Why Is Africa Still Poor?
A slogan
painted on trucks and taxicabs all over Africa, much beloved by
metaphor-hunting authors, reads: NO CONDITION IS PERMANENT. This is
true, but some are recurring. Tyranny in Zimbabwe, famine in Niger, a
constitutional coup in Togo, rampant corruption in Kenya, protesters shot in
Ethiopia, an epidemic in Angola, civil war in Sudan–those are this year’s
headlines, but if you think you’ve heard it all before, you have. Martin
Meredith, in his new book The Fate of Africa, writes that “what is so
striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to which
African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes.” Some countries,
like Nigeria and Zambia, have gone through cycles of reform and decay. But
Meredith’s subtitle–From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair–sums
up the overall trend. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the heady days of the
1960s, much of the continent was no less prosperous than South Korea or
Malaysia. While those Asian nations have transformed themselves into economic
“tigers,” however, gross domestic products across Africa shrank during the last
two decades of the twentieth century. Africans are getting poorer, not richer.
They are living shorter, hungrier lives.
The
decline of an entire continent confounds our preconceptions about human
advancement. The economist Jeffrey Sachs points out in his recent book The
End of Poverty that our Hegelian notion of linear progress is relatively
new. For most of history, humans lived miserable existences and couldn’t expect
better before the afterlife. But since the Industrial Revolution the situation
has improved, and not only in the rich countries of Europe and North America.
Between 1981 and 2001, Sachs says, hundreds of millions of people, many of them
in Asian nations like China and India, emerged from extreme poverty. But a
billion have been left behind, most of them in Africa. “The greatest tragedy of
our time,” Sachs writes, is that one-sixth of all humans still live a
dollar-a-day existence, scraping by on the margins of starvation.
How can
one continent be so out of step with humankind’s march of progress? Everyone
agrees that Africans are desperately poor and typically endure governments that
are, to varying degrees, corrupt and capricious. The dispute is about causes
and consequences. One group–call it the poverty-first camp–believes African
governments are so lousy precisely because their countries are so poor. The
other group–the governance-first camp–holds that Africans are impoverished
because their rulers keep them that way. The argument may seem pedantic, but
there are billions of dollars at stake, and millions of lives. The fundamental
question is whether those who are well-off can salve a continent’s suffering,
or if, for all our good intentions, Africans are really on their own.
Recently,
the poverty-first crowd has been making a lot of noise. The weekend before the
July G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, millions of people watched as pop
stars in cities around the world played concerts organized by Africa crusader
Bob Geldof. The event’s platform–forgive Africa’s debts, increase its
development aid, end trade policies that undermine its exports–echoed the
recommendations of Sachs, the antipoverty movement’s house economist. A
Columbia University professor and an adviser to Kofi Annan, Sachs has lately
become a favorite brain of the US Weekly set: Bono wrote his book’s
introduction, and he recently starred alongside Angelina Jolie in an MTV
special about their travels in Kenya. The celebrity endorsements amplify
Sachs’s serious argument that for too long, rich countries have done too little
to help the poor. At the end of the Gleneagles summit, world leaders announced
that they would increase global aid by about $50 billion by 2010. Sachs says
the poor need much more, right away: about $75 billion a year, half of it for
Africa. “I reject the plaintive cries of the doomsayers who say that ending
poverty is impossible,” he writes.
The
doomsayers, sadly, include many of those who know the continent best. Two other
recent books–Meredith’s sweeping history of the post-independence era, and
Robert Guest’s more tightly focusedThe Shackled Continent–have joined
the immense corpus of literature arguing that, for all the continent’s
geographical and historical handicaps, Africa’s main problems are political.
Guest, an optimist, believes that with better leadership African countries
could catch up. But Meredith reaches a dismal conclusion. Even “given greater
Western efforts,” he writes, “the sum of Africa’s misfortunes–its wars, its
despotisms, its corruption, its droughts, its everyday violence–presents a
crisis of such magnitude that it goes beyond the reach of foreseeable
solutions. At the core of the crisis is the failure of African leaders to
provide effective government.”
