The helicopter swooped low over the floodwaters of southern Mozambique. The South African airmen sitting in the rear, legs dangling out of an open doorway, strained their eyes for a glimpse of survivors. I sat behind them, taking notes.
Poking out from the leaves of a tree that, despite the deluge, had somehow stayed upright, the pilot saw a scarlet shawl on a stick, waving to attract our attention. He took the helicopter down, and as we drew closer, the blast from its rotorblades flattened the canopy to reveal twenty-two Mozambicans clinging to the branches to avoid the churning waters below.
To rescue these people required hovering dangerously close to the tree, but the pilot did not hesitate. An airman rappeled down and strapped a little girl into his spare harness. The two were then winched back up. The airman quickly but gently handed the girl to his mate and rappeled down again. And again, and again, and again, until all twenty-two of the people in that tree were safely on board the helicopter.
The refugees had all tried to save their most treasured possessions from the flood. Most carried sacks of half-rotten corn or bundles of damp clothes. One man wore a miner’s helmet – a status symbol in a country where the best-paid workers are often those who toil in the gold and platinum mines of neighboring South Africa. Another fellow had salvaged his hut’s wooden front door and was distraught when the airman told him that there was no room for it on board. A thin old man was told that he could not keep his pet dog, but the airman relented when he signaled, by pointing to the dog and then to his mouth, that the animal was for food. The dog defecated with fear when pulled into the helicopter, adding a new stench to an atmosphere already rank with the smell of large numbers of unwashed bodies crammed into a small cabin.
By the time the airmen had finished plucking people out of trees and from thatched rooftops, there were at least sixty in a machine that would have felt crowded with ten. I found myself pressed against a bag of pots and pans, with a mother of two and her children sitting on my leg. But it was only a thirty-minute flight to the refugee camp, where everyone was obviously grateful to be put down. The refugees had no language in common with the airmen. They spoke no English or Afrikaans, and the airmen knew no Shangaan or Portuguese. So they thanked their rescuers with gentle nods as they were ushered out of the helicopter and across a field to the nearest feeding station. The airmen smiled and nodded back and then flew off to pull more people out of trees. A baby girl was born in a Mozambican tree that day; both child and mother were rescued.
Perhaps a million southern Africans lost their homes in the floods of March 2000. Mozambique, the poorest country in the region, was also the worst affected. At the time, it was still recovering from two decades of civil war that had reduced many people to wearing tree bark and eating wild berries. The country had done well in the late 1990s, its economy expanding at a scorching pace, albeit from a wretchedly low starting point. Then, suddenly, the Zambezi, Save, and Limpopo rivers swelled to rushing torrents up to eighty miles wide, drowning villages and hurling livestock into the Indian Ocean. Countless Mozambicans, who were struggling so determinedly to pull themselves out of poverty, had just been knocked back down by several billion tons of muddy water.
Back in the capital, Maputo, I was in a taxi heading for dinner when my mobile telephone buzzed. It was Phil, an old friend from back home in Britain. His Internet company had floated that morning, making him a millionaire. I congratulated him and asked him to tell me all about it. He started to gush but then paused. “What’s that noise?” he asked, referring to a hubbub in the background. I told him. It was a throng of half-naked street kids, tapping on the taxi windows and begging for change. Phil took this in and said: “Well, that certainly puts things into perspective.”
I calculated that, at current income levels, it would take an average Mozambican 10,000 years to earn what my friend earned that day. As it happens, Phil lost it all again when the dot.com market crashed. But somehow that does not make the contrast any less striking. He’s young, he’s clever, and he lives in a country where talent is amply rewarded. He’ll probably make another fortune some other way. For the Mozambican street kids, the prospects are not quite so good. They are young, too, but they live in Africa, the poorest continent on earth, and the only one that, despite all the technological advances that are filling stomachs and pockets everywhere else, has actually grown poorer over the last thirty years.
The numbers are staggering: half of sub-Saharan Africa’s 600 million people live on just sixty-five cents a day, and even this figure is misleadingly rosy. Many Africans rarely have any money at all. They build their own homes, often out of mud and sticks. They grow their own food. When the rains fail, they go hungry. And when the rains are too heavy, as in Mozambique, they lose their homes. The median African country has a gross domestic product (GDP) of only $2 billion – roughly the output of a small town in Europe. Not even Africans want to invest in Africa – about 40 percent of Africa’s privately held wealth is held offshore.1
As a journalist covering Africa, I’ve come face to face with some of the human consequences of economic failure. I’ve seen ragged children foraging for lunch in an Angolan trash pile and listened to Ethiopian nomads describing what it feels like to starve.
