A brief history: Africa swaying in the winds of change
By GEORGE OWUOR
(c) Earth Times News Service
<The last history lesson Evelyn Awino and her classmates at Orenge Primary
School in western Kenya learned last fall is how Dr. David Livingston, the
legendary English explorer, got lost in East Africa while trying to discover
the "dark continent." This summer her more learned teachers at Kibos High
School will tell her that Livingston was actually searching for Lake Victoria,
the source of River Nile--a lifeline for millions of people living in Uganda,
the Sudan and Egypt--whose control was supposed to boost the European
countries' economic return from their colonial possessions in north Africa and
India.
But she may not be told that Livingston's exploration also opened Africa's
wealth--reported extensively by New York Herald reporter Henry Morton Stanley,
who was sent to find Livingston--to exploitation by the Europeans.
A century later, a new wave of exploration has begun. This time it's an
exploration of ideas about how Africa can be rid of poverty, wars, diseases
and illiteracy. It's an exploration that has many world leaders jostling for
new ways to addressing Africa's perennial problems so that the continent's 650
million residents can join the rest of the world community in the competitive
information age.
>From London to Washington, leaders of the industrialized nations are telling
their electorates why they should care about Africa even though they have
nothing to show for the billions of dollars in foreign aid that has been
poured into many African nations. Both the G-7 meeting coming up in Denver and
the UN General Assembly's special session in June are expected to focus on
Africa's lagging development.
All that is fine, say many Africans, except there is one problem: The
discussions will most likely be among foreigners, with few if any African
voices being heard or heeded. All of which helps to support an emerging view
held by many African academics and other observers: That the biggest
impediment to development in Africa is that development strategies are imposed
on the Africans even when they don't understand them well. "Our states were
developed externally," says Ugandan historian Amii Omara-Otunnu, who teaches
at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been studying armed
conflicts in Africa."There has never been state formation in Africa. We have
states constructed by declaration by external people."
Omara-Otunnu refers to the Berlin Conference in 1884, at which Africa was
divided into almost half a hundred states by European imperialists, thus
starting a process of economic plunder, disunity and conflicts that is at the
heart of Africa's problems today. King Leopold of Belgium enriched his country
using copper, diamonds, timber and gold from the equatorial Congo, now known
as Zaire. It was a frightening act of exploitation.
To be sure, Africa emerged from colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s with a
stronger economy than before. But the period immediately following
independence was characterized by disagreements, conflicts, dictatorships and
unsuitable economic policies that only undermined the gains. In 1965, the
average per-capita income in sub-Saharan Africa was 60 percent of the
developing world average; today, it is less than 3 percent.
So what caused the decline? It depends on who you ask. But many experts agree
that Africa's problems have something to do with disunity and conflicts. The
conflicts have their roots in colonialism. Colonialism set off Africa on the
wrong foot, says George Ayittey, a Ghanaian professor of economics at American
University in Washington. Independence proved a hollow word for Africans. As
soon as they threw away their colonial rulers, cold-war politics intervened to
create a new form of foreign interference. The United States and the former
Soviet Union poured large sums of money into propping up dictators--such as
Siad Barre of Somalia, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Mengistu Haile Mariam of
Ethiopia--who had no popular support among their citizens.
But in the 1980s Africans began to realize that their own leaders were to
blame for their plight. "The basic reason why we're having all this chaos in
Africa is because we had bad leadership," Ayittey told a Chicago Tribune
reporter in 1995. "The colonial state was very authoritarian but those who
took over made things worse."
In much of Africa, the leaders have sought to create or inflame ethnic tension
to allow them a chance to rule longer by the gun. In Nigeria, for instance,
Shehu Shagari, a civilian who was elected president in 1979, created what
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka calls "a police (or poli-thug) state," in which
oil-swollen government coffers were looted and the country was forced to
import basic food items. When President Shagari was overthrown in 1983 by
General Muhammadu Buhari, Soyinka says, the motive was to preserve--rather
than terminate--Shagari's corrupt system.
Many other post-colonial African leaders stole millions of dollars given by
donors for development assistance and stashed the money in Swiss banks or
spent it on weaponry while ordinary citizens grew poorer. "In 1990 Uganda
spent 45 percent of its [budget] on the military and less than 10 percent on
education," says Omara-Otunnu. Although his military spending is large,
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, is not known to be corrupt. In fact, he has
installed strict economic discipline that is unparalleled in Africa. "We must
start by preaching political morality," says Omara Otunnu. "Why do we need an
army? The military is a parasitic bureaucracy."
FOREIGN INFLUENCE: FOREIGN MINING COMPANIES
Part of Africa's development problem has to do with the socialist or near
socialist economic policies left in place when the European colonial masters
departed between 1959 and 1980. These policies had failed in Britain and
France, which experienced negative growth in the 1960s and 1970s. It would
have been a miracle if the socialists' policies, some of them disguised as
Western capitalism, had worked in Africa. "Development planning in Africa in
the 1960s was funded by external donors, the World Bank and IMF, and it was
based on industrial protection against competition," says Michael Chege, a
Kenyan professor of political science and director of African Studies at the
University of Florida at Gainesville. "Now they are saying protection is a bad
idea."
