Africa

by Guy Arnold

  Sub-Saharan Africa represents the least economically dynamic region in the world and, according to the World Bank’s 1997 report Global Economic Perspectives and the Developing Countries, although the region was on the threshold of a period of sustained growth at 4 per cent a year this would not be enough to reverse the region’s marginalization. By 2020 sub-Saharan Africa’s share of global GDP will only have risen from 1.2 per cent (1997) to 1.7 per cent and will have lost ground to more dynamic countries, especially in Asia. Over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa’s share of developing world GDP was expected to fall from 7.6 per cent in 1992 to 5.8 per cent in 2020. South Africa may be the largest, most dynamic economy in the region but that did not alter the fact of belonging to a region that in world terms was marginal. This report had particular relevance for South Africa, which at that time was enjoying a sense of release from apartheid and a new acceptance by the rest of the world. It was, however, in danger of taking apparently attractive decisions that it might later regret. In its search for capital investment and reintegration into the world economic system South Africa appeared too ready to accept uncritically all the Western economic orthodoxies that always work to the advantage of the major economies but often spell continuing dependence if not total manipulation for developing countries. Further, in its desire for racial harmony, was Pretoria too ready to give way to white business pressures at the expense of justice for the majority of its people? At the beginning of the new century South Africa was the one major investment attraction for international business in Africa: while this was of vital importance to its economic development it also laid the country open to globalizing pressures that it might later come to regret.

  At the other extreme of the continent, Algeria under Chadli Benjedid in the early 1990s had abandoned socialism and turned back to capitalism. This meant the resubordination of Algeria’s economic future to French economic influence so that the retreat from socialism was simultaneously a retreat from nationalism as far as economic and social policies were concerned.27 According to this writer, Europe deliberately held back support from Benjedid as his political-economic crisis deepened since it wished to force the Algerian government to accept the rescheduling of Algeria’s debt and all that that entailed – the obligation to undertake a structural adjustment programme as dictated by the IMF. ‘After January 1992, no funds were released until this objective had been attained and the promise of funds was used as a lever to secure compliance. All other policy considerations – stability, democracy, respect for human rights – were sacrificed to this objective.’28 Thus, the EU sought to impose rescheduling and structural adjustment on Algeria so as to secure its integration into a free trade area dominated by Europe. Paris was the source of this strategy and France expected its EU partners to defer to its ‘vital interests’. Such a self-seeking French policy did not assist Algeria achieve peace in its civil war but it did safeguard the French hold on the Algerian economy. Thus, at the height of the Algerian civil war and as the West generally was insisting upon good governance and democracy in the aftermath of the Cold War, in fact it was never serious about promoting these values in Algeria and turned a blind eye to the flouting of these values by the Algerian army.

  There have been various attempts to promote regionalism in Africa ever since independence, because it was argued that stronger units would be better able to bargain with the EU or US. In fact, few of these regional arrangements have come to anything and regionalism as such appears to have done little to boost internal African trade. On the other hand, in contrast to this formal approach, there has been a huge growth in Africa of informal trading systems, a form of globalization indigenous to the continent. Unfortunately, regionalism has always suffered because of the fear that a dominant member of the bloc will reap most of the advantages: Nigeria in ECOWAS, Kenya in the East African Community, South Africa in SADC. Such suspicions are understandable but unless they are overcome Africa stands little chance of presenting even a moderate show of unity against globalizing pressures from outside. ‘Globalization is generally thought of in terms of multinational companies and the changing relations between nation states and peoples as they become enmeshed in the world economy.’ However, a study of transnational trade of second-economy traders between Africa and Europe29 provides some interesting insights into African entrepreneurial capacities. The story of traders from Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville to Europe focuses on individuals operating in the interstices of these larger national entities and on how they manage to take advantage of the way the world economy now works. A key aspect of globalization, of great importance to Africa, is the size and geographical range of the African diaspora and the close family networks that operate as a result. Drugs, illegal trade, the ‘internationalization of the family’ represent a significant aspect of Africa’s ‘private’ globalization activities.

