Africa

by Guy Arnold

  The rapid urbanization of the continent presented another set of social and political problems. By the mid-1980s more than 42 per cent of all urban-dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa lived in cities of 500,000 or more (the figure had been 8 per cent in 1960) and it was estimated that by 2000 there would be 60 or more cities with populations in excess of one million inhabitants. People migrating to the cities did so in search of jobs, access to education and better medical care and the supposed attractions of urban life; too often, however, they arrive to disappear into urban slums. Whenever structural adjustment programmes are applied and cutbacks result, or are necessitated by lack of funds, it is the health, education and infrastructure sectors that are hit first and hardest. A major reason for economic decline has undoubtedly been the neglect of agriculture by governments who see their potentially dangerous urban populations as the first priority for attention in the form of food subsidies and higher wages. Between 1973 and 1984, for example, only 10 sub-Saharan countries increased food production on a per caput basis. Most of the problems came back to poverty and lack of funds and by the late 1980s Africa was mainly dependent upon official aid flows rather than private source flows. In 1980 the net inward flow of private source finances stood at US$1,500 million; by 1985 the net outward flow was US$700 million.

  The tone of the 1989 World Bank Report was suddenly upbeat. It claimed that in aggregate sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP had grown by 2.6 per cent over 1985–88, counteracting the general perception that ‘Africa is a continent still in unrelenting decline’. This growth, however, had not been reflected in per capita incomes, which were 15 per cent lower than they had been a decade earlier. In other words, this modest rise in GDP had done no more than permit the African economies to stand still. Agriculture, the report argued, had grown by 4 per cent between 1985 and 1988. As always, the first concern of the World Bank was policy reforms. ‘By the end of fiscal 1989, the number of countries implementing policy reforms to effect structural adjustment had increased to nearly 30. In many countries that have had strong and sustained reform programmes and which have not been affected by strong external shocks, for example, in The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Togo, there are encouraging signs of growth in output generally well above the average for the region as a whole and above that achieved in the early 1980s.’17 There was an increase in aid flows. Aid over 1984–87 increased by 9 per cent over the early years of the decade. The region’s share in worldwide ODA went up from 23 per cent in 1980 to 30 per cent in 1987 while low-income countries in the region received US$36 per capita in aid compared with US$25 per capita in 1983. However, the impact of aid was threatened by a population growth averaging 3 per cent a year that could increase to 4 per cent if fertility rates were not brought down. And another problem concerned the degradation of the environment with an alarming rate of desertification taking place, as well as deforestation, ground water loss and air and water pollution.

  According to the World Bank this modest recovery continued in 1990 when GDP rose by 3.5 per cent as opposed to 2.5 per cent in 1988 while countries dependent upon concessional ODA did better at 4.2 per cent as opposed to 3.4 per cent in 1988. The region was also helped by an increase in non-oil commodity prices in 1988 and oil in 1989. Pressure was maintained to make countries adopt structural adjustment programmes although structural obstacles to development were seen as particularly profound in Africa, and long-term efforts to overcome them were necessary on a broad front, ranging from human resource development and poverty alleviation to environmental protection, slowing the growth of population, and quickening the pace of agricultural development. As the report conceded, agriculture is the primary source of growth in sub-Saharan Africa and even when full account is taken of environmental constraints, the scope for expanding agricultural production remains considerable. On education the report said: ‘Although school enrolments have been vastly expanded over the past three decades, too often this expansion has come at the expense of educational quality.’18 Of the 42 countries listed as low-income economies in the World Development Report 1990, 27 were in Africa.

  During the 1980s a distinct pattern emerged in the relationship between the donors and their African recipients and it was a disturbing pattern because it highlighted all that was wrong about what ought to have been a genuine two-way partnership for development. The donors always knew what had to be done. Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) or economic recovery programmes (ERPs) were devised in Washington or Paris by teams of highly competent economists but never on the ground in Africa, just as an earlier generation of ‘experts’ had devised five-year plans for newly independent African states. If these planners for Africa had been impartial their remoteness, their production of solutions from on high would not have mattered so much, but they were not impartial. From their early beginnings the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund had been hijacked by the West whose principal countries, led by the United States, controlled the voting power and soon came to see these international financial institutions as instruments for imposing Western economic policies upon Africa. Part of the motivation was the Cold War and it was both Africa’s fortune and misfortune to emerge to independence at the height of this ideological confrontation. Still more, however, Western capitalism saw Africa as a region that had to be firmly corralled into its own orbit and this became most apparent during the 1990s when the Cold War had come to an end. It was, in any case, a one-sided battle for all the advantages lay with the donors who, in the final analysis, dispensed or withheld favours. Most African economies were small and fragile and they needed some form of government protection or intervention. Donor policies, however disguised, had as their ultimate aim opening up Africa to Western economic penetration and control and during the 1990s, with the constraints of the Cold War removed and reinforced by the new Western capitalist ideology of globalization, the donors at last came close to achieving their objectives.

