The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Obote assumed that Amin would continue to serve him as a loyal and simple soldier. A man of huge physique, a Kakwa from the West Nile region, Amin was virtually illiterate, with no schooling and limited intelligence, but he possessed a peasant’s cunning and shrewdness. When Obote began to build up a personal following in the officer corps and to look for support among the large contingents of Langi and Acholi troops, Amin matched his manoeuvres by enlisting groups from the West Nile. Amin struck first, ousting Obote in 1971 while he was on an overseas visit.

  Under Amin’s rule, Uganda descended into a nightmare of massacres, murders and lawlessness. In constant fear of a counter-attack by Obote’s supporters, he ordered the mass killing of Langi and Acholi police and troops and let loose special squads to hunt down suspected opponents. No one was immune. The chief justice was dragged away from the High Court, never to be seen again. The vice-chancellor of Makerere University disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of the Anglican archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital shortly after he spoke out against Amin’s tyranny. The civil service, once the most advanced in east Africa, was reduced to a mere shell, its senior members either purged or escaping to safety abroad. All notion of orderly government ceased to exist. Amin used the state and its resources simply to keep himself in power and his army satisfied.

  As Uganda sank deeper into disarray, with soaring prices and consumer shortages, Amin turned vindictively on Uganda’s Asian community. A wealthy immigrant minority, Asians controlled much of the country’s trade and industry and were widely disliked. In 1972, Amin ordered the expulsion of all Asian families with British nationality, handing out their shops, businesses and properties to his cronies in the army. In the general exodus of Asians that followed – some 50,000 left in all – Uganda lost a large proportion of its doctors, dentists, veterinarians, professors and technicians.

  The end of Amin’s regime came in 1979. After falling out with his closest collaborators, Amin desperately sought a diversion and ordered the army to invade the Kagera Salient in northern Tanzania, allowing his troops to loot and plunder at will. Tanzanian forces struck back across the border and then decided to oust Amin altogether. After brief resistance, Amin abandoned Kampala and headed for exile, finding refuge in Saudi Arabia.

  Amin’s rule had left Uganda ravaged, lawless and bankrupt, with a death toll put at 250,000. But its ordeal was not yet over. In 1980, Obote regained power in disputed elections, plunging Uganda into an anarchic civil war. Obote’s repression was as bad as Amin’s had been. By the time Obote was overthrown in 1985, Uganda was a wreck.

  The discovery of huge oil resources in Libya in 1965 transformed it from an impoverished backwater into potentially one of the richest states in Africa. But just when oil revenues began to flow, an army coup in 1969 brought to power a 27-year-old captain, Muammar Gaddafi, a Bedouin officer driven by grand ambitions, fierce hatreds and a pathological penchant for meddling in the affairs of other countries, who squandered Libya’s fortunes on military hardware and foreign adventures. His spending spree on military equipment was gargantuan: between 1970 and 1985, the bill amounted to an estimated $29 billion. Among his purchases were 700 aircraft, submarines and helicopters. He also used Libya’s oil revenues to support a host of dissident and insurgent groups fighting to overthrow foreign governments and sent out death squads to murder opponents living in exile. His readiness to use proxy violence, assassination and bribery in foreign lands made him widely feared and detested there.

  In Africa, Gaddafi backed Eritrean guerrillas against Haile Selassie’s regime; Polisario guerrillas fighting to oust Morocco from the Western Sahara; opposition factions in Niger and Mali; and southern African liberation movements. When Amin’s army faced defeat in 1979, Gaddafi dispatched an expeditionary force to Uganda to try to prop him up. He sent troops to invade the Aozou Strip, a stretch of desert on the border with Chad, and then used it as a forward base from which to intervene in a civil war in Chad, hoping to make it part of a new empire. In Libya, meanwhile, the population endured decades of stifling dictatorship.

  From the outset of Ethiopia’s revolution in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam relentlessly pursued his goal of achieving sole control, eliminating whatever opposition stood in the way. A dour, secretive man, coming from a poor background, with little formal education, he was impatient for revolutionary action. When Derg members met in November 1974 to decide the fate of some sixty prisoners, mostly officials associated with Haile Selassie’s regime, it was Mengistu who insisted on ordering their execution. The following month he proclaimed the advent of Ethiopian socialism and followed through by nationalising banks, insurance companies, all large industrial and commercial enterprises, rural land, urban land and rentable houses and apartments. In a radio and television broadcast in 1976, he announced Marxism-Leninism as Ethiopia’s guiding ideology. He finally achieved undisputed control of the Derg in 1977 by organising the killing of seven of his opponents on the committee.

  As the revolution rolled on, Ethiopia was engulfed in strife and turmoil. Landowners, landlords, royalists and aristocrats all raised the banner of revolt. In one province after another, rebellions against the central government flared up anew, aggravated by long-held grievances. Eritrean guerrillas launched a huge offensive in their campaign for independence, gaining control of much of the countryside. In Addis Ababa, radical political groups wanting civilian control of the revolution sought to resist the Derg, assassinating scores of officials and supporters.