Even where pseudo-Western capitalism was practiced, as in Zaire, it was to the
benefit of foreign powers. The Financial Times of London reported in May that
as early as the 1980s Zaire's Mobutu had accumulated about $4 billion in
personal assets from stolen foreign aid, even while his country was being
ranked among the poorest by the United Nations. And much of that plunder of
aid and Zairian wealth was done with the support of Western powers. "By the
early 1980s Mobutu was an untouchable in client terms," the newspaper quoted a
senior British banker closely involved with Zaire. Added John Stockwell,
former CIA chief of base in Zaire: "The US tapped in at independence because
the place was a plum financially."
It's not true that the West was interested in Africa for cold-war reasons
only. There is also evidence that there was a thriving Western investment in
much of Africa's trouble spots. Consider that beneath the surface of the
tragic drama of Somalia, four major US oil companies had acquired exclusive
concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of barrels of oil. In
1993, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times obtained documents showing that
almost two-thirds of Somalia had been allocated to the American oil giants
Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before the country's
pro-US President, Mohamed Siad Barre, was overthrown and the nation plunged
into chaos in 1991.
According to corporate and scientific documents, the American companies were
well positioned to pursue Somalia's most promising potential oil reserves the
moment the nation was pacified, and at least one of them stayed in Mogadishu
through the period of turmoil. Although the US administration denied any
involvement, sources told the Los Angeles Times that the oil companies were
hoping that the Bush administration's decision to send US troops to safeguard
aid shipments to Somalia would also help protect their multimillion-dollar
investments there.
African experts and prominent Somalis charged that President Bush, a former
Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia at least in part by the US corporate
oil stake, a charge the administration denied, although it was reported that
Conoco assisted the US military's operation in Somalia. "We can't ignore that
fact of foreign influence," says Omara-Otunnu, who is a Ugandan national.
"Foreigners tend to blame Africans but fail to admit their own role in the
[African] conflicts. Who is trading in arms in Somalia? In Zaire, the conflict
would not have continued had it not been for the US and France." He contends
that the two Western powers are supporting rival factions in Zaire for their
own economic reasons.
Dutch/Shell in Nigeria has a legacy of influence on the government in Abuja.
The company, which funds the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha as it has
funded other dictators through the years, spills 1.6 million gallons of
environmental wastes in Nigeria's Delta region, according to the environmental
watchdog Greenpeace. And Shell pays the Nigerian military to suppress any
opposition to its lucrative but hazardous activities. The political problem
arising from this led to the government's execution of environmental activist
Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight associates in 1995.
In Zaire, the US supported the dictatorship of President Mobutu even when it
became clear he was looting his country while millions of Zairians suffered.
Debora A. Green, a Washington-based lobbyist on foreign policy issues who has
provided expert testimony on Zaire before the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, says the policies pursued by the Bush and Clinton administrations
have "hobbled the democratic transition in Zaire and contributed to the
current crisis." She says that in 1990, under international pressure,
President Mobutu announced a limited political liberalization. Zairians rushed
into this narrow opening and enlarged it, forcing the convening of a Sovereign
National Conference (SNC) in 1991. The SNC, a remarkable national assembly of
2,840 delegates from all political parties and social sectors in Zaire,
drafted a new constitution, formed a transitional government and elected a
transitional parliament. These institutional changes were mandated to guide
the country to free elections by 1994. The SNC opted for a federal system of
government and began investigations into government corruption with the aim of
recovering misappropriated state assets.
As SNC was nearing its close in August 1992, the Bush administration weighed
in on the side of Mobutu, pressuring the SNC leadership to accept
"power-sharing arrangement" with Mobutu. Under the "Comprehensive Political
Compromise" brokered by Herman Cohen, then Assistant Secretary of State for
Africa, Mobutu was made president with the promise that his powers would be
sharply curtailed by the new constitution. In practice, however, Green says,
Mobutu used his control over the military to paralyze the government of Etiene
Tshisekedi, the prime minister elected by SNC.
Throughout the ensuing constitutional crisis, says Green, the US State
Department snubbed the Tshisekedi government while frequently reiterating its
support for the Mobutu presidency. Green says Cohen's successor in the Clinton
administration, George Moose, insisted in testimony before Congress that
Mobutu "had a role to play" in the transition, ignoring all evidence that this
arranged marriage between an armed dictator and democrats could not work.
In September 1993, a new round of negotiations brokered by the US and its
allies began between Mobutu and the opposition, in the course of which most of
SNC's institutional framework was discarded. The transitional parliament was
enlarged to include 400 Mobutu supporter, who promptly dumped the popular
Tshisekedi and elected Kengo wa Dondo, a Mobutu supporter who was favored by
the US, as prime minister.
END OF PART 1