Meredith,
a British journalist and historian, is the author of biographies of Nelson
Mandela and Robert Mugabe. Here, he offers an ambitious survey of fifty years,
fifty-three countries and countless wars and coups. The story begins in the
early 1950s, with the first stirrings of nationalism among the colonized
peoples of Africa. Seventy years of rule from afar had left the continent
spectacularly ill-equipped for self-rule–a collection of states that were
nations in name only, drawn up according to the realpolitical whims of the
likes of Gladstone, Bismarck and Belgium’s King Leopold, who presided over the
deaths of millions of Congolese. Some European powers were spiteful about
leaving: French President Charles de Gaulle, piqued by the lack of deference
shown him by Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré, had colonial officials cart away their
office furniture, while the Portuguese fought a series of bloody wars to hold
on to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Other colonial powers were more
benevolent. Britain, for instance, built some good schools and decent roads in
East Africa. What none of the Europeans left behind, however, were societies
equipped to approach the immense challenge of mending the tribal, regional and
religious rifts created and exacerbated–often deliberately–in the interest of
dividing and ruling.
Yet in
those early years, all these challenges seemed manageable. “Expectations were
high,” Meredith writes, with charismatic leaders like Léopold Senghor,
Senegal’s philosopher-president, and the regal Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya,
seemingly poised to lead the continent to democracy and self-sufficiency. The
rains were good, the harvests bountiful and the infrastructure, left behind by
the Europeans, adequate. The “sense of euphoria,” Meredith writes, “had been
raised to ever greater heights by the lavish promises of nationalist
politicians campaigning for power, pledging to provide education, medical care,
employment and land for all. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom,’ Nkrumah had
told his followers, ‘and all else shall be added unto you.’”
Kwame
Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and the first man to lead an African colony to
independence, is of especial interest to Meredith, perhaps because his career
established the pattern of disappointment. A former political prisoner of deep
nationalist conviction, he took over when the British exited Ghana in 1957.
Nkrumah was hailed worldwide as a prophet of liberation, and he acted the part,
wrapping himself in kente cloth and talking of a United States of Africa. He
spent hundreds of millions of dollars in a five-year spree, constructing lavish
public buildings, creating nationalized industries from scratch and
establishing a Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute to codify his thinking. He
encouraged a personality cult and took grandiose titles, such as Osagyefo,
which means “redeemer.”
When his
popularity waned, Nkrumah turned to other methods of rule. He doled out
patronage, as his cabinet ministers demanded 10 percent cuts of every public
contract. (When one Nkrumah crony was questioned about his exorbitant
lifestyle, he replied, “Socialism doesn’t mean that if you’ve made a lot of money,
you can’t keep it.”) As Ghana went bankrupt, Nkrumah became increasingly
remote, surrounded by sycophants inside Christianborg Castle, a former slaving
fort. He crushed labor unions and imprisoned political opponents. After more
than one attempt on his life, he created a praetorian guard within the army,
made up mostly of his own tribesmen. In February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a
state visit to China, the military overthrew him. Ghanaians celebrated in the
streets.
With eerie
uniformity, this same drama played out in country after country, as colonial
exploitation gave way to the rule of homegrown tyrants. In Meredith’s account,
these so-called Big Men begin to blur together. Even their flourishes seem
interchangeable. Meredith, who has a gift for the mordant aside, tells us that
Nkrumah built himself a large zoo that featured a boa constrictor sent by Fidel
Castro. The Ivory Coast’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny allowed a sacred elephant to
roam the grounds of his palace. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie kept caged
lions and leopards. Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, another
cat person, used to feed his lions dissidents.