I don’t imagine that I can change any of this, but I do believe that it can change. Any country inhabited by human beings has the potential to grow rich. We know this because many countries have already done so. If Africa is to succeed too, it is crucial to understand what has gone wrong in the past. Just why is Africa so poor?
This book is an attempt to grapple with that question.
In historical terms, Africa’s plight is not unusual. Since humans first stopped being apes, most have lived short and hungry lives. The way the poorest Africans live today is not much different from the way most Europeans lived until the industrial revolution. In fact, modern Africans live longer than Europeans or Americans did before the twentieth century, largely because so many useful medicines that were invented elsewhere – antibiotics, for example – have become cheap enough for Africans to buy.
It is not much comfort for Africans, however, to hear that other people were equally poor a hundred years ago. Even cattle-herders in the foothills of Lesotho know that, today, the rest of the world is much richer than they are. Any African who occasionally watches television can see that people in America live lives of unimaginable luxury, with bulging fridges, soft clothes, and big cars that even teenagers can afford. Why, they ask, is life in Africa not like that?
Some blame geography. It is certainly a factor. Most African countries are tropical. Rich nations tend to have temperate climates: roughly 93 percent of the people in the world’s thirty richest nations live in temperate zones. The tropics tend to be poor: of the forty-two countries that the World Bank classified in 1999 as “Heavily Indebted Poor Countries” (HIPCs), thirty-nine either were in the tropics or consisted largely of desert. The only three temperate HIPCs – Malawi, Zambia, and Laos – were land-locked.2
The Victorians believed that hot weather drains a man’s strength. A more likely link between climate and poverty is that hot countries are home to all manner of diseases that affect both people and their livestock. Africa has the worst of them: malaria, yellow fever, rare but deadly viruses such as Ebola, and a host of energy-sapping parasites. Down a cup of dirty water in Nigeria, for instance, and you may find yourself infested with threadlike, meter-long guinea worms, which cause a painful fever and can, for months, make you too tired to work. You can cure guinea-worm infestation by waiting till the worm’s end bursts through the skin and then wrapping it around a stick and tugging it out slowly and gently over the course of several days. But Africans can’t do much about the climate that allows such horrors to thrive, and it is hard to build a prosperous, efficient society when you are riddled with parasites or shaking with fever.
Another popular culprit for Africa’s ills is history. Many Africans argue that the continent’s current problems spring largely from the traumas that Europeans visited on Africa, such as slavery.
It’s an emotive argument. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Africans were kidnapped, chained, squashed into the fetid holds of slaving ships, and taken across the Atlantic. Many died before they reached the other side. Those who reached the Americas were set to work, unfree and unpaid, on plantations. Those who stayed behind in Africa lived in fear that they would not escape the clutches of the slave raiders the next time they came. This fear and the constant loss of healthy adults were massively disruptive to African societies.
Slavery was not introduced to Africa by Europeans. Arab slavers arrived earlier than the Portuguese, British, and French, and Africans were enslaving each other centuries before even the Arabs arrived. In fact, slavery was common in most parts of the world before the British started trying to crush it, and Africa was no exception. By one estimate, between 30 and 60 percent of Africans were slaves before the Europeans arrived.3 The shipping of slaves to America could be seen as an extension of Africa’s internal market: many African chiefs saw no wrong in selling slaves to European traders, and some even protested when the trade was banned. None of this excuses the European slavers, of course. Judged by today’s standards, their behavior was abominable, and even by the standards of the day it was cruel and rapacious.
Of course, slavery is evil. But it is implausible to blame it for all of Africa’s modern problems. Practically all nations have endured slavery at some point. Probably everyone alive today is descended from slaves (and from slave-owners, too). Thirty or forty generations ago in Europe, the vast majority of people were serfs: bonded laborers, tied to the land, forced at their lord’s whim to fight for him, sleep with him, or harvest his corn.
Granted, if you are African, your closest slave ancestors probably lived more recently than the medieval serfs from whom most Europeans are descended. But the transatlantic slave trade ended in the nineteenth century. Slavery continued in much of East Asia and the Middle East for decades longer. In a few African countries, notably Sudan and Mauritania, it still exists, though both governments deny it.