  Mengistu’s answer to all opposition was brutal repression. In Addis Ababa, he sent out murder squads to crush civilian activists defying his rule. Thousands died in his campaign of ‘red terror’; thousands more were imprisoned and tortured. In Eritrea, shunning the possibility of a negotiated settlement, he sent peasant armies to the north, hoping that sheer numbers would overwhelm the rebels. But he lost further ground there, including control of major towns, and his position became increasingly beleaguered. In July 1977, Somalia, taking advantage of Ethiopia’s internal upheavals, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden.

  What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by Soviet and Cuban forces, dispatched to ensure his Marxist regime survived. In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift to Ethiopia, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of military advisers. A Cuban combat force numbering 17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, Ethiopian troops inflicted a crushing defeat on the Somali forces in the Ogaden. The full might of the Ethiopian army, backed by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea. For the next twelve years, the Soviets continued to underpin Mengistu’s regime, providing him with $12 billion worth of arms and military equipment.

  Assured of Soviet support, Mengistu adopted an increasingly imperious manner. At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square watching a procession of army units and civilian groups pass before him. ‘We were supposed to have a revolution of equality,’ recalled one of his ministers. ‘Now he had become the new Emperor.’

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  LOST DECADES

  By the 1980s, Africa was renowned for its ‘Big Men’, army dictators and one-party presidents who strutted the stage enforcing their personal control, tolerating neither opposition nor dissent, licensing secret police to silence their critics, cowing the press, emasculating the courts, and making themselves exceedingly rich. Once in power, their abiding preoccupation was to stay in power, employing whatever means were necessary. A few examples of multi-party democracy survived – notably in Botswana and Senegal – enough to prove that the idea could work. Some one-party states offered relatively tolerant government and occasionally held restricted forms of election. But the vast majority of Africans could expect neither political rights nor freedoms.

  The economic record wa
s equally dismal. While making rapid progress with school enrolment and medical care, most African governments failed to carry through effective economic programmes to improve the plight of their populations. The rewards of independence all too evidently were reaped for the most part by small, privileged groups at the pinnacle of power. Huge sums were lavished on prestige projects such as presidential palaces, conference halls, grand hotels, elite housing, airlines and embassies abroad.

  The focus placed on industrialisation rather than agriculture as the engine of development proved ruinous. African states were soon littered with state-owned industries and enterprises that were badly managed, overstaffed, subjected to frequent political meddling and requiring huge government subsidies to keep them afloat. Zambia, rich from copper revenues, squandered its fortunes on a host of high-cost, loss-making, inefficient state corporations. Mali, a poor country, even by African standards, set up twenty-three state enterprises, all of which fell into muddle and chaos, accumulating huge deficits. In a review of Guinea’s economic policy, a French economist wrote: ‘To set up a cannery without products to can, a textile factory that lacked cotton supplies, a cigarette factory without sufficient locally grown tobacco and to develop . . . a forest region that had no roads and trucks to carry its output – all of these were gambles taken by utopian idealists and ignoramuses.’ State-owned corporations also became vehicles for corruption, preyed on by politicians and fraudsters alike. Tenders were often awarded to dubious companies that never delivered goods or services. Project costs were grossly inflated to allow for kickbacks, rendering many projects uneconomical. Payrolls were padded with ‘phantom’ employees. Company assets were routinely stolen.

  Agriculture, meanwhile, suffered from decades of neglect. It was Africa’s principal economic sector, providing a living for four out of every five people. Yet African leaders regarded it as useful primarily as a lucrative source of revenue. Using their power over state marketing boards, they paid farmers for their export crops a fraction of what they received on world markets, pocketing the profits. In some cases, cocoa producers in Ghana and sisal producers in Tanzania, for example, farmers were not paid enough even to cover their own costs of production. A study completed in 1981 showed that rice growers in Mali were paid by the government 63 francs for a kilo of rice that cost them 80 francs to produce. Food producers fared no better. Governments paid low prices for food crops to keep the urban cost of living down, for fear of political protest among urban populations. Farmers consequently deserted in droves.

  The results in many cases were calamitous. Nigeria, the world’s largest exporter of groundnuts and palm produce at the time of independence in 1960, all but stopped exports of groundnuts and palm-oil in the 1970s. Zambia, blessed with fertile land, reliable rainfall and huge agricultural potential, self-sufficient in food supplies at independence, was forced to rely on food imports. In Ghana, cocoa production, once the economic mainstay, fell by half.

  A socialist experiment in agriculture, carried out by Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, proved equally disastrous. It involved uprooting scattered rural populations and placing them in large communal ujamaa villages where basic services such as schools and clinics would be available. The ujamaa campaign was intended to be voluntary, but when local communities showed no enthusiasm for participating in it, Nyerere ordered the compulsory resettlement of the entire rural population. Between 1973 and 1977, some 11 million people were herded into new villages in what amounted to the largest mass movement in Africa’s history; many had to be coerced into leaving their ancestral homes. The disruption caused by Nyerere’s ‘villagisation’ programme nearly led to catastrophe. Food production fell dramatically, raising the spectre of famine. Instead of self-sufficiency, Tanzania became dependent for survival on foreign handouts of food.

