by Guy Arnold
Other factors weakened Africa’s ability to deal with crises: these included the results of coups and political corruption and pyramidal hierarchies that referred all decisions to the head of state. The independence of judiciaries was undermined, ministers were not restrained but often acted as laws to themselves, while the freedom of the press which had been so vital to the earlier independence struggles was progressively shackled by governments that only wanted the media to act as mouthpieces for the official line. These processes, moreover, were readily assisted by Western (and sometimes Soviet) support for dictatorial regimes on the ostensible grounds that Africa was ‘different’ and needed strong governments but in reality because dictatorial regimes were more likely to safeguard their interests in return. In any case, power-hungry elites, whether civilian or military, were uninterested in development as such but only in manipulating the system to maintain their grip on power. There were exceptions – Nyerere in Tanzania, Masire in Botswana, Kaunda in Zambia, Rawlings in Ghana – but the corruption of power for its own sake had become pervasive through most of the continent. Thus, the high rhetoric of the 1960s had changed into a ‘big brother’ syndrome that elevated national leaders above the law.
The deteriorating economic position of Africa as a whole can be illustrated by the decline in food production for personal consumption: ‘By 1984 per caput production of food for own consumption had fallen, on official estimates, to little more than 75 per cent of the average quantities produced for the market in 1960–65. A still largely agrarian continent was reduced, for the first time in history, to helpless dependence on food imports, and for those imports it could no longer afford to pay.’2 Debt escalated through the decade and African countries accumulated ever more loans from abroad, often at very high rates of interest. The result was an ever-rising debt-service ratio (the percentage of export earnings which have to be used to service foreign debt before export earnings can be used to buy imports) from a reasonable 4.6 per cent in 1974 to a huge 20.3 per cent in 1983 and this ratio continued to rise for the rest of the decade. A further burden arose out of the high rate of population increase, often as much as three per cent or more a year. This level of increase placed added strains upon all aspects of development, not least on food resources at a time when food production for home consumption was declining. Some governments and leaders worked hard to overcome the impact of these trends; others appeared to accept them as the lot of the continent. Too often leaders appeared unable or unwilling to grapple with these obstacles and focused their attention upon international rather than home developments.
Africa’s ability to tackle its development problems was often undermined by the attitudes of the developed world, and most particularly the former colonial powers, whose interests were best served, as they believed, by creating and maintaining a dependence mentality. The terms of trade between Africa and the developed world remained one of deepening inequality or ‘unequal exchange’ to Africa’s disadvantage. Thus, while in 1972 Tanzania could buy a seven-ton truck for 38 metric tons of sisal, by 1982 it had to pay 134 metric tons of sisal for the same truck. Throughout the decade wealth extracted from Africa was greater than inputs of wealth, whether in the form of payments, investment or aid. In any case, the 1980s witnessed a new world ‘conflict’ of which Africa was only a part whereby the wealth disparities between the rich developed countries of the North and the poor, mainly ex-colonial territories of the South steadily widened. Indeed, the coming North-South confrontation emerged with increasing clarity during the decade. It was highlighted by the African-European relationship because of the sharp and growing power disparity between the two and because the richest nations seemed totally disinclined to close the gap; rather, they appeared to want to maintain the gap since the alternative of assisting Africa to close it would lessen their own influence and power.
AN UNEASY DECADE
Summarizing the 1980s, Colin Legum wrote: ‘After a disappointing decade, the Organisation of African Unity began to turn a corner in mid-1990. It saw the approaching end of its long struggle in support of Namibia’s independence and more dramatically, the beginning of the end of Apartheid in South Africa. These two developments promised the fulfilment of the OAU’s commitment at its founding in 1963 to achieve the complete liberation of the continent from colonial and White minority rule. After mediocre leadership for a decade, the new Secretary-General, Salim Ahmed Salim, Tanzania’s former Foreign Minister, who had been elected by a convincing majority in his contest with Oumarou, the incumbent, lost little time in stamping his authority on a somewhat moribund organization.’3 However, the decade’s ongoing problems were still very much alive and included: Chad and Libya, Mauritania and Senegal, the SADR dispute (with Morocco remaining outside the OAU), the civil wars in Sudan, Angola and Mozambique. The outgoing Secretary-General, Ide Oumarou, denied that the OAU was in ‘deep trouble’, as suggested in many quarters, but admitted the organization did not have sufficient credibility with regard to political instability in a number of African countries. He claimed that the OAU could have a more active role in ‘the management of conflict situations’ in the wake of the East–West rapprochment that heralded the end of the Cold War. However, he added, Africa’s problems originated mainly from within the continent: ‘If we sought internal solutions then we could solve or soften the impact of foreign intervention in our conflicts.’ At the 1989 OAU summit the idea that the organization should establish an African Defence Force was raised once again – the concept had become something of a hardy perennial – but sufficient delegates opposed the idea to make it a non-starter. On this occasion, President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya roundly condemned the idea: ‘As far as I am concerned this is a dream. Why? Because before we Kenyans and Nigerians agreed to send observers and troops, the OAU pledged it would pay, but the result was that the Kenyans and Nigerians were to foot the bill. The OAU did not pay a single cent.’ The problem was a familiar one. Like the idea of a Defence Force, the OAU Defence Committee, primarily concerned with coordinating training and equipment for African armies and consulting on security problems, was really moribund. OAU committees included: the Liberation Committee, the Refugee Committee, the Congress of African Trade Unions, while there were regular policy meetings to consider Namibia, South Africa, Afro-Arab Cooperation. There was also a Pan African News Agency (PANA). The structures for action were all in place, the requisite meetings were held and thereafter, as a rule, little action followed.
