Why tribe and state should separate
Nestor Nebigira fell in love. But because he fell in love with the wrong woman, tribal politics ruined both their lives and left their children forever at risk of being murdered.
Nebigira is a Hutu married to a member of the Tutsi tribe. I met him in a refugee camp in Tanzania, where he was selling matches, combs, and other essentials to his fellow fugitives. It was hardly a lucrative business: refugees have little money, and there was, in any case, only enough room for one customer at a time to browse in Nebigira’s tiny shop. When I spoke to him he had no customers at all; a storm was pounding the camp, and the other refugees were sheltering in their huts.
“I was a successful businessman once,” he told me. Born in Burundi, he lived well until 1994, when, after months of ethnic massacres, he decided that there was nowhere in his homeland safe for a “mixed” family.
He was terrified that Tutsi soldiers might kill him, or that angry Hutus might kill his wife, or that zealots of either hue might kill the whole family for not being bigoted enough. So they packed as many possessions as they could carry and fled to Zaire, as Congo was then called. I gulped when he told me this. You have to be desperate to seek refuge in Congo. But that was not the end of the story. After two years, another war forced them to flee again. This time, they took a ferry across Lake Tanganyika and ended up in the camp where I met Nebigira, standing on the mud floor of his comb shop.
Burundi has roughly the same ethnic make-up as its more notorious equatorial twin, Rwanda. The Hutus form a large majority of the population of both countries, while the Tutsis are a minority. Burundi was ruled by a succession of Tutsi despots from independence until 1993, when a brief experiment with democracy went wrong. The reigning Tutsi strongman, Pierre Buyoya, called a free-ish election and then stood aside for the Hutu victor, Melchior Ndadaye. President Ndadaye lasted for less than five months before he was kidnapped and murdered by Tutsi army officers. Hutu mobs retaliated by killing their Tutsi neighbors, which in turn prompted the Tutsi-dominated army to seize power. In the ensuing civil war, 300,000 people died and 1.2 million fled their homes. In other words, Nebigira’s tale is not unusual.
He said he would love to return home but saw little hope that he ever could. “My children,” he sighed, “will always be in danger. Hutus hate them because they have a Tutsi mother. Tutsis hate them because they have a Hutu father.” There is a local saying: “The son of a snake is a snake.”
The perils of tribalism
Other people’s tribal quarrels never make much sense. Can you recall why the Tamils and the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka don’t get along? Me neither. I once tried to explain to a Japanese friend what the troubles in Northern Ireland were about, and I remember thinking how fatuous it sounded. What’s the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant? Well, 500 years ago, there was a split in the Christian church, with some people arguing that you could find salvation through faith alone, while others maintained that you had to submit to the authority of the Pope in Rome.… My friend nodded politely and said: “Ah … I see” from time to time, but I could see that she had no idea what I was talking about.
European history in the first half of the twentieth century is largely a story of tribal bloodletting, and recent years have seen carnage in the Balkans. Asia and the Americas have had also their troubles, from the Pacific War to the periodic pogroms of Chinese people in modern Indonesia. But these days it is in Africa that ethnic strife seems most acute. Memories of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 are still fresh, and Burundi’s civil war shows few signs of ending. Ethnic or religious differences have been the pretext for violence in Sudan, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, both Congoes – the list goes on.
Africa’s ethnic conflicts are often imagined to be the spontaneous expression of ancient hatreds. Tribal animosity certainly exists, but it rarely erupts into large-scale bloodshed unless deliberately inflamed by unscrupulous leaders. In pre-colonial times, tribes often fought over such things as pasture and water, but their battles were usually brief, local, and not especially bloody. Today, tribes fight for control of a much larger prize: the nation-state. And many more die in the struggle.
The historian Basil Davidson has written a whole book on “Africa and the curse of the nation-state.” He argues that because post-colonial states were alien transplants, based usually on British or French models rather than old indigenous institutions, they “failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens, save for a privileged few.” Against this illegitimate state, he says, “the majority have sought ways of defending themselves. The principal way they have found of doing this is through ‘tribalism’, perhaps more accurately, clientelism: a kind of Tammany Hall-style patronage, dependent on personal, family and similar networks of local interest. Insofar as it is a ’system’, clientelism has become the way politics in Africa largely operates. Its rivalries naturally sow chaos.”1
It is not tribal feelings themselves that cause trouble; it is their politicization. Most of Africa’s ethnic strife has its roots in the manipulation of tribal loyalties by the colonial authorities. And most of today’s conflicts owe their persistence to modern politics, not primordial passions.