  None of this excuses the failings of African leadership. Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who had already served as head of state for Nigeria, made the following observations at the beginning of the 1990s:

  Despite over a quarter of a century of political independence, Africa’s aspirations and hopes remain unfulfilled. This has not been, however, a period of unmitigated failure in the history of the continent; there have been successes in education, public health, import substitution industries, and in the continuing process of decolonization. The problems of development, peace and security, the health of the world economy, and improving the environment are interrelated global issues; they do not admit of piecemeal solutions.

  And yet all countries find that in the absence of true global co-operation, they have to tackle particular aspects of them. At the national level in Africa, the inadequacy of information, data, and resources render the problems daunting. Regionally they are overwhelming.19

  Obasanjo speaks with the authority of an ex-head of state and one, moreover, who had stepped down and handed over power to the civilians exactly as he had promised. If, as he suggests, many of Africa’s and the world’s problems require ‘true global co-operation’ then much of the onus must rest with the most powerful nations and in terms of Africa’s problems this means the major donors. Unfortunately that co-operation has been conceived not in terms of achieving greater global equity but rather as a means of extending their influence and economic control.

  A classic World Bank appraisal Poverty, Adjustment, and Growth in Africa, written by Ismail Serageldin in 1989, sets forth the problems admirably: ‘To reduce poverty in Africa in a long-term, sustainable manner, economic growth is absolutely essential. Growth can increase people’s incomes, support education and health expenditures, generate investment and employment opportunities, raise living standards. But without growth, as indeed we have seen from the African experience in the later 1970s and the 1980s, living standards will become further and further depressed – and it is the poorest in society who will be hurt most.’20 Few would dis
agree with the author’s emphasis upon the need for growth; the problem, however, must be the manner in which growth is achieved. He goes on, more controversially, to argue: ‘Despite the profound difficulties – economic, social, and political – involved in economic reform, there is now a strong consensus within Africa and within the donor community on the need for adjustment.’ There may have been such a consensus among the donors, for good reasons of their own; there was little evidence of a similar consensus among African leaders or governments. They may have consented to adjustment reforms but almost always they did so under protest because only by agreeing World Bank or IMF programmes could they obtain the aid they so desperately needed. The seriousness and depth of the African crisis through the 1980s was real enough and international awareness of the crisis was expressed by a series of World Bank in-depth studies: Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Agenda for Action (1981); Sub-Saharan Africa: Progress Report on Development Prospects and Progress (1983); Towards Sustained Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Joint Program of Action (1984); Financing Adjustment with Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1986–90 (1986). Yet one looks in vain for any sense that the World Bank was planning and working with the people of Africa. Always, these reports and appraisals carry with them a sense of Bank conviction that it knows the answers, if only the Africans would be sensible enough to accept its judgements. Nowhere is there evidence of doubt or even the possibility that African leaders might know better than the Bank how best to develop their countries and their people. And in the background, driving Bank decisions, are the major Western donors whose primary consideration has ever been to spread their influence and look after their global financial interests.

  The most revealing statement made by Serageldin is the following: ‘Despite 25 years of development programmes and projects supported by multilateral and bilateral aid institutions, two-thirds of the rural population and a third of the urban population of sub-Saharan Africa remain below the absolute poverty level. Infant mortality rates averaged 104 per thousand in sub-Saharan Africa in 1985, compared with 71 per thousand for all the developing economies. In that same year, child death rates were estimated at 18 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, twice as high as in all developing economies.’21 What never appears to occur to either the writer or the World Bank as a whole is the possibility – given the huge attention lavished upon Africa’s problems – that perhaps their approach was the wrong one.

  Poverty and debt go together and once an African country had become sufficiently indebted it was at the mercy of donors who used debt as a lever to enforce upon the debtor country policies it would never otherwise have adopted. Under pressures of crisis, governments that are forced to service onerous debts and repay loans are obliged to cut back on those aspects of development which are the most important: social spending – education, health, housing, clean water – instead, increasing the production of commodities for export to their donors or liberalizing trade barriers so that the advanced economies can the more easily move into positions of control. Since, on the World Bank’s own admission, basic needs are not being met in much of Africa, should it not be asked whether the years of bilateral and multilateral aid have not been woefully misdirected?

  African dependence upon aid in all its forms had become ingrained by the late 1980s and the growth of this dependency was largely due to the activities of the World Bank and the IMF’s ‘seal of approval’ that conveniently provided individual donors with a shield when they might otherwise have been prevailed upon to pursue separate policies of their own. But though external factors have had a devastating impact upon African development this cannot excuse the shortcomings of African leaders and elites whose behaviour in the 1980s was far removed from the socialist rhetoric of the 1960s. Inefficiency, corruption, greed and self-serving elites have all played their part in Africa’s woeful development performance. State structures are too often rigid and inefficient and provide minimal services to the public while the notion of a government working in the ‘national interest’ is far removed from the sectarian regimes that cater to specific groups (the clients of the ruling elite) and are sustained in power by their external backers, who provide aid, or withdraw it, depending upon how the rulers protect the national and corporate interests of the donors. As an African participant in a 1988 Nairobi conference put it succinctly: ‘The development strategies followed by African countries during the two to three decades of their political independence has gradually led the continent into its present destitution… Worse still, all plans designed by those concerned with development, whether social or economic, indicated that without exception, the present policies, plans and strategies are incapable of bringing about any growth recovery in the foreseeable future.’22