The decade proved a hard one for the continent as a whole. Beginning 20 years after the great surge of independence in the early 1960s, the events of the 1980s taught Africa just how vulnerable it was to external pressures, how its small economies remained over-dependent upon external aid and investment for their survival and how urgent was the task of achieving some form of unity that would promote continental self-reliance. The violence that characterized much of Africa through the decade led Western critics of independence for the continent to argue that Africans could not govern themselves and should not have been given independence so soon. The contrary was the case. Only after the colonial powers had withdrawn was it possible for African countries, individually and collectively, to begin addressing problems that had only been disguised or papered over by the colonial presence. If Africa was weak, this in large measure resulted from the distortions that colonialism had imposed on the continent: the consequent lopsided economic development, and the artificial creation of colonial states that defied the natural regional developments, which might otherwise have emerged. Succession governments had been obliged to work within the bequeathed political systems; they had never had the chance to develop systems in their own manner so that any post-independence attempt to do so inevitably produced disruptions and sometimes conflict and many of these problems of adjustment came home to roost in the 1980s.
CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE
The Arab North
Authoritarian rule was the order of the day in North Africa at the beginning of the
1980s. In Morocco, despite the trappings of democracy, King Hassan did more or less what he wished. Algeria was a one-party state still dominated by the FLN and the army, the victors of the independence struggle against France. Only Tunisia observed genuine democratic practices, though the ageing Bourguiba exercised wide authority even though there were increasing signs of unrest at his clinging on to power. In Libya the idiosyncratic and ultimately dictatorial Gaddafi controlled every facet of policy. Both Sadat and his successor Mubarak in Egypt favoured personal, populist rule rather than genuine democracy. It was in any case an uneasy decade for the Arab world as a whole; its attention was focused on the continuing crisis over Palestine and Israel and the states of North Africa tended to turn in upon themselves and became less engaged in African affairs than thay had in the immediate years after independence. Arab aid for Africa, it is true, had been hugely increased in direct response to the events of 1973 and the fourfold increase in the price of oil but most of this aid, channelled to Africa through the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (ABEDA), came from the oil rich Gulf States and the 1980s were to witness a fall in such aid as recession cut back international demand for oil.
The five North African Arab states had been members of the OAU since its inception but their participation in African, as opposed to Arab, affairs had sharply diminished and though periodic gestures towards Arab-African solidarity were made, the interchange between these states and sub-Saharan Africa had become formal rather than especially warm or close. There were exceptions. Throughout the decade Libya intervened in Chad to turn a civil war into an international confrontation. Egypt, whose leadership role in the 1960s had made it highly popular throughout the continent, was more preoccupied with the after-effects of its Camp David Accords with Israel than upon its relations with the rest of the Arab world.
Only two Arab states could claim to have been nations for centuries and this gave to each of them a stability that was lacking in the states that had been artificially created on the demise of the Ottoman Empire. These two were Egypt, with its 5,000-year old history, and Morocco. Increasing indebtedness became a problem at this time. Morocco had no oil and so the high oil prices worked against it although it received some grants from Saudi Arabia. It incurred substantial debts over the late 1970s and early 1980s for major infrastructure adjustments in relation to its phosphates industry, which provided the bulk of its export earnings, and during 1983 was obliged to request a rescheduling of its US$14 billion worth of debts. During 1985–86 first Algeria and then Tunisia became deeply indebted but instead of rescheduling, which would have excluded them from commercial money markets, they embarked upon refinancing operations: that is, more borrowing. In 1987 Egypt had to reschedule its debts. Morocco, at least, learnt its lesson. When it rescheduled in 1983 debt-servicing was taking two-thirds of its export earnings but after nine years of regular rescheduling it had reduced its debt-service ratio to 33 per cent of export earnings, which it could manage, and so was able to announce in 1992 that it would not need to reschedule again.
Afro-Arab co-operation, which had reached its height during the OPEC crisis of the 1970s and had been established on an apparently firm basis in 1977 at Cairo, in fact lapsed through much of the 1980s. The natural differences in aims, concerns and backgrounds between Arabs and Africans meant that an alliance of interests had to be worked at constantly if it was to bear fruit. Following the election of President Mubarak of Egypt as chairman of the OAU for 1989–90, his Minister of State, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, said it was an opportunity to revive earlier Afro-Arab co-operation. In an interview with the International Herald Tribune1 Boutros-Ghali said President Mubarak could ‘play a role’ in reinforcing the co-operation that had been established in Cairo in 1977. He made the point that ‘more than 70 per cent of Arab territories are in Africa and more than 80 per cent of the Arab population live in the continent. A better co-ordination between the OAU and the Arab League may help in the synchronization between the African and Arab world. Furthermore, we both have non-alignment in common’. In February 1990, the new OAU Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim told the OAU Council of Ministers that it was important not to lose sight of the common destiny that links African and Arab peoples. Increased co-operation between them could set an example for North–South co-operation. He proposed the creation of ‘concrete co-operation programmes’. Nothing practical was to follow. In March 1989, in a gesture towards greater co-operation, the OAU Council of Ministers had reaffirmed its support for the creation of an independent State of Palestine although this was a modification of its stronger resolution of 1973.