In attempting to analyze the interplay between politics and tribalism in Africa, it helps to use a broader definition of tribalism than most dictionaries would allow, one that amalgamates tribalism, racism, and sectarianism. I know they are not the same, but I think the similarities matter more than the differences. The theme is bigotry: treating individuals badly, not because of something they have done, but because they belong to a particular group. People find all sorts of unjust reasons to hate, and unjust governments exploit them all.
To illustrate this argument, I am going to concentrate on the modern histories of Rwanda, Nigeria, and South Africa. Knowledgeable readers may object that these three countries are so different that it makes no sense to squash them all into the same chapter. It is a reasonable objection. They are indeed very different, and there is not enough space in a single chapter to do justice to the complexities of culture, tradition, and colonial experience that make them what they are today.
But I would like to argue that what these places have in common is both interesting and important. In all three countries politicians have at times sought to stir up, rather than soothe, ethnic passions. In all three, governments have made laws that explicitly discriminate against their own citizens on tribal or ethnic grounds. And in all three, the results have been either woeful or, in Rwanda’s case, catastrophic.
Rwanda’s holocaust
From 6 April 1994, a government dominated by Hutus tried to exterminate the Tutsis. The killings were carried out mainly with simple tools: machetes and clubs studded with nails. To be chopped or bludgeoned to death takes time; some Tutsis paid to be shot instead. Sometimes the task of killing all the Tutsis on a particular hillside took several days. The executioners had to rest each evening, and so victims had their Achilles tendons cut to prevent them from running away. The killers drank gallons of beer to cool their throats and dull their consciences. At night, they feasted on the cows they stole from the dead.
The piles of bodies grew so large that city councils had to remove them in garbage trucks to avert the spread of disease. Many corpses were simply thrown in rivers: about 40,000 were fished out of Lake Victoria by the authorities downstream in Uganda. In all, about 800,000 people – a tenth of the population – were killed in six weeks. This was a rate of slaughter roughly five times that of the Nazi extermination camps.
Visitors to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in late 1994 were struck by the fact that there were no dogs in the streets. Most African cities teem with dogs, so the lack of barking made Kigali seem eerie. Why were there no dogs in Kigali? The gruesome answer is that after the genocide, when there were piles of human bodies everywhere, Rwanda’s dogs started gnawing on the corpses. Soldiers grew so sick of the sight that they shot them all.2
There is a common assumption that Rwanda’s holocaust was simply an explosion of bigotry. The Hutus hated the Tutsis, so they tried to kill them all. The Hutus have always hated the Tutsis, and vice versa. That’s just the way it is in central Africa. But this explanation simply won’t do. Many Hutus do indeed hate Tutsis, but this is not an ancient, immutable fact of nature. It was only in the last forty years that large-scale ethnic killing began in Rwanda and Burundi. Hutus and Tutsis have only thrown themselves at each other’s throats since their political leaders started urging them to. The genocide was carefully planned by a small clique of criminals to maintain their grip on power.3 They were not forced to carry it out by passions beyond their control or by the irresistible tide of history. They had a choice. And they chose to try to create an ethnically pure Rwanda, ruled by themselves. They nearly succeeded, too.
The roots of the Hutu–Tutsi conflict can be traced back to colonial times. (The same is true of most aspects of modern Rwandan society, as few problems spring from nowhere, and the colonial period was when written records began.) When Europeans first arrived in Rwanda and Burundi in the nineteenth century, they found two large tribes and one small one. The Hutus were mostly peasant farmers, the less numerous Tutsis largely tended cows, and the Twa, a group of pygmies who were only 1 percent of the population, lived mainly as hunter-gatherers.