Ghana was
lucky by comparison. Its dictators were gentler than the likes of Bokassa, a
reputed cannibal, or Idi Amin, who had one of his wives killed, dismembered and
dumped in a car trunk. Coup leader Jerry Rawlings, an Air Force lieutenant, led
Ghana well enough to be hailed in the 1990s as one of a “new breed” of
enlightened autocrats. Rawlings presided over World Bank-mandated economic
reforms. Pleased donors flooded the country with billions in foreign aid.
Rawlings eventually handed over power to an elected civilian. Nonetheless,
Meredith writes that in 1998 “Ghana’s gross national product was still 16
percent lower than in 1970.” This, mind you, is one of the continent’s success
stories.
Meredith’s
book is full of tales like this, and worse. The author seems to be emulating
Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa, an epic history of the early
colonial period. But Meredith is a victim of his own scope; when he leaves
southern Africa, his area of expertise, he leans heavily on earlier writers. As
his narrative flits from crisis to crisis, his attempts at a wider analysis
disappear into the repetitive gloom. What’s missing is a unifying idea, an
explanation. For that, one must turn to Robert Guest and Jeffrey Sachs.
Guest
spent years traveling the continent as an editor and writer for The
Economist, and his fine book is filled with the kind of vivid details that
come from spending too many nights in dingy, sweltering hotel rooms. (I should
mention that he is a professional acquaintance; he edited several stories I
wrote for his publication between 2002 and 2004.) Before being assigned to
Africa he was stationed in booming East Asia, an experience that shapes his
view of the continent’s predicament. “Any country inhabited by human beings has
the potential to grow rich. We know this because many countries have already
done so,” he writes. “If Africa is to succeed too, it is crucial to understand
what has gone wrong in the past. Just why is Africa so poor?”
The
answer, Guest believes, is misrule. In his view, corruption isn’t just a
symptom of Africa’s deeper problems. It is the deeper problem. When government
ministers loot social programs, it exacerbates poverty, disease and illiteracy.
When customs agents demand bribes for allowing trucks to cross borders, it
increases shipping costs, and hence the prices poor consumers pay. When rulers
distribute jobs and contracts to their own tribal kin, it deepens ethnic
divisions.
It’s no
accident, Guest writes, that “the poorest one sixth of humanity endures four
fifths of the world’s civil wars.” In Africa, where so many have so little,
it’s easy to foment rebellion against Mercedes-driving kleptocrats. Because
those who lose power are usually stripped of their ill-gotten wealth, rulers
have an incentive to be paranoid and cruel. Perversely, Guest notes, countries
that are blessed by nature tend to suffer the most. Nigeria has pumped $280 billion
worth of oil since the 1970s, and has seen much of it siphoned off by a series
of dictators. Angola endured a long, bloody conflict over its oil and diamonds.
Congo is endowed with vast quantities of almost every precious mineral, and
today it lies devastated by an interminable war of plunder.
Guest’s
book is at its best, however, when it abandons these big stories and focuses on
the everyday, showing how corrupt governments plague the lives of normal
Africans. In one chapter, he recounts his experiences riding along with a truck
driver and his cargo of Guinness Stout on a ridiculously arduous four-day
journey across Cameroon. The route is in terrible shape; Guest notes that since
1980 the government has allowed about two-thirds of Cameroon’s roads to be
reclaimed by the rainforest. But the worst holdups come at countless police
roadblocks, where officers fabricate phantom offenses to generate bribes. “Do
you have a gun?” a police officer asks when someone raises an objection. “No. I
have a gun, so I know the rules.”
Too often
in Africa, Guest says, men with guns twist the rules to enrich themselves,
further impoverishing their countrymen in the process. Still, he thinks
countries can work their way out of the mess, particularly if they adopt the
sort of free-market policies The Economist champions. Some of Guest’s ideas are
compelling, such as when he cites the work of Peruvian economist Hernando de
Soto to suggest that African governments could unlock nearly $1 trillion in
capital by recognizing the land rights of squatters, who might then be able to
borrow money against the value of their property. Elsewhere, he is less
convincing. Guest believes that a simple fear of bad publicity will prevent
multinational corporations from mistreating African workers, a contention that
is quite at odds with historical precedent.
