposium proposed that the degree of a country’s dependence for its food imports should henceforth be considered as one of the most significant indicators of its level of development.’ Members of the Symposium highlighted the statistics of population increase, infant mortality, education, the movement to the urban centres, decline in the growth of agriculture during the 1970s, in fact all the problems that were regularly rehearsed at donor-recipient or other meetings to consider development on the continent. Development objectives for the year 2000 were summed up as follows:
1 To attain a high degree of self-sufficiency.
2 To democratize national development in order to enjoy the fruits of our efforts more fully and more equitably.
3 To increase and consolidate African solidarity.
4 To carry more weight in world affairs.
The Symposium was important because it brought together eminent Africans other than politicians who were remarkably impartial in their examination of African shortcomings and saw only too clearly the linkage between economic development targets and the need for open politics: that is, democracy, widespread literacy and mass involvement in the development process. In one of its most telling phrases the report called upon African countries to ‘break with excessive mimicry in every field’. The Symposium showed a realistic understanding of the continent’s problems. The main argument was that any real economic advance for the developing countries of Africa must arise out of their own efforts and would not be achieved through aid or dependence upon outside help.
The Symposium’s report became the basis for OAU economic discussions, with the result that in April 1980 an extraordinary summit conference of the heads of state and government of the OAU met in Lagos, Nigeria, and adopted what came to be called the Lagos Plan of Action for the development of Africa up to 2000. The plan called for collective self-reliance and the gradual fusing of national economic policies into regional ones, with the eventual aim of creating an African economic community. Targets were set for food self-sufficiency and industrialization. The Plan of Action was a basic economic blueprint for a move towards pan-Africanism, and was very much in the tradition that had led to the creation of the OAU in 1963. Fundamentally, the high economic ideals and goals set out in the Lagos Plan of Action were recognition of the continent’s economic weaknesses and the fact that each country was too small and weak to succeed economically on its own.
THE BRANDT REPORT
In the aftermath of the mid-1970s oil crisis and demands for a New International Economic Order the rich nations of the North, which had no intention of facilitating any basic changes in the world economic system, nonetheless realized that some real concessions – or what passed for concessions – had to be made to the poor countries of the South. The Brandt Report – North-South: A Programme for Survival (The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt) – was the answer. Ten years earlier, another former head of government of a rich country, on that occasi
on Lester Pearson of Canada, had given his name to a report on the relations between rich and poor; briefly, this had excited hopes that a new relationship between rich and poor could be inaugurated before it languished, largely ignored, on library shelves. Now a former West German Chancellor presided over a similar Commission; and the Brandt Report, published in 1980, was accorded a great deal of publicity. As Willy Brandt said in his introduction: ‘Mankind has never before had such ample technical and financial resources for coping with hunger and poverty. The immense task can be tackled once the necessary collective will is mobilized.’ The Report contained excellent vignettes of how money used for military purposes could be translated into development achievements and these – for example, the price of one jet fighter (US$20 million) could establish 40,000 village pharmacies – provided splendid quotes for campaigners for change. The Report was thorough and enumerated in depth the areas that required attention: food security, commodity trade and development, aid, appropriate technology, in fact all the headings that made up the development debate. But the Report, despite the North-South composition of its committee, may be seen as the North’s answer to demands for an NIEO. The Report’s approach is to improve existing structures rather than suggest new ones. A key chapter is headed ‘Mutual Interests’ and the chapter’s subheadings read as follows:
An opportunity for partnership
Understanding interdependence
The transmission of growth
The potential effects of ‘massive transfers’
Expanding world trade and markets
Access to markets
Protectionism hurts
Earning more from commodities
Energy, environment, food
Transnational corporations
The financial and monetary systems
Towards a genuine society of nations
Reforms are interconnected
The moral imperatives
On reading such a list the reader could be forgiven for imagining that an NIEO was in fact being proposed. On analysis, however, these add up to a plea for reforms in the existing order, not for an NIEO. One sentence from the Brandt Report reads: ‘World Society now recognizes more clearly than ever before its mutual needs; it must accept a shared responsibility for meeting them.’ The sentiment may have been well meaning; the cruel events of the 1980s and the continuing growth of the gap between rich and poor turned such an optimistic statement into downright wishful thinking. Each chapter in the Brandt Report ended with a set of recommendations while at the end An Emergency Programme: 1980–85 set forth four principal elements for action:
1 A large-scale transfer of resources to developing countries.
2 An international energy strategy.
3 A global food programme.
4 A start on some major reforms in the international economic system.
Such targets looked well. What the Report did not do was explain how these targets were to be met, who would provide the means and what kinds of pressure would be exerted upon the rich nations in order to make them share a substantial proportion of their wealth and know-how with the poor. Like its predecessor, the Brandt Report was soon largely ignored.