Long after slavery was abolished, most of Africa remained subject to European colonial rule. Since most African countries were still colonies until the 1960s or 70s, it is easy to find colonial roots for modern problems. If the rulers of Congo today treat their subjects as a leopard treats a herd of impala, one can argue that they learned the habit from the Belgians. If the rulers of Sudan and Burundi manipulate ethnic grievances to stay in power, they probably learned that from their former colonial masters, too.
The colonists left deep scars. But they also left behind some helpful things, such as roads, clinics, and laws. If colonialism was what held Africa back, you would expect the continent to have boomed when the settlers left. It didn’t.
Perhaps, then, the problem is that the legacy of colonialism remained, even after the colonists had gone. Up to a point, this is true. Africa’s borders are still a source of trouble. Arbitrarily penciled onto inaccurate maps when European powers carved up the continent in the nineteenth century, today’s national boundaries split tribes in half and lump mutually hostile ethnic groups together. This often causes tension and sometimes bloodshed. But African countries have themselves determined not to tamper with the colonial borders, for fear that this might spark new conflicts rather than end old ones.
Some Africans argue that their continent has been crippled by what Steve Biko, a South African revolutionary, called a “colonization of the mind.” White rulers thought their black subjects inferior. The fact that the more technologically advanced European powers conquered most of Africa with relative ease doubtless led some Africans to wonder whether this might be true. Even today, some argue, Africans’ lack of confidence prevents them from fulfilling their potential. There may be something in this, but over 70 percent of Africans alive today were born after independence.4 And examples from other countries suggest that unpleasant colonial experiences need not doom a country to eternal penury.
Korea, for example, was annexed by Japan in 1910 and freed only when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While they ruled Korea, the Japanese colonists tried to destroy the local culture and to cow the population into servitude. They banned the Korean language, barred Koreans from universities, and systematically desecrated the country’s most sacred hilltop shrines. They shipped young Korean men to Japan to provide forced labor in mines and munitions factories or conscripted them to serve in the Imperial army. They drafted more than 100,000 Korean women, some as young as twelve, to serve as sex slaves in military brothels. And the ordeal did not end with liberation. Soon after the colonists left, Korea was plunged into a civil war that cost a million lives and split the country in two.5
With such a traumatic history, Korea would have every excuse for failure. But the southern, capitalist part, which was as poor as Ghana in 1953, is now twenty times richer. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore – all ex-colonies – are all now affluent and peaceful. So are Ireland, Australia, and Massachusetts. Africa’s colonial legacy, though influential, cannot explain all that is awry today.
Another problem with blaming the legacy of colonialism for Africa’s current woes is that it gives little clue as to how these woes could be ended. History, like geography, cannot be changed. Grieving for past wrongs is natural and human, but it can also provide an excuse for despair. If today’s problems are the fault of the West, the obvious thing to do is to demand that the West should solve them. The trouble with this approach is twofold. First, today’s Westerners do not feel particularly guilty about the sins of dead people who happened to come from the same country. Second, efforts by rich countries to solve Africa’s problems have, over the last few decades, been spectacularly unsuccessful.
Put differently, countries that prosper tend to do so by their own efforts. Outsiders can help, but only on the margins. Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s president, has predicted an “African renaissance” but says that this renaissance will only succeed “if its aims and objectives are defined by the Africans themselves, if its programmes are designed by ourselves and if we take responsibility for the success or failure of our policies.”6
Countries grow wealthy in much the same way that individuals do: by making things that other people want to buy or by providing services that others will pay for. There are exceptions. Just as some individuals inherit wealth, so some countries are rich simply because they have a lot of oil and not many citizens. But by and large the route to prosperity is through thrift, hard work, and finding out what other people want in order to sell it to them.
Britain first grew rich, in the nineteenth century, by using newly invented industrial techniques to produce cheaper and better textiles, steel, railways, and other goods, which both locals and foreigners were keen to buy. Japan grew rich in the twentieth century by adopting and improving manufacturing techniques invented elsewhere, in order to make better and cheaper cars, semiconductors, and fax machines. America is the world’s richest country today because so many people crave American movies, medicines, airplanes, and banking services. Africa, by contrast, hardly produces anything that the rest of the world wants to buy. With a tenth of the world’s population, Africa’s share of world trade is a miserable 2 percent. The continent exports minerals, such as oil and copper, and crops, such as cocoa, coffee, and tobacco. But few African countries turn their minerals into manufactured goods, and hardly anyone buys African software or insurance. To understand why Africa is so poor, we must first ask why Africa is so unproductive.