  During the nearly 60 years since the end of World War II the world has become an unmistakably harsher place. There are many reasons for this: the confrontation of the Cold War, the doubling of the world’s population with the commensurate increase in pressures upon resources and what would appear to be a fundamental change for the worse in the power attitudes of the rich, developed nations. During this period the entire continent of Africa became independent to find in both economic and power terms that it was the poorest, least influential region in the world. Ever since the independence era of the 1960s African states have been trying to find their own place in the world while dealing with the leftover problems of colonialism; they have done so in a climate that was rarely favourable to the independence of small states even though so many had appeared on the world scene. Yet in 1945 ‘everyone was a Keynesian’. ‘The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; that the state should reduce its role in the economy; that corporations should be given total freedom; or that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection – such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time.’30 Such perceptions favoured small states newly emerging on the world scene; their replacement by the market forces arguments central to globalization has created a world inimical to the freedoms so essential to the growth of a small new state. Privatization ought to make small as well as big markets more successful but in fact the point of privatization, as promoted by the IFIs, has not been about economic efficiency or improved services to the people but about the transfer of wealth from the public purse, where it might be used to benefit the people, to the private purse where it would not do so. Further, by its nature globalization degrades democracy while the post-1990 rise of US unilateralist power and arrogance has threatened or downgraded every institution, beginning with the UN, that opposed, or threatened to oppose, US policies. ‘Thus, the only international organizations which have any real influence on world affairs are those economic and financial organizations (the World Bank, IMF, WTO) where, often, decisions are influenced and even prepared by private organizations such as the International Chamber of Commerce, the Club of London (private lending banks), or the various committees dealing with norms and standards. Financially dependent on the developed countries, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO are effectively under their political control.’31 This is not an encouraging climate for weak economies struggling to achieve development without surrendering their freedom of action.

  We may live in a capitalist-oriented world and most Africans are capitalist-oriented rather than otherwise, but ‘What is radically new is its (capitalism’s) claiming of the market as the sole foundation of its philosophy and organization, and the sole criterion of its further development, so that a cumulative process is unleashed which it is less and less able to control’.32 The globalized market, almost by definition, disregards collective needs in an individual country or society. It has to impose the one criterion of market behaviour everywhere and the idea has gown that the market will alone solve all economic and social problems. In opposition to this view
, the first aim of all economic and social organization ought to be to satisfy the priority needs of the people, all the people. That, of course, is what the African nationalists of the 1960s claimed and however much they or their successors have deviated from that nationalist aim globalization has further exacerbated their failings as most of them have found themselves in the grip of a process they cannot begin to control. The proponents of globalization have been so successful in their propaganda that no one – even at the top levels – questions it. There is no debate, only a ‘take it or leave it’ response. ‘Unless global pressures for profit maximization and more intense competition are corrected by some worldwide public intervention, they have the effect of making some poorer and others richer. Opponents of globalization, in making their case, may thus counter its ostensible advantages by referring to the new poverty it brings about, especially through the destruction of local economies and the refusal to prioritize the essential needs of the population.’33

  In part, but only in part, Africa is accommodating itself to globalization in so far as it is able to make the decision to do so independently of the pressures that are constantly exerted upon it from the G7/8 and IFIs. On the other hand, much of the continent’s population is irrelevant to the process anyway and is hardly touched by the world’s formal economy. Over the last decade of the twentieth century this was recognized by the donors who changed their policy from one of promoting development to one of providing ‘global poor relief’. In the North the idea of a national economy is coming to be replaced by the concept of an interdependent globalized world. This idea of interdependence applies to Africa in a number of ways. There are vigorous African informal economies that cross borders illegally and encompass a range of activities such as the international drug trade. Ironically, informal activities have been greatly enhanced by the structural adjustment programmes and other conditionalities imposed on African states from outside. An ever-increasing number of African entrepreneurs have opted out of state structures to operate illegally on their own and their activities, in turn, have helped to accelerate the disintegration of central state power and so give rise to the phenomenon of ‘failed states’.

  It is against this background of globalization and relentless international pressures that the world’s weakest continent faces the twenty-first century. The idea of an African renaissance was first mooted by Thabo Mbeki in 1997. If there is to be such a renaissance it can only come from within the continent and must be spearheaded by Africans at every level. A renaissance that makes Africa viable and gives it a meaningful voice in world affairs would be to everyone’s advantage. Whether it can be achieved remains to be seen.

  EPILOGUE

  An African Renaissance

  The beginning of the new century has witnessed the transformation of the OAU into the African Union, the launch of a New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the South African insistence that the time has come for an African renaissance. At the same time Africa faces the new neo-colonialism represented by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization – the international financial institutions – that, whatever their ostensible purposes, have been turned into instruments of Western manipulation and control. The question of how Africa can shake off dependence upon the outside world is quite separate from engagement with that world. Despite the fanfare about NEPAD and the visit to Africa in July 2003 by US President George W. Bush, the West at most is only marginally interested in Africa as Africa, as opposed to what it can extract from it, and if African leaders pause to think about this they should be relieved rather than upset. If past history, both colonial and post-colonial, is any guide neither European nor American interest has done the continent any favours. NEPAD, the launch of the African Union and an African renaissance are closely intertwined as part of the same exercise: how to rid Africa of the weight of external pressures that force it to develop as the West requires instead of in its own fashion.