  The record was not uniformly bleak. A handful of countries – Kenya, Malawi, Swaziland, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon – managed to establish thriving agricultural sectors. Kenya, once the domain of wealthy white farmers, was highly successful in promoting smallholder agriculture and diversifying smallholder production into tea, coffee, pyrethrum and other crops. Malawi, though small, landlocked and heavily populated, also achieved steady growth. In Côte d’Ivoire, the boom in agriculture was phenomenal by any standards: agricultural production tripled between 1960 and 1980. Much of the increase was attributable to smallholders awarded favourable government prices.

  The overall results for agriculture, however, showed most of Africa in a parlous position. Food production failed to keep pace with rapid population growth. Between 1960 and 1990, the population grew from about 200 million to 450 million. During the 1960s and 1970s, Africa was the only region in the world where food production per capita declined. To cover food production deficits, relatively wealthy countries such as Nigeria and Zambia paid out huge sums on costly food imports; poorer countries came to depend on food aid. The need to purchase food imports, coupled with the fall in agricultural exports, depleted foreign exchange reserves and contributed to balance of payments crises.

  The rising rate of population growth had other consequences. Governments were simply unable to cope with the demand for more schools, more clinics, more housing and more basic services such as water supply. The impact on land use was especially damaging. By the 1970s arable land in some areas was no longer in plentiful supply. Peasants thus turned to cultivating marginal land, increasing the problems of soil erosion and degradation, over-grazing and deforestation. In the Sahel region some 80,000 square miles of land deteriorated every year. When a succession of droughts struck the Sahel between 1968 and 1973, the population in parts of Niger, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) and northern Nigeria were already living close to the margin of survival. As many as a quarter of a million people may have died; cattle herds were decimated; vast areas of land deteriorated into desert.

  Adding to the burdens of many African governments was the soaring price of oil. In 1973, in the wake of the Arab–Israeli war, crude oil prices increased from about $3 a barrel to more than $12. In 1979, as a result of events in Iran and Iraq, the price rose from $19 a barrel, reaching $38 a barrel in 1981. A handful of oil-exporting states – Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Algeria and Libya – made spectacular gains. But all oil-importing countries were adversely affected. A 1981 study showed that, for a sample of eight oil-importing states, oil imports as a percentage of export earnings rose from 4.4 per cent in 1970 to 23.2 per cent in 1980. Governments were forced to reduce imports of many essential goods and to raise domestic costs and prices. Agriculture was hit by higher fuel and fertiliser costs and shortages of equipment. Industry suffered similar problems, with many factories operating at low levels for lack of imports.

  In growing desperation, African governments tried to keep themselves afloat not by introducing austerity measures or policy reforms but by borrowing heavily abroad. Between 1970 and 1980, black Africa’s external debts rose from $6 billion to $38 billion. By 1982 they had reached $66 billion. A year later they stood at $86 billion. Many countries were unable to meet debt-servicing costs. In some cases there was no longer any realistic prospect that loans would be repaid. Commercial banks abroad, once eager lenders, now shunned Africa.

  The impact of Africa’s failing economies on ordinary life was severe. Crippled by debt and mismanagement, African governments could no longer afford to maintain adequate public services. Hospitals and clinics ran short of medicines and equipment; schools lacked textbooks; factories closed through lack of raw materials or spare parts for machinery; shops were plagued by shortages; electricity supplies were erratic; telephone systems broke down; roads and railways deteriorated; unemployment soared; living standards plummeted. More than two-thirds of Africa’s populations were estimated to live in conditions of extreme poverty. By the mid-1980s, most Africans were as poor as or poorer than they had been at the time of independence. To escape the maelstrom, large numbers of trained and qualified Africans sought work abroa
d, further diminishing the ability of governments to cope.

  The plight of Africa was made even worse by outbreaks of civil war. The fault line running across Sudan and Chad around the twelfth parallel, dividing the Muslim north from the non-Muslim south and ‘Arab’ from ‘African’, was the cause of endless conflict. In Sudan, the Khartoum government’s attempts to impose an Islamic form of administration on southerners provoked rebellions that flared up again and again. In a reverse sequence in Chad, southern politicians in control of the central government in Fort Lamy (N’Djamena) precipitated a series of revolts in the Muslim north and elsewhere by their brutal treatment of local populations. A variety of foreign governments, notably Gaddafi’s Libyan regime, sought to profit from the conflicts for their own purposes.

  In Ethiopia, Colonel Mengistu used scorched-earth tactics year after year in an attempt to defeat rebellions in Tigray and Wollo, routinely using food as a weapon of war. He let loose the army to destroy grain stores, burn crops and pastures and kill livestock; rural markets and farm activity were regularly the target of aerial bombardment. In addition to outright destruction, the army requisitioned food and enforced blockades of food and people.