The great African novelist, Chinua Achebe, said of his homeland: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”7
Substitute “Africa” for “Nigeria” and this is a pretty good summary of what holds the continent back. Since independence, Africa’s governments have failed their people. Few allow ordinary citizens the freedom to seek their own fortunes without official harassment. Few uphold the rule of law, enforce contracts, or safeguard property rights. Many are blatantly predatory, serving as the means by which a small elite extracts rents from everyone else. Predatory governments usually make their countries poorer, as in Nigeria and the Central African Republic. Worse, when power confers riches, people sometimes fight for it, as in Congo and Liberia.
The shackled continent
Nowhere exemplifies how an authoritarian government can stifle a nation’s ability to create wealth better than Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Mugabe is interesting because he is one of the last reigning members of the first generation of post-independence African leaders, and he rules in a way that suggests he has not learned much from his contemporaries’ mistakes. He seizes private property, thus sending a deafening warning to foreign and local investors alike: “Do not put your money into Zimbabwe.” He also tries to alter the laws of economics by decree. He fixes the price of gas at below what it costs to import it, so the pumps run dry. He tries to create money by printing it and so causes hyper-inflation. These policies have failed as utterly in Zimbabwe as they have everywhere else they have been tried and have made Zimbabweans much poorer than they were at independence. But although most of his people would love to get rid of Mugabe, they have not been able to because he rigs elections to keep himself in power.
Mugabe governs like the guerrilla commander he once was. He gives orders and expects them to be obeyed. He regards his opponents as enemies to be crushed. The details of how his people earn their daily bowl of cornmeal mush do not interest him in the slightest. He thinks the economy is like the land he once fought for. There is only a fixed amount to go around, and if you want a bigger share, you have to take it by force.
For most of the time since independence, the majority of African countries have been ruled by men with similarly authoritarian ideas. Kwame Nkrumah led the way, imposing a one-party state on Ghana, the first colony to win independence after the Second World War. Other African leaders followed suit, declaring that their own irremovable governments would henceforth control everything of importance. They nationalized everything from mines and factories to bicycle-repair shops, staffed them with ruling-party cronies, and then ran them into the ground.
For a while, they were able to disguise the fact that they were not producing much by borrowing huge sums of money from foolish Western banks and governments. This created a temporary illusion of prosperity. Some of the borrowed cash was spent on free healthcare, education, and loans to farmers, but much of the money was wasted on prestige projects: dams, conference halls, steel mills erected far from the nearest port and over budget, and so on. Little of the money was invested in such a way that it actually produced a return, so African governments eventually found themselves unable to service their loans, let alone repay them.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, some things have improved. Marxism is out of fashion, democracy is in. Almost all African countries have held multi-party elections, and many have attempted free-market economic reforms. But old attitudes persist. In many African countries, reforms have been pursued fitfully and without enthusiasm, which may explain why they have so rarely succeeded.
Laissez-faire is not popular in Africa. Nkrumah is still a hero to most Ghanaians, who remember his generous spending but not the fact that he used the accumulated surplus of the colonial period to finance his social programs, which collapsed when the money ran out.8 Robert Mugabe enjoys a curious popularity too, at least among Africans who do not live in Zimbabwe. Many see him as a strong black leader standing up to intimidation by Western governments, which refused to recognize his stolen election victory in 2002. They cannot fail to notice that Zimbabwe has grown poorer under his rule but swallow his line that this is the fault of a Western conspiracy.
Unchecked power is a swift route to riches, especially in countries with abundant natural resources. Africa is fabulously well endowed with precious minerals, which is one reason why so many people are prepared to fight for a share of power. In Congo, for example, half a dozen armies and several rebel factions have been battling for control of some of the world’s richest deposits of diamonds, cobalt, and tantalum. In Angola, a four-decade-long scramble for loot ended only in 2002, when the rebel leader, Jonas Savimbi, was shot and killed.
In both these cases, and several others besides, minerals have provided not only the motive but also the means for war. Governments use oil revenues to buy helicopter-gunships. Rebels capture diamond mines, sell the stones, buy weapons, and carry on fighting.
That such struggles make Africa poorer than it would otherwise be is obvious: armies marching through your cornfields are bad for your harvest. What is not so obvious is how such wars can be stopped and Africa’s mineral wealth turned from a curse into a blessing.
Even in African countries where men with guns do not routinely plunder villages, property rights are rarely secure. Most African peasants do not own the land they cultivate. In some countries, the state owns all the land. In others, individual ownership is allowed, but because of an over-prescriptive and under-competent bureaucracy, it can take ten years and untold hassle to obtain formal title. The same is often true of the houses where the urban poor live.