  The African problems that engage external attention have been well rehearsed: poverty, lack of development, aid dependence, debt, corruption, civil wars, lack of democracy, failed states. It is a depressing list. The question for Africa is, how best to tackle these problems? Awareness of their debilitating impact upon Africa’s potential for growth has been behind these new continental initiatives. Let us begin with the new African Union. There will have been no point in transforming the OAU into a new African Union unless the core issue of enabling Africa to speak with one voice is tackled. The newly independent nations of Africa rejected moves towards real union in the immediate post-independence era, for understandable reasons, and instead opted for a weak OAU. However, the need for African unity has never been more urgent than today, as the process of world globalization is pushed ever harder by a dominant West, and should be at the top of the continental agenda. Fifty-four weak states will be permanently subservient to Western interests and pressures unless they learn to act as one in relation to the United States and the European Union. Even the strong work together rather than separately. The donor nations, for example, invoke IMF or World Bank conditionalities when they wish to evade one-to-one decisions and the EU bargains as a collective with individual African countries. Given the power disparities between the West and Africa it becomes essential that the African Union (AU) should speak for the whole continent, most especially at the present time when the United States is seeking new bases in Africa. The aims of the African Union, as set out in its charter – unity, harmonization of policies, economic integration – are impeccably correct but are they also meaningless? Africa has made many attempts to achieve regional economic integration and ECOWAS and SADC are at present the best examples of this but what the continent needs is a single economic voice.

  The second task for the AU, one that is only too apparent at the present time, is the need for it to take control of peacekeeping in Africa. In troubled Sierra Leone, Africa appeared only too ready to allow the former imperial power, Britain, to do the peacekeeping. When Côte d’Ivoire went up in flames, the African Union’s first chairman, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, had a unique opportunity to involve the AU in a peacekeeping exercise; instead, he gave his blessing to a Paris initiative under the arch neo-colonialist, President Jacques Chirac. And in the case of Liberia, reeling after 14 years of civil war, the people all clamoured for US intervention to bring them peace even when ECOWAS was organizing a peacekeeping operation. Africa does not lack for soldiers and it is time some of these were placed permanently at the disposal of the AU for peacekeeping operations anywhere on the continent. African independence owed much to United Nations pressures in the 1950s and 1960s and the integrity of the UN is of greatest importance to its weakest members, yet when the United States and Britain arrogantly bypassed the UN to invade Iraq without a UN mandate to do so, Africa was noticeably mute in its response to this deliberate downsizing of the world body, giving rise to the suspicion that it was desperate not to offend the two Western powers because it was relying upon their generosity to make NEPAD work.

  And what has the AU been prepared to say, let alone do, about events in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), including the predatory activities of the Congo’s neighbours, especially Uganda and Rwanda, whose raping of that country’s resources and arming of its militias is straight international piracy, while the ethnic violence in the Ituri region of north-east Congo between Lendu and Hema threatens to develop into full-scale genocide? Everyone, it seems, would avoid a rescue operation in DRC and no one seems willing to point any finger of blame at the country’s neighbours. At the 2001 Labour Party conference in Britain, Tony Blair in his ‘concerned for Africa’ mode, said, ‘I tell you if Rwanda happened again today as it did in 1994, when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act there.’ The evidence in 2003 was overwhelming that a comparable slaughter akin to genocide was taking place in eastern DRC and human rights estimates suggested that some four million people had died over the precedi
ng five years. Blair had also said, ‘The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, it will become deeper and angrier.’ Given the nature of politics, it is unrealistic to expect that Britain should act alone yet it did take action, but action that would lessen the chances of stopping the carnage. After many delays the UN Security Council voted in July 2003 to impose an arms embargo on DRC yet Britain and the US would not allow this to extend to Rwanda and Uganda, which back the militias killing civilians in eastern DRC. Both Rwanda and Uganda are substantial recipients of British aid and Britain could exert major influence upon them, yet it prefers to turn a blind eye to their activities in DRC. Rwanda has been heavily involved in the DRC’s North and South Kivu provinces where its officers have plundered vast amounts of gold, diamonds and coltan while claiming to be fighting against the Interahamwe extremists responsible for the 1994 genocide. According to a senior UN official based in Goma, ‘Rwanda has been hiding behind the guilt the outside world has for having failed to stop the genocide (in 1994). It has been able to do what it likes in DRC without fear of real criticism – and now four million, maybe more, have died in a conflict fuelled by Rwanda.’1 Given the West’s past record, this reluctance to intervene in DRC is, perhaps, to be expected, despite Tony Blair’s brave words. But what of Africa? Article Four – Principles – of the Constitution Act of the African Union lays down