They all seem to have gotten along reasonably well. They lived on the same hills, spoke the same language, and intermarried freely. When a Tutsi woman married a Hutu man, their children were considered Hutu. Hutus could sometimes become Tutsis, too. There were tensions: Tutsi chiefs sometimes forbade Hutus from owning cows, and small wars were common. But these wars were not terribly bloody because there were traditional mechanisms for ending them. And Hutus, Tutsis, and Twa often fought side by side to repel invaders or steal cattle from neighbors.4
Rwanda and Burundi were German colonies for a couple of decades until the First World War, when Belgium seized them. In keeping with the nineteenth-century European obsession with race, the colonists saw great significance in the divide between Hutu and Tutsi. They surmised that the Tutsis were a Nilotic people, immigrants from the north, more intelligent than the native Hutus and a “natural” ruling caste. They toppled Hutu chiefs, replaced them with Tutsis, and turned a blind eye when these Tutsis stole large tracts of Hutu land. They favored Tutsis in admission to colonial schools and set Hutus forcibly to work digging ditches, planting trees, and building roads, often under the cruel eye of a Tutsi overseer. They even introduced ethnic identity cards. Where it was not possible to determine someone’s tribe, the Belgians counted his cows. Those with ten or more were classified as Tutsi; those with fewer were condemned to be Hutu.5
The Europeans’ tribal policies had two effects. First, the Hutus grew to resent their Tutsi overlords as never before. Second, both tribes came to believe the myth that they were utterly distinct. Tutsis, even the poor ones, took pride in their alleged racial superiority. Hutus began to see all Tutsis as “feudal exploiters,” even the ones who lived in the same rags and ate the same scraps as they did.
After independence, politics split along ethnic lines. The main Hutu party in Rwanda easily won an election in 1960, organized by the Belgians as they prepared to leave. The first Hutu government tried to enforce ethnic quotas: since Tutsis were estimated to be 9 percent of the population, no more than 9 percent of school places were to be held by Tutsis, and no more than 9 percent of salaried jobs, whether in the civil service or in private companies. Businesses did their best to ignore the rules because they needed skilled workers and the Tutsis were, on average, better educated. But occasional purges kept the civil service strongly Hutu.
In 1973, a Hutu major general called Juvenal Habyarimana seized power and established a police state. He banned all opposition and set up his own party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which all Rwandans were obliged to join, including babies. Party spies watched every hilltop village, moving house required official permission, and “loose women,” such as the Tutsi girlfriends of European aid workers, were arrested.
Habyarimana’s only claim to democratic legitimacy was that he was a Hutu. He often repeated the slogan “rubanda nyamwinshi” (literally, “the majority people”), implying that any government dominated by the ethnic majority was ipso facto democratic. Many Hutu peasants swallowed this ludicrous idea. French author Gérard Prunier observed that just as poor Tutsis under the old order “felt proud of belonging to the ‘ethnic aristocracy’, although it brought them very little beyond [a] sense of superiority,” so now the Hutus “fell prey to the same error and mostly persuaded themselves that because the government was Hutu, they, the humble peasants from the hills, somehow shared in that power.”6
Habyarimana did his best to exclude Tutsis from public life. From the time of the coup until his assassination in 1994, he allowed only one Tutsi officer in the army and forbade Hutu soldiers from marrying Tutsis. Local governors, called bourgmestresandprefets, were all Hutu, with one exception, who was killed in the genocide. There were only two Tutsi members of parliament and only one Tutsi cabinet minister.7
The Tutsis did not like living under Habyarimana’s dictatorship, and by 1990 about 600,000 or 700,000 of them had fled the country. In October that year, some of these Tutsi exiles, calling themselves the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded Rwanda but were beaten back. There followed four years of sporadic fighting, during which neither side prevailed. France provided Habyarimana with money and weapons because although odious he did at least speak French.8
To begin with, Habyarimana used the war as an excuse to lock up and torture his opponents, but French diplomats pressed him to stop embarrassing them, and he was eventually persuaded to unban opposition parties. The slighty less dictatorial atmosphere allowed many groups to flourish, but unfortunately some of the most influential were even more bigoted than Habyarimana. A new party called the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic lambasted the government for being too soft on the Tutsis and indeed on Hutus who favored ethnic tolerance. A bold and chillingly well-written paper called Kangura demonized Tutsis, and Radio Mille Collines mixed funky music with incitement to murder.