This matters enormously. Lack of clear ownership means that poor Africans cannot use their property as collateral in order to obtain loans. Without access to credit, farmers find it hard to afford the tools and seeds that might make them more productive, and would-be entrepreneurs find it hard to get started.
A Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, estimated that the value of “dead capital” in poor countries – that is, property which cannot be capitalized because of the lack of a title deed – is roughly forty times the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Africa, the unexploited value of informal urban shacks and informally owned fields is almost a trillion dollars, which is about three times the annual GDP of all the countries south of the Sahara.9
Another obstacle to African prosperity is AIDS. Despite all the advances of modern medicine, life expectancy has fallen in much of Africa in the last two decades; in some countries it is less than forty. The main reason is the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), which destroys the body’s immune system. Thirty million Africans are infected with HIV. Three quarters of the world’s AIDS deaths occur in Africa: nearly five Africans die of the disease every minute.10
Poverty speeds the epidemic’s spread. Those who cannot afford television find other ways of passing the evening. Many Africans cannot afford antibiotics and so cannot cure other sexually transmitted diseases, which leaves them with open sores through which the virus can pass.
Migration and war help the virus to cross borders. Laborers and traders flock from the poorest African countries, such as Mozambique, to the richer ones, such as South Africa. Migrant miners often live in single-sex hostels for eleven months of the year, surrounded by prostitutes. At Christmas, they go home and infect their wives. Truck drivers carry the virus for thousands of miles, from one rest-stop brothel to another. Africa’s wars create surges of refugees, some of whom have no other means of support but sex work. Soldiers, with their regular pay and disdain for risk, are more likely to contract HIV than civilians and horribly prone to spread it, forcefully, when they march through enemy villages.
Most important, the virus is spread through sex, something which most Africans do not wish to discuss. This is part of the problem. In Kenya, Christian and Islamic groups have burned sex-education pamphlets and condoms in protest at what they see as the encouragement of promiscuity. South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki, has suggested that foreigners who say Africa has a big AIDS problem are in fact hinting that Africans are immoral savages: “We are blamed as criminals and seen as human beings of a lower order that cannot subject its passions to reason … as natural-born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, doomed to a mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin of lust.”11
There is a simpler explanation. People who worry about AIDS in Africa do so because the disease threatens to kill more people than all the continent’s wars put together and multiplied by ten. And in countries where a quarter of the adult population is infected, it is clear that someone has been having unsafe sex. Without frank discussion of what exactly people are doing in bed and behind bushes, it will be impossible to curb the epidemic.
There are myths that must be rebutted: some young African women believe that without regular infusions of sperm, they will not grow up to be beautiful. In parts of southern Africa, men believe that they can cleanse themselves of the virus by passing it on to a virgin. In Kenya, some think they can achieve the same effect by having sex with a madwoman.
AIDS has devastated African families. The disease strikes people in their productive prime. Breadwinners sicken, so households lose their income just as their medical bills soar. Daughters drop out of school to help nurse their parents. When the virus kills, millions of orphans are left behind. And yet there is hope. A few countries, notably Uganda and Senegal, have fought the epidemic with great success. In Uganda, after a loud and inventive anti-AIDS campaign, adult HIV prevalence crashed from 30 percent in 1992 to 5 percent in 2002.12
Even the most stable societies would find it hard to cope with African rates of HIV infection. African societies, however, are often chronically unstable. Most Africans still feel more loyalty to their tribe than to the young nation-states of which they are citizens. Because tribal loyalties are so strong, wily politicians can often stir up conflicts between tribes as a means of cementing their hold on power. This phenomenon is not unique to Africa, of course. From the pogroms of medieval Europe, through the rape of Nanjing, to the Balkans and the Middle East today, unscrupulous politicians have often inflamed tribal passions, usually with vile consequences. But in recent years the worst ethnic clashes have been disproportionately African. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was probably the worst tribal massacre since the Holocaust. On a smaller scale, ethnic violence is common in Burundi, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and several other African countries.