When it
comes to development aid, Guest believes that donor nations “should be both
more generous and more selective,” rewarding countries that are “trying to
implement sensible policies” and cutting off those that aren’t. Aid isn’t the
answer, he says. Rather, only Africans can save Africa, by building competitive
economies. Right now, he writes, Africa possesses 10 percent of the world’s
population and accounts for only 2 percent of global trade; it “hardly produces
anything that the rest of the world wants to buy.” Until it does, Guest
believes, the continent’s shackles will stay locked.
By this
point, you may think you know why Africa languishes. But you’re wrong, says
Jeffrey Sachs. In making his passionate call for more foreign aid, he
challenges the conventional wisdom that Africa isn’t ready for help. African
governments are dictatorial? Sachs says that the
thieving-tyrants-with-fly-swatters stereotype of African leaders is “passé,” and
that “by the early 1990s…a little-heralded democratic revolution was sweeping
the continent.” Corruption is the source of all misery? That contention, he
writes, “does not withstand practical experience or serious scrutiny.” Sachs
believes Africa’s problem is not politics but simple misfortune. Its soil
produces less food than, for instance, East Asia’s. The continent suffers
disproportionately from debilitating diseases like AIDS and malaria. Much of
its population is concentrated away from its coastline, and this, combined with
its lack of good roads and navigable rivers, hampers trade and economic growth.
“Africa’s governance is poor,” Sachs writes, “because Africa is poor.”
The idea
that Africa is a victim of geography is not new, but Sachs’s book dares to
offer a big, bold solution. And an author of Sachs’s pedigree can’t be taken
lightly. The globe-trotting Columbia professor is a kind of macroeconomic
Winston Wolf. Like Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction, he shows
up at scenes of carnage with a snappy plan to clean things up. Sometimes he
succeeds, as in Bolivia in the hyperinflationary 1980s. Sometimes he fails, as
in post-Communist Russia–but never for lack of self-assurance. He says
economists should think like scientists when diagnosing Africa’s ills. “In some
ways,” he writes, “today’s development economics is like eighteenth-century
medicine, when doctors used leeches to draw blood from their patients, often
killing them in the process.”
Sachs
first approached Africa in the late 1990s, at a time when foreign aid was
plummeting from cold war highs. He concluded that many Africans are stuck in a
“poverty trap.” They don’t make enough to save, so they can’t amass the capital
necessary to build a future. (For an illustration, read Robert Guest’s account
of a Malawian farmer who dreams of becoming a merchant but can’t because he
finds a bicycle hopelessly expensive.) The End of Poverty contains many
common-sensical ideas: Use irrigation and fertilizers to increase crop yields;
distribute mosquito nets to combat malaria and pharmaceuticals to lessen the
symptoms of AIDS; give rural villages cell phones to ease communication and
trade. What’s grabbed the world’s attention, though, is not such incremental
prescriptions but Sachs’s claim of a cure.
“The end
of extreme poverty is at hand–within our generation,” he declares, if only rich
nations, especially the United States, open their coffers. This, Sachs writes,
“is the great opportunity of our time, a commitment that would not only relieve
massive suffering and spread economic well-being, but would also promote other
Enlightenment objectives of democracy, global security, and the advancement of
science.” Sachs attacks those who don’t share his utopian vision, lamenting the
“anti-African and antipoor attitudes” of skeptics. “Africa gets a bad rap as
the ‘corrupt continent,’” he writes. “Even when such sentiments are not racist
in intent, they survive in our societies as conventional wisdom because of
existing widespread racism.”
Invoking
the R-word in this context seems overheated, especially since those who
complain loudest about corruption in Africa tend to be Africans themselves.