The editor of Kangura published ten “Hutu commandments.”
Hutu men, said the paper, should never marry or befriend Tutsi women, for they were all Tutsi agents. Every Tutsi, the paper continued, was a cheat, so any Hutu doing business with Tutsis was a traitor. It was essential that “all strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security,” be controlled by Hutus. The eighth commandment was “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.” These commandments were widely copied and frequently read aloud by Hutu headmen at village meetings.
Throughout the early 1990s, there were signs that something was brewing. Army officers started diverting weapons to the Interahamwe, an anti-Tutsi militia. Hutu officials started firing up peasants for the task ahead, portraying the Tutsis of the RPF as demonic creatures with tails, hooves, horns, and red eyes that glowed in the dark. After RPF attacks, they organized small retaliatory massacres in which peasants were encouraged to take part. Hacking men to death was referred to as “bush clearing”; killing women and children was “pulling out the roots of the bad weeds.” Tutsis were called “cockroaches,” and those who helped exterminate them were sometimes rewarded with the victims’ land or cows.
Meanwhile, pushed by the French, President Habyarimana was talking peace with the Tutsi rebels, the RPF. On 6 April 1994, he was assassinated. His private plane was hit by two missiles as it approached the runway at Kigali airport and crashed, killing all aboard.
“Hutu power” apologists blamed the RPF. The RPF blamed the Hutu power fanatics. Whatever the truth, within forty-five minutes of the crash, Interahamwe road blocks were thrown up all around Kigali. The killings began almost immediately.
That the genocide was premeditated is not in doubt. On 3 April, Radio Mille Collines broadcast that “On the third, fourth, and fifth, heads will get heated up. On the sixth of April, there will be a respite, but ‘a little thing’ might happen. Then on the seventh and eighth and the other days in April, you will see something.”9
The first to die were those on pre-prepared lists of “enemies”: politicians, journalists, lawyers, and businessmen who held liberal views. To begin with, the killing was carried out mainly by the presidential guard, a 1,500-strong elite corps based in Kigali, and the Interahamwe and other militiamen, who numbered perhaps 50,000. Jobless urban Hutus soon joined in. The most senior army leaders hesitated for a couple of days but then went along with the bloody flow.
From the capital, orders were swiftly sent to officials in the countryside. In almost every village peasants were called together to murder their Tutsi neighbors. Since Tutsis were only a small fraction of Rwanda’s population and both tribes lived intermingled, most Tutsi peasants had Hutu neighbors on all sides. This made it nearly impossible to escape.
All the while, Radio Mille Collines called for more blood, shrieking that “the graves are not yet quite full” and asking, “Who is going to do the good work and help us fill them completely?”10
Anyone stopped at a road block who could not produce an ethnic identity card was assumed to be a Tutsi and killed. Those who had cards identifying them as Hutus but who looked too pale or long-nosed were often killed, too. Hutus who refused to take part in the slaughter were denounced as allies of the enemy and killed. Professionals, students, and anyone who looked educated or prosperous was at risk. In the words of one survivor, “the people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”11
The outside world did almost nothing to help. The genocide only stopped when the Tutsi rebels of the RPF won the war and stopped it. They found it unusually easy to march across the country, largely because the Rwandan army was distracted by the business of killing civilians. In July, the RPF took Kigali. As they gained control of the countryside, which they did with considerable brutality, the génocidaires lost heart and fled into Zaire, along with nearly a million other Hutus who feared reprisals.
The rebels were victorious, but the land they had conquered was shattered. Tutsis who had survived the genocide emerged from church vaults and septic tanks to find their huts burned, their cows eaten, and their villages deserted. Hutus who had risked death by resisting the genocide were sometimes killed by the RPF; in the confusion no one knew for sure who was guilty and who was not.
Rwanda has regained a measure of stability under a Tutsi strongman, Paul Kagame. With help from foreign donors, Kagame’s government has done a good job of rebuilding the country. Average incomes are now all but back to their pre-genocide level, but the psychological wounds of the genocide are, unsurprisingly, far from healed.