Ethnic conflict is not inevitable in Africa. Tanzania has dozens of tribes, but Tanzanian politicians have not sought to inflame their differences, and the country has been peaceful since independence. The Rwandan genocide is usually portrayed as the result of ancient and implacable tribal hatreds, but I would argue that without predatory politics, it would not have happened. Members of the Hutu tribe did not spontaneously slaughter their neighbors, the Tutsis. The genocide was meticulously planned by Hutu politicians, who sought thereby to keep themselves in power and Tutsis out of it. Their radio station urged Hutus to fear, hate, and finally kill their neighbors. A secretly organized militia coordinated the bloodletting, arming Hutus who took part and slaughtering those who refused. Roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered in six weeks, making it the swiftest genocide on record. Rwanda is an extreme example, but the same problem – the tribalization of politics – afflicts most African countries.
In Nigeria, home to at least 250 ethnic groups and split between Muslims in the north and Christians and animists in the south, politicians look to their kith and kin for support, often by reminding them of how much they detest the tribe next door. Once in power, Nigerian politicians tend to put as many people as possible from their own tribe onto the public payroll. This is nice for them but not quite so good for Nigerian public services, which suffer from what Chinua Achebe calls a “cult of mediocrity.” In Nigeria, he says, “it would be difficult to point to one important job held by the most competent person we have.”13
South Africa, notoriously, has ethnic problems too. Under apartheid, the white tribe treated blacks so badly that the rest of the world was moved to sever trade links with South Africa. Since 1994, the country has been ruled by the African National Congress (ANC), the biggest of the parties of liberation, whose leaders see their task as righting the wrongs of apartheid by narrowing the wealth gap between black and white South Africans. They do this partly by taxing the rich and spending the proceeds on schools, clinics, and pensions in poor areas. But they also use more controversial methods, such as compelling companies to favor blacks in hiring and promotion and allowing black-owned firms to charge more and still win public works contracts.
Black executives and construction-firm owners do well out of this, but poor blacks suffer. Because the government pays a premium to black contractors, the budget for building houses for poor people stretches to fewer houses. Because employers are obliged to hire people on a basis other than ability, South African firms become less competitive, the economy grows more slowly and the jobless stay that way. Most worrying, the ANC’s policy of positive discrimination, coupled with increasingly frequent appeals to black solidarity, has spoiled the harmony of the Mandela years and re-polarized South African politics along racial lines. This is unlikely to lead to violence; whites who don’t like it can emigrate. But it is unlikely to promote prosperity either.
I devote the longest chapter in the book to these issues for two reasons. First, you cannot understand African politics without grasping the influence of tribal hucksters. Second, because my proposed solution is highly controversial. It is an article of faith among many in the West that governments should favor certain ethnic groups, especially those who have been discriminated against in the past. But after seeing what quotas and ethnically divisive laws have done in Africa, I have to disagree.
Smarter aid, more trade
Any discussion of Africa’s poverty has to take into account its relations with the rest of the world. For half a century now, the continent has been deluged with aid, but this has failed to make Africans any less poor. The problem is that donors have opened their wallets with scant regard as to whether the money will be sensibly spent. They have bankrolled tyrants, such as Gnassingbé Eyadéma in Togo, or idealists with hopeless economic policies, such as Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. Both types of aid have been wasted.
Some people argue that aid to poor countries is always wasted and that we should cut it altogether. This is too simplistic. There is good evidence that aid works if directed to countries with sound economic polices and functioning institutions of government. Meanwhile, rich countries could do more good, more quickly, if they ripped down their trade barriers. Africa has terrific agricultural potential: fertile land, sun when the northern hemisphere is frosty, and cheap labor. The continent also has a comparative advantage in textiles, which are simple to make but require lots of labor. By exporting crops and shirts to rich countries, Africa could start on the path to growth. But imported food and textiles are precisely the things that rich countries most vigorously shut out of their markets.
Farm products face meager quotas and steep tariffs. Worse, rich countries subsidize their own farmers so lavishly that African producers cannot compete. The total value of agricultural subsidies in developed countries is almost a billion dollars a day: more than the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. This wastes Western taxpayers’ money and greases the ladder up which Africans are trying to clamber out of poverty.
That ladder is slippery enough in any case. Africa needs more successful businesses, but doing business in Africa can be tricky. Bad roads, punctuated by road blocks manned by bribe-hungry policemen, make it slow and costly to move goods even short distances. Frequent power and water cuts force Nigerian firms to resort to what local businessmen call BYOI (“Bring Your Own Infrastructure”).
Surprisingly, foreign investors in Africa make better returns than on any other continent. But this is partly because the perceived risk of doing business in Africa is so high that firms only invest in projects that promise a quick reward. And a recent trend to demonize Western companies that operate in poor countries, encouraged by campaigning charities and protectionist Western trade unions, has deterred many from putting money into Africa.