During this period the states of North Africa became increasingly concerned with the deepening cultural crisis in Islam. The revolution that had brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran provided the impetus, though a number of other factors were at work, to increase an Islamic rejuvenation that, however, was seen in many quarters as a rise in Islamic fundamentalism. During the nineteenth century the spread of Western imperialism had undermined Islam by subordinating it to Western power, consumerism and political ideas with the result that a decline in Islam as a cohesive force in the region had followed. At the end of World War I the Middle East had also come under Western influence, not quite colonized but divided into European spheres of influence and, after 1945, that of the United States as well. The creation of the State of Israel in the geographic centre of the Arab world had acted as a spur to this Islamic revival and by the 1980s, when the European empires had come to an end, change was heralded by the growth of fundamentalism: the determination to revert to a stricter form of Islam. The new fundamentalists clashed with the modernizers and secularists who provided the core of the North African political class. These latter had embraced a materialist, semi-Westernised lifestyle and did not wish to return to the restrictions that fundamentalism would impose upon them. It was the failure of this secular, modernizing leadership to spread the new wealth to their whole populations that provided the opportunity for the fundamentalists. Angry young men rejected the turn to the West, the failure to solve the Palestine issue, the tyranny of entrenched elites and leadership; they believed that only a reversion to fundamentalism could sweep away this leadership and revitalize Arab-Islamic society.2
EGYPT
Through the 1980s Egypt was entirely preoccupied with Arab-Middle East affairs and no longer played the role of bridge to sub-Saharan Africa, which it had filled with such success in the 1960s and 1970s. As President Sadat discovered, the Camp David Accords did not settle the Palestine question while his economic policies were unpopular. Moreover, Sadat violated conventional proprieties and ignored growing corruption in high places. As a result, Islamist and leftist opposition to his regime increased. In September 1981, responding to the growing opposition, Sadat had some 1,500 of his critics, including highly respected individuals such as Umar Tilmisani of the Muslim Brotherhood and the journalist Muhammad Heikal, arrested. He then nationalized all the private mosques to deprive populists of their pulpits. He was assassinated on 6 October 1981. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, worked through the 1980s to rehabilitate Egypt with the rest of the Arab world, following its almost total isolation as a result of the Camp David Accords. Mubarak faced an intensified campaign by fundamentalists to have the Sharia (Islamic law) fully adopted as part of the legal system. Immediately on coming to power, Mubarak had 2,500 people arrested in connection with the assassination of Sadat but most of these were soon released. He enlisted the support of the moderate Islamists and the Brotherhood to oppose the advance of the extremists. In April 1982, five people were executed for the assassination of Sadat but no disturbances followed. In September 1984, 174 of 301 who had been arrested in connection with the Sadat killing were acquitted of plotting to overthrow the government while 16 were sentenced to hard labour for life. Thereafter, Mubarak followed a moderate line with regard to Islam. Only in 1989 was Egypt’s isolation that had followed Sadat’s recognition of Israel brought to an end when it was
readmitted to the Arab League. On the home front Mubarak faced huge problems which included rapid population increase (close to one million a year), high unemployment, periodic shortages of basic foods, a foreign debt of US$50 billion to be serviced, over-bureaucratization, the reluctance of foreign companies to invest in Egypt, a frustrated younger generation and the steady growth of militant Islamic fundamentalism. Nonetheless, by the end of the decade Mubarak was riding high as Egypt re-entered the mainstream of Arab politics.
THE MAGHREB COUNTRIES
An advance in the long-projected Maghrebi Union took place in June 1989 with the formation of a joint Parliament, shared by the five member states (Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia). Morocco and Algeria finally agreed on the border demarcation between their two states. However, this apparent move towards greater integration looked less promising towards the end of 1989. There were two postponements, as doubts about the union surfaced, before the Union du Maghreb Arabe (UMA) (Arab Maghreb Union) Summit was held in Tunis over 22–23 January 1990. The agenda included strengthening relations with other regional groups and especially the European Union. The leaders agreed to give UMA a greater role in co-ordinating their regional policy and international relations. It was agreed to set up a permanent secretariat although this went contrary to the founding principles of UMA, which had been intended as a loose structure avoiding a large, expensive bureaucracy. Despite the summit, the members of UMA appeared lukewarm in their endorsement of the union and resistant to giving it powers to resolve problems. These included Morocco’s policy in Western Sahara (SADR), Algerian-Moroccan relations, Gaddafi’s foreign policy and the dispute between Mauritania and Senegal.