When I visited Rwanda in August 2003, I was struck by how frightened everyone was. The people were afraid of their government, and the government, despite its strenuous denials, was afraid of the people.
I was there to watch the first presidential election since the genocide. Kagame was already president but had decided, under pressure from donors, that he wanted to be a directly elected one.
On the night before the polls, I spoke to the main challenger, Faustin Twagiramungu, a moderate Hutu, in the little flat that served as his campaign headquarters. He was in despair. His party had been banned for promoting ethnic “divisionism” – an odd charge to level at a man who had lost thirty-two relatives during the genocide, but one Kagame seemed to aim at all serious rivals. Twagiramungu had barely been allowed to campaign: his pamphlets had been confiscated; his supporters threatened. As we spoke, some of his provincial campaign managers, all twelve of whom had been arrested the previous day, were paraded on the television news, denouncing their former leader. Twagiramungu showed me a letter which he said was from one of them. The message, he said, was: “I’m so sorry, but I have to stay alive.”
I drove out into the countryside, where most Rwandans eke out a living growing beans and bananas, to find out what people thought of Kagame. No one wanted to talk. Asked what they thought about the way the country was being run, villagers told me they had no opinion. At one point, two policemen drew up in a car and demanded to know what was going on. My traveling companion, an American freelancer called Carter Dougherty, told them we were journalists reporting on the election. They suggested that we should redirect our enquiries to the Bureau of Elections.
Kagame’s party, the RPF, has made sure that its people control all the institutions that matter in Rwanda: the army, the police, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, banks, universities, and state-owned companies. Few Rwandans believe that the party will surrender power in the foreseeable future. (Among other safeguards, the law allows for an election to be annulled if the winner campaigns on a “divisionist” platform.) Most Tutsis are grateful for this. Many see Kagame as their savior and their only protection against a repeat of the slaughter of 1994.
Kagame’s regime has many fine qualities. It is more efficient than you would expect; its policemen almost never ask for bribes. But it is ruthless. During the war against the génocidaires in Rwanda, the RPF killed between 25,000 and 45,000 people. When thegénocidaires regrouped in Congo, Kagame’s men invaded, twice, and with their local allies killed perhaps 200,000 refugees.12
Back in Rwanda, life is now calm and orderly, but even some of Kagame’s supporters wish there was a bit more freedom. A group of well-off, RPF-voting students in Kigali grumbled to me about the censorship that made it hard for them to know what was going on in their own country.
Those who dislike the regime, meanwhile, have no outlet for their grievances. One Hutu told me he had spent eight years in jail before being found innocent of abetting the genocide. Someone lost his case file, he said, perhaps because “those who came from abroad” – i.e., the Tutsi exiles who now rule Rwanda – wanted his plum government job. Since his release, he said he had been unable to find work, but he did not dare complain. “I’ve seen men beaten to death in prison,” he told me. “I don’t want to go back.”
Kagame won the election, of course, with 95 percent of the vote. Twagiramungu managed 3.7 percent.
African disunity
Nowhere else in Africa compares with Rwanda. But politicians in most African countries play on tribal grievances to a greater or lesser extent, and the results, while never as disastrous as in Rwanda, are usually harmful. The Nigerian example is illuminating.
Africa’s most populous country is home to some 250 ethnic groups and is also split along religious lines, with the north mainly Muslim and the south mainly Christian or animist. Tribal sniping is common. Nigerian comedians play endlessly on ethnic stereotypes: that Yorubas are noisy, Ibos are miserly, Hausas are dim, and so on. Nigeria’s many newspapers are full of columnists who complain that their own tribe has contributed more to the country than any other but never gets its fair portion of pepper soup. Ordinary Nigerians spend hours mouthing similar complaints. The only time this great nation cheers with one voice is when its football team scores.
This matters, because ethnic solidarity is used to justify Nigeria’s great vice: corruption. Since the discovery of oil in Nigeria, politics have been largely a scramble for petrodollars. Politicians want money for themselves, of course, and they also want to grab a fistful for their supporters, to make sure they keep getting re-elected.