Local firms, meanwhile, have been held back by arbitrary government, dysfunctional legal systems, and the difficulty, for those without political connections, of raising capital. Persistent and ingenious African businessfolk prosper despite all these obstacles, but many more would do so if the obstacles were removed.
If the examples of most developed countries are anything to go by, Africa’s future prosperity will depend in part on the speed with which it adopts and adapts to new technologies. There are millions of wonderful ideas out there waiting to be borrowed, but so far Africa has been slow to train the necessary engineers and technicians to make use of them. As for original innovations, the continent produces depressingly few. But in several African countries, people recognize the need to embrace new technology. Even in backwaters such as Swaziland and Madagascar there are Internet cafés and pirated anti-malarial drugs.
Technology does not mean only high technology. Simple devices can also change people’s lives. Take the rolling plastic water barrel, for example. Cheap but tough, the barrel is attached to an axle and frame, like a wheelbarrow. It can be filled with water and then pushed along the bumpiest of tracks. This enables women who previously had to carry water on their heads to transport much greater volumes of the precious liquid with less effort. Women who used to spend two hours a day fetching water are able to perform the same task in one hour a week.14
Several African countries are trying to leapfrog from the pre-industrial present into the information age. For example, most of the fixed-line telephone networks in Africa are awful, so many Africans are jumping straight to the latest mobile-telephone technology. Being largely privately owned, African mobile telephone firms have to satisfy their customers or go out of business. In theory, Africans could leapfrog to the latest technology in many areas. Having few factories, the continent has few factories with outdated technology that people might hesitate to close. The question is, how can Africa keep pace with a world that won’t slow down?
The country with the best chance of catching up is South Africa, the most advanced industrial nation on the continent. Since the relatively peaceful passing of apartheid in 1994, anyone concerned about Africa’s future has been watching South Africa carefully, for its success or failure will have a profound influence on its neighbors. A liberal, democratic South Africa would set an example for others to follow. A prosperous South Africa could provide the engine for the whole continent’s economic growth, much as Japan did in East Asia.
South Africa’s early years as a democracy have not been easy. The euphoria that most South Africans felt under the presidency of Nelson Mandela has given way to confusion and tension under his successor, Thabo Mbeki. The economy has failed to grow fast enough to create jobs for the third or more of the South African workforce who are unemployed. AIDS threatens to kill millions. Education for black South Africans, deliberately neglected under apartheid, has barely improved under the new order. Crime, once kept more or less in check through brutality, has flourished now that the police can no longer kick confessions out of suspects, but most have not yet learned other ways of securing convictions.
And yet there are reasons for optimism. In startling contrast to some of its neighbors, the new South Africa has enjoyed sound fiscal and monetary policies. Put simply, the government has not spent much more than it raises in taxes and has not printed money to pay its bills. A party that was once funded by the Soviet Union and determined to nationalize mines and to arrest speculators has made the hard transition to realism. South Africa still has the best roads, telephone lines, power stations, and restaurants in Africa. Its financial markets are more sophisticated than most of Latin America’s. Many of its companies are advanced enough to list on the London stock exchange. A takeoff is possible. It needs only wise leadership to let it happen.
In the long run, I believe that Africa will prosper. Any country can make the transition from poverty to comfort. We know this because it has been done before, in countries as different as Italy and Japan. The technology that underpins prosperity already exists, and much of it is free. Want to know how to build a car, a microchip, or a factory for antibiotics? Walk into a library, or browse through old patent applications. The political, legal, and economic arrangements of rich countries are not exactly secret, either. When Japan’s rulers decided, in the nineteenth century, that they had to modernize to avoid being colonized, they sent their brightest officials to Germany, Britain, and America to find out how industrial societies worked. They then copied the ideas that seemed most useful and rejected the Western habits that seemed unhelpful or distasteful; within a few decades Japan was advanced enough to win a war with Russia – the first non-white nation to defeat a European power in modern times.
Japan’s example should be important for Africa, because it shows that modernization need not mean Westernization. Developing countries need to learn from developed ones, but they do not have to abandon their culture and traditions in the process. No one who has seen a Shinto priest blessing a new bullet train would argue that Japan is a Western country, but the engineering that went into the train is of universal applicability. Africans face the same challenge now that Japan faced in the nineteenth century: how to harness other people’s ideas and technology to help them build the kind of society that they, the Africans, want.