  The Decade in Retrospect

  The word ‘crisis’ occurs all too often as the descriptive term for Africa’s problems during the 1980s. The independence euphoria had passed; nationalist heroes had turned into repressive dictators; economies were stagnant and living standards falling; civil wars and violence in much of the continent appeared to be endemic; experiments in self-reliant socialism were collapsing in the face of subversive Western pressures. Yet, emerging from this depressing scenario were some hopeful signs as a new realism led African leaders at Addis Ababa in 1990 to assert that development was Africa’s responsibility, as opposed to the donor world to which they had looked with such dependence up to that time. There were new moves to resuscitate a sense of African unity as the first tentative steps were taken to create an African economic union. After the long decades of struggle, apartheid in South Africa had at last collapsed and President de Klerk’s speech of February 1990, in which he unbanned the ANC, and the subsequent release of Nelson Mandela heralded a new beginning for that deeply troubled country. Most encouraging of all, persistent demands for democracy were challenging the roles of autocratic rulers from one end of the continent to the other.

  Wars and civil violence were a permanent feature of the Horn of Africa – Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan; of Southern Africa – Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa destabilizing its neighbours as things fell apart within its own borders; while, more generally, the continent as a whole had become heavily militarized with the helmeted soldier in battle fatigues clasping his Kalashnikov one of the continent’s most potent symbols. Ethnic or tribal divisions in many countries – the Congo, Zaïre, Ghana, Nigeria or Uganda – lay at the heart of divisions threatening national unity and in many cases had emerged as stronger forces than the appeals to nationalism of an earlier generation. In the Arab North the growth of Islamist fundamentalism posed new threats to stability while in countries such as Nigeria or Sudan clashes between Christians and Muslims were employed as political weapons by the power hungry.

  Above all, it was in the economic sphere that Africa suffered endless setbacks, partly due to factors beyond its control, partly the result of mistaken policies. Few countries escaped what appeared to be a permanent economic blight upon the continent of rising debts, unfavourable terms of trade for export commodities, declining agricultural output (campaigns to persuade people to go ‘back to the land’ never worked), manipulation by aid donors, falling incomes, natural disasters and general stagnation for economies most of which had such small bases that they had no reserves to fall back upon. In a state of semipermanent economic crisis, Africa turned to the international financial institutions (IFIs) – the World Bank and IMF – for assistance but did so with reluctance and suspicion. Few African countries either wished to apply the structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) so readily put forward by the World Bank and IMF or believed that these were in their best interests; but SAPs were the price to be paid for much-needed aid. There were exceptions and for a time during the 1980s the revolutionary Jerry Rawlings of Ghana became the ‘darling’ of the IFIs because he had accepted their adjustment programmes, though he came to doubt their efficacy later. Elsewhere, country after country, with varying degrees of reluctance, felt obl
iged to seek World Bank assistance because they could see no alternative way out of their economic troubles. One result of Africa’s economic collapse was the end of most experiments in socialist self-reliance: countries such as Guinea or Mali that had attempted to break free of the West’s economic stranglehold were drawn back into the capitalist fold, patted on the back for being sensible, and then, once more, provided with aid – strings attached. In Tanzania the collapse of Nyerere’s ujamaa experiment, the continent’s most famous attempt at home-grown socialism, signalled one more defeat for African self-reliance. On the other hand, Zaïre’s Mobutu, a past master at brinkmanship, engineered a confrontation with Belgium, which he successfully blackmailed into providing more aid and forgiving a large slice of his debts because his country possessed a fabulous range of minerals that the West would do virtually anything to control. And so, at the end of the decade, as at the beginning, Africa remained woefully dependent upon the West for its economic survival and though its leaders were only too aware of their dependency they could not find a way to escape from it.

  On the political front insistent demands by increasingly determined opponents of one-party, dictatorial or military rule moved the continent slowly yet inexorably towards more open, democratic forms of government. Reluctant autocrats were obliged to make concessions to these popular demands and tried to buy off their critics with limited moves towards full democracy; but the little they offered was never enough and increasingly determined masses lost their fear of oppressive leaders and began to force them, step by step, to concede power to the people. It was a relative process but by the end of the decade the signs were clear: the days of the charismatic, one-party ‘dictator’ were coming to an end. Progress, however, was slow and the counter-revolutionaries usually had the army on their side and the coup remained a principal weapon of political change. At the same time, there was fear of real radicalism and in West Africa Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and Jerry Rawlings of Ghana were regarded with deep distrust by their more conservative neighbours, as well as the West, because they might actually succeed in giving real power to the people. The efforts of the CIA to destabilize and discredit Rawlings more than justified the ongoing accusations of neo-colonialism against the West that were still made by African leaders.