Nigerians almost all say they disapprove of corruption, but they tend to forgive or even applaud the perpetrator if he is one of their own tribe. Most Nigerians feel far stronger loyalty to their tribe than to the state. Big Men are therefore expected to use their power to help their kith and kin. Eghosa Osaghae, a political historian, puts it like this: “It is a popular Nigerian saying, which took root under colonial rule, that ‘government business is no man’s business’. There was thus nothing seriously wrong with stealing state funds, especially if they were used to benefit not only the individual but also members of his community.”13
For most of the time since independence, Nigeria has been ruled by northern Muslim military strongmen. They and their hangers-on grew fabulously wealthy, as a short wander around Kaduna, a northern town where several of the military elite hail from, reveals. I visited in 1999, not long after Nigeria reverted to civilian, democratic rule, and marveled at the palaces these fortunate officers had built for themselves. There were marble follies with mirrored gates and satellite dishes the size of ordinary people’s houses, estates with private mosques, and one unbelievably tacky mansion shaped like a ship. The cars parked outside the Kaduna polo club were impressive, too.
The king of crooks was Sani Abacha, the northern Muslim dictator who ruled from 1993 until 1998. He used to send trucks round to the central bank with orders that they be filled with banknotes. When he died, reportedly of Viagra-fueled over-exertion with three prostitutes, the records showed that he and his associates had stolen over $2 billion – more than a million dollars for every day he was in office, including weekends. According to his successor, Olusegun Obasanjo, he also awarded $1 billion in contracts to front companies and accepted another $1 billion in bribes from foreign contractors. That kind of money bought him a lot of support while he was alive, and his surviving relatives remain influential.
*
Inevitably, one can trace Nigeria’s tribal troubles back to colonial times. The country’s borders were drawn by the British, who, in 1914, lumped the whole melange of tribes and religions into a single unit. Nigerians sometimes refer to this as “the mistake of 1914.” The British were not completely blind to the rifts within their new colony. They did seek to avert religious strife by discouraging Christian missionaries from preaching in the Muslim north, but while this seemed wise at the time, it stored up problems for the future.
Because the missionaries were effectively barred from northern Nigeria, they built all their schools in the south. By 1950, there were thousands of university graduates in the south but only one in the north.14 Southerners dominated all the jobs in the civil service that required numeracy or literacy. Members of the south-eastern Ibo tribe, owing to a long tradition of trading, dominated commerce in the north as well as in their own region. The Hausas and Fulanis of the north felt left out. But they had the upper hand in the army because the British thought them good soldiers, which was to prove important later on.
As independence approached, northern leaders realized that the better-educated southerners would dominate Nigeria unless they did something drastic. So they began a program of “northernization” within their own region. Initially, it was presented as a policy of training native Nigerians to replace British expatriates in the civil service. But the northern leaders felt less threatened by British experts than by Yorubas and Ibos. In 1957, the Public Service Commission of the Northern Region stated: “It is the policy of the Regional Government to Northernize the Public Service: if a qualified Northerner is available, he is given priority in recruitment; if no qualified Northerner is available, an Expatriate may be recruited or a non-Northerner on contract terms” (i.e., not as a permanent employee).15 The northern regional government tried to bar southerners from winning public works contracts, running shops, or owning land in the north. This bias swiftly spread to the federal government after independence, or at least to the parts controlled by northerners.
Southerners resented being discriminated against, which was one reason why a group of mainly Ibo officers tried to mount a coup in 1966. The coup leaders promised, among other things, to establish national norms that all applicants for civil service jobs would have to meet. To northerners, this sounded like a promise that all the best jobs would go to southerners. Horrified at the prospect, a group of mainly Hausa-Fulani officers led a counter-coup and seized control of the state.
A chain reaction of violence followed, culminating in an attempt by south-easterners to secede from Nigeria, taking most of its newly discovered oil with them. The northern-dominated army ferociously put down the rebellion. It took three years and cost a million lives. To many people’s surprise, the northerners then treated their vanquished enemies with restraint and even repealed some of the more extreme regulations that discriminated against southerners.
But the government did not become tribe-blind. Instead of favoring only northerners, it decided that civil service jobs and university admissions should be decided by tribal quotas. This policy has remained ever since and has set every ethnic group in Nigeria bickering over whether they have received their rightful share.