Some readers may find my arguments too narrowly materialistic. Money is not everything. Despite their poverty, Africans are not obviously less happy than, say, Japanese salarymen. The man in a suit on the Tokyo subway earns far more than a Cameroonian peasant, but the peasant seems less stressed and has more time to sit in the shade eating papayas and enjoying the company of his family and friends. Which of the two is better off? There is no reliable means of measuring this.
Probably most Africans desire at least some of the material goods that are so abundant in industrialized societies. But are they prepared to undergo the wrenching changes necessary to industrialize? Some may not be, which is fair enough. Many subsistence farmers undoubtedly want to remain as they are. In their villages, they enjoy the familiarity that comes of living as their parents did and the warmth and security that comes from belonging to a community whose members look out for each other.
For the most part, peasants who wish to remain peasants are free to do so. The problem in Africa is that there are not enough opportunities for the large number of people who want something more. Economic growth brings not only greater material wealth but also greater choice. In peasant societies, children usually start work in the fields before they reach puberty and carry on planting and harvesting until shortly before they die. In industrialized societies, children start school young and continue their education into their twenties, broadening their minds and preparing themselves to pick one or more of a dizzying range of careers. Some pine for the days when life was simpler, but no one ever voluntarily goes back to being a peasant.
So the question is, how can African societies evolve so that more Africans have options other than growing yams? I think the answer is largely political: if Africa were better governed, it would be richer.
Politics matter, as can be shown by looking at Germany or Korea. South Korea shares 5,000 years of history and culture with North Korea. West Germany had almost as much in common with East Germany before the nation was divided. During the Cold War, both Germany and Korea were split into communist and capitalist parts. In Korea, the division remains. In Germany, half a century of separate government created a huge difference in wealth. By the time the Berlin Wall was knocked down, West Germany was freer, happier, and four times richer than East Germany. In their occasional humorous moods, West Germans ask: “How do we know that East Germans are not descended from apes?” The answer: “No ape could have gone forty years without bananas.”
In Korea, the difference is greater still. Politics on the peninsula mean the difference between penury and excess, between fear and freedom. After fifty years of Stalinism, North Koreans are at least ten times poorer than their southern cousins. Power cuts leave northerners’ homes dark at night and icy in winter. Famine killed hundreds of thousands of North Koreans in the 1990s and forced survivors to subsist on boiled grass and leaves. Dissidents are locked in labor camps or shot. Ordinary North Koreans are too scared of their rulers to talk openly to strangers. Contrast this with capitalist South Korea, a country where the only people who go hungry are fashion models, where manual laborers can afford foreign holidays, and where artists can lampoon the president in the crudest terms without provoking anything more frightening than a bored audience.15
Similar, if less extreme, comparisons can be made in Africa. Consider, for example, Zambia and Botswana. These two neighboring states may not be culturally identical, but they are certainly cousins. At independence in the 1960s, Zambia was Africa’s second-richest country, whereas Botswana was what one British colonial official described as “a useless piece of territory.”16
Zambia had a government determined to help the poor, rich copper mines, and a torrent of foreign aid. But the country’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, though well-meaning, was convinced that socialism was the route to prosperity. So he nationalized Zambia’s copper mines, told peasants what to grow, and forced them to sell their crops to the government at artificially low prices.
Kaunda assumed that the mines would provide an inexhaustible flow of money, whether well-managed or not. He allowed the state mining firm to become bloated and corrupt. No serious effort was made to develop alternative sources of foreign currency. When the copper price plunged, Kaunda’s costly policies suddenly became unaffordable. Kaunda was succeeded by a former trade unionist, Frederick Chiluba, who promised liberal reforms. But these reforms stalled as Chiluba’s venal cronies began to loot the country. Corruption under Chiluba held Zambia back as surely as Kaunda’s socialism. Despite huge infusions of foreign aid, Zambians are now poorer than they were at independence.
Contrast this with Botswana. The country’s mineral wealth, in the form of one of the world’s richest seams of diamonds, was discovered after independence. Unlike Zambia, Botswana spent the windfall wisely. Diamond dollars were ploughed into infrastructure, education, and health. Private business was allowed to grow; foreign investment was welcomed. Government was astoundingly clean. The budget is usually in surplus. The president, Festus Mogae, has been seen doing his own shopping. From 1966 to 2001, income per head in Botswana grew faster than in any other country in the world, from bare subsistence to well over $3,000.
Botswana is a wonderful success story, but it is tiny. Only a million and a half people live there, less than the population of a single slum in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. For Africa to thrive, it needs more and bigger Botswanas. And for that, the continent needs saner politics.