Immediately, however, the World Bank issued a report, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (1981), which was a response both to the Lagos Plan of Action and to the various calls to action that had resulted in the Brandt Report. The Report highlighted the severity and complexity of the problems facing many of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and accepted the long-term objectives of the Lagos Plan of Action. The Report, like most World Bank publications, presented a meticulous analysis of the problems faced by most African countries and then outlined a series of short-term measures to be backed by the donor community to tackle immediate problems. There was nothing essentially new or original about the Bank’s remedies: the earlier chapters in the report discuss measures for accelerating economic growth, always within the context of a Western view of the world economy. Then the Report turns to longer-term issues and begins with population growth and what to do about it; urban growth; resource planning, which covers such subjects as soil conservation, reforestation and fuelwood; and finally, regionalism. There is something oppressively de haut en bas about World Bank Reports as, didactically, they tell their readers what they know already. Thus, on the subject of regionalism:
Regional economic co-operation then, while essential in loosening long-term development constraints facing many African states, will not come easily. It will require changes of great substance, including strengthening of transport links, reduction of monetary and commercial policies that inhibit and distort intraregional trade, promotion of joint projects in industry, education, and research, and regional institutions with adequate staff and budgets that could become major instruments of co-operation and integration.8
Then, the final chapter of the Report calls for increased aid to Africa. The World Development Report 1981 projected a minimal per capita income growth for sub-Saharan Africa from 1980 to 1990 of only 0.1 per cent and there follow suggestions of donor support for programmes of policy reform, foreshadowing one of the main lines that the World Bank would follow in relation to Africa over the next 20 years. The problem inherent in such a World Bank report was the assumption that a non-African institution in Washington could prescribe answers for African development. The prescriptions, as we shall see through the 1980s and 1990s, were essentially Western responses to situations that the West sometimes did not understand and, when it did, determined to manipulate to its own advantage. (The World Bank, despite the composition of its staff and the participation in it as shareholders of the great majority of countries, is overwhelmingly Western oriented in its approach to economic problems and structures.) Finally, though the Report claimed to accept the Lagos Plan of Action as its starting point, it clearly did not accept the far more radical suggestion of Africa 2000 that there should be a break with the past ‘starting with excessive mimicry in every field’. Perhaps, the real tragedy for Africa at this point was that a majority of its political leaders who endorsed the Lagos Plan of Action did not accept the full implications of Africa 2000 either.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Strategic Highways
The vast size of Africa, 11.5 million square miles, the sparse populations and huge desert or arid regions that are virtually empty of people, the colonial pattern of development that had failed to create an African network of highways – whether road, rail or air – to connect the different territories with each other meant that at independence Africa’s general problems of development were compounded by the poor communications between countries, and sometimes the virtual absence of any communications at all. This fact made the proclaimed goal of African unity all the harder to achieve. There were no direct transcontinental routes at independence, neither road, rail or air. New highways, or the upgrading and extension of existing ones, therefore, became a priority of the 1960s and 1970s. The concept of strategic highways changes little: they generate development along their paths; they link regions to encourage economic and political contacts; they enable exchanges to take place that formerly were not possible and so bring into closer unity communities or states where earlier interchanges had been limited; and most important of all, they provide routes through neighbouring territories to link landlocked countries with seaports. The 1970s witnessed a proliferation of highways in Africa: some were simply intended to increase development but others, in the south of the continent, were inextricably linked with the needs of landlocked countries, and most especially Zambia, to free themselves from total dependence upon trade routes through the White South.
The continent’s transport problems were well illustrated by Zaïre (as it was in the 1970s). The Shaba Province (the former Katanga), for all practical purposes, can be treated as a landlocked country so that transporting its minerals to the sea for export is a major operation. The shortest route to the Atlantic was the 1,000-mile Beng
uela Railway across the central highlands of Angola which, from the mid-1970s, was closed as a result of the civil war in that country. Secondly, it was possible if political conditions permitted to export Shaba’s bulk copper southwards through Zambia, Rhodesia and Mozambique to Beira on the Indian Ocean. Thirdly, the minerals could have been transported to the Atlantic entirely through Zaïre itself. Zaïre has only two ocean-river ports near the mouth of the Congo River, Matadi and Boma. But between the mouth of the river and Lubumbashi in the heart of the Shaba mining region five transshipments between rail and river were needed. There are some 2,966 miles of rail linking the various sections of the river where transport was possible and the main function of the railways was to link the navigable stretches of the huge river network. The Kinshasa–Matadi line was vital, bypassing the early falls and rapids on the river and linking Kinshasa directly to the seaport of Matadi. This 277-mile stretch of rail handled the country’s highest tonnage of freight. The main railway system serving Shaba had 1,587 miles of 3 ft 6 in. gauge track that included the various connections between stretches of navigable river. This route, serving the mineral-rich Shaba region, was far less satisfactory and took far longer than did the most direct Benguela railway to the Lobito outlet on the Atlantic Ocean. The whole region, however, was deeply troubled throughout the 1970s.
LANDLOCKED COUNTRIES
Fourteen of the world’s landlocked countries were in Africa at this time although when Eritrea became independent in 1993 it cut off Ethiopia’s direct links to the Red Sea to turn it into the fifteenth landlocked country on the continent. Five of Africa’s landlocked states are in the Sahel region; these, from west to east, are Mali, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), Niger, Chad and Central African Republic; three are in East Africa – Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda; while the remaining six are in Central and Southern Africa – Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi, the members of the former Central African Federation that came to an end in 1963; and Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, the former High Commission Territories that achieved precarious independence in the white-dominated South during the latter half of the 1960s. Malawi illustrated perfectly the problems that face even well-endowed countries that are landlocked. Situated in south-central Africa, Malawi has one major mineral resource, bauxite, but this is locked in the great mountain massif of Mulanje in the far south of the country. There is plenty of bauxite worldwide but accessibility is everything. Guinea on the West African coast has large bauxite deposits, as has Jamaica in the Caribbean, and both countries export it. Malawi, whose easiest routes to the sea lay through Mozambique, was seen as too remote as a source of this mineral while other sources with easy access to the sea were available. Thus one of Africa’s poorest countries was unable to market its only major mineral resource.