When the price of oil jumped in the early 1970s, the Nigerian government suddenly had billions of dollars to dole out. Politicians discovered that the most effective way to win the support of their fellow tribespeople was to promise them more roads, schools, and handouts, to be paid for with petrodollars. And the most effective way to parlay tribal support into political office was to carve out a new state in which one’s own tribe was a majority.
Nigeria started to fragment. From three regions at independence, it has splintered into thirty-six states today. This has caused endless complexity. For example, state governments hoping to privatize state-owned firms often find that the state which originally set up the firm has split into several smaller ones, none of whose leaders can agree on how to proceed. Worse, civil service jobs have come to be seen as gifts that Big Men bestow on their grateful ethnic cousins.
Between the early 1970s and Abacha’s heart attack, Nigeria received some $280 billion in oil revenues. Through corruption, waste, and foolish investments, successive governments squandered the lot. In fact, since they borrowed billions against future oil revenues and squandered that money too, it is fair to say that Nigeria blew more than all of its windfall. By 1998, Nigerians were poorer than when the oil boom began in 1974, and the country was saddled with debts of some $30 billion.
The scale of Nigeria’s failure is simply staggering. Contrast the place with Indonesia, another huge, populous, ethnically diverse, and oil-rich nation. Both countries have suffered military rule and, at times, massive bloodshed. Both were, at independence, nations of subsistence farmers. Both struck oil and were deluged with petrodollars. But here the parallels cease. Indonesia has not exactly been a model of good governance, but average incomes rose nonetheless, from under $200 in 1974 to $680 in 2001, despite the Asian financial crash of 1997. Today, Nigerians are more than twice as likely as Indonesians to be illiterate or to die before the age of forty.16
Tribalism is not the only reason why Nigeria is so dysfunctional, but it clearly doesn’t help. In Lagos, I have seen piles of rubbish, some of them twenty feet high and three blocks long, festering in the middle of the road. Electricity comes, as novelist Wole Soyinka puts it, in “periodic vengeful surges … as if the god of lightning has … taken personal charge.”17 All this is at least partly because someone has looted the rubbish collection budget, and the state electricity firm has been stuffed with various managers’ incompetent kinsfolk.
After Abacha died, Nigeria held reasonably fair elections. The winner was Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba and a born-again Christian, but also a former general and a friend of several northern Muslim leaders.
To his credit, Obasanjo has not abused his power to pamper his own ethnic group. He has tried to divide federal funds more equally between the states, while at the same time reducing the incentives for the states to continue splitting into even smaller ones. His bloated cabinet usually contains at least one representative from each of the thirty-six states. He has promised to increase the share of oil revenues that go to the states where the oil is actually drilled from a wretched 3 percent to 13 percent. But it is impossible to please everyone.
Since federal money is, at least in theory, allocated to the states in amounts proportional to their populations, Nigerian censuses are usually marred by fraud and mayhem, as each tribe seeks to inflate its numbers. As a result, no one really knows how many Nigerians there are. A census in 1991 put the number at 88.5 million. In 1998, the government’s estimate was 108.5 million, and the United Nations’ was 121.8 million. Most tribes claim to have been undercounted and underpaid. Obasanjo has discovered that using federal money to bribe the tribes to behave only whets their appetite for more.
Ethnic bloodletting has actually increased since democracy was restored, perhaps because the police no longer suppress it so brutally. Yoruba youths hurl “magic bombs” – eggshells filled with sulphuric acid – at members of other tribes in Lagos. And in the Niger delta, where most of Nigeria’s oil is pumped, a feud has arisen between the Ijaws and the Itsekiris.
I went to investigate this feud in April 2003, at the height of an election campaign when the spoils of office were up for grabs and tempers were accordingly hot. The trouble centered on Warri, a busy, smoggy town surrounded by swampy forest. When I arrived, Warri was under curfew. Soldiers manned road blocks at every major intersection, stopping cars and searching them for arms.
The soldiers were in a bad mood and made a point of humiliating motorists who spoke disrespectfully to them. At one road block, I saw them force a young man to hop down the street in a squatting position, with his hands behind his head: a petty punishment known as the “frog jump.”
The town was tense because Ijaw youths had been burning Itsekiri villages. Eric Igban