(Bob Geldof, to his credit, recognizes this.) One might forgive Sachs’s
rhetorical overkill if it weren’t emblematic of his book’s deeper failure to
engage with the most serious argument against him: history. Ending African
poverty is a worthy aspiration. It is also an old ideal, a shoal on which many
buoyant ideologies–liberalism, communism, pan-Africanism–have run aground. Sachs
talks of the need for an effort akin to the Marshall Plan for postwar Europe.
Guest points out that since independence Africa has “received aid equivalent to
six Marshall Plans”–with little to show for it.
Much of
this assistance has been consumed by graft. Corrupt leaders have proved to be
highly adaptable to changing times. When statism was in vogue, they
nationalized industries, which they proceeded to operate as patronage mills.
When the World Bank demanded privatization, they sold off the state companies
to their cousins and cronies. Nowadays, the watchword is “transparency,” but
the situation remains much the same. According to a 2002 study conducted by the
African Union, corruption consumes more than a quarter of the continent’s gross
domestic product every year, about $148 billion.
Faced with
such facts, Sachs tries to recalculate reality. He publishes a chart of
corruption figures that have been “controlled statistically for income levels”
and concludes that Africa is not “distinctly poorly governed by the standards
of very poor countries.” This is a little like saying if you control for
height, the Ivy League is the best conference in college basketball. The
generals who looted Nigeria–a government of “average” honesty by Sachs’s
measure–were not stealing relative dollars: Check their Swiss bank statements.
Some, like Guest, contend that in Africa corruption matters more than anywhere
else, because the margin of survival is so thin. Rapacious rulers are literally
stealing bread from the mouths of those they serve.
Sachs’s
solution sounds simple enough: Lavish billions on good countries like Ghana and
punish bad ones like Zimbabwe by stopping the checks. The hitch is that the
list of countries considered “good” and “bad” keeps changing. Sachs’s favorites
include Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique. But fifteen years ago these countries
were basket cases; Zimbabwe was the success story, under the wise rule of its
benevolent autocrat Robert Mugabe. Fifteen years before that, the paragons were
Nigeria and Ivory Coast. Whenever a darling disintegrates, much of what
development aid finances–paved roads, schools, hospitals, advanced farms–is
destroyed, and the process must begin anew.
The closer
you look at some of Sachs’s chosen countries, the more you wonder about his
judgment. Take Kenya, for instance. Sachs minimizes the problem of corruption
there, attacking leery donors for their “useless and false moralizing,” but no
Kenyan I’ve ever met would share his lack of concern. (Nor, it’s likely, would
the country’s former anticorruption czar, who resigned earlier this year in
frustration.) One leader Sachs frequently consults, Ethiopian Prime Minister
Meles Zenawi, has lately been acting like an old-school dictator, imprisoning
political opponents after an allegedly fraudulent election. In Uganda, where
more than half the country’s budget comes from foreign aid, a recent
confidential report written for the World Bank concludes that donor aid is
becoming a “mechanism for regime maintenance,” allowing the ruling party to set
up “slush funds” to pay for patronage and a military buildup. Meanwhile, the
percentage of Ugandans living in poverty has risen. Sachs says this is nothing
an extra $1.8 billion a year won’t fix.
African Countries By GDP
The point
is that playing favorites requires vigilance and a willingness to recognize
when success is turning sour. Africa is not the unremitting disaster Martin
Meredith portrays. Countries like Botswana and Senegal stand out as models of
stability, and Sachs is right to say that more Africans enjoy more democracy
today than ever before. Everyone who knows the continent well believes it could
benefit from a boost in generosity and–especially–closer attention from the
American government. But an endeavor as ambitious as ending African poverty
demands a little humility in the face of the task. We must recognize history,
and understand the continent as it is, not as we wish it to be. To worry about
corruption and misrule is to amplify the concerns of Africans I’ve met all over
the continent, whose greatest anger is inevitably reserved for those leaders
who have misspent so much in their names. Their voices should be heard, too,
over the din of the rock concerts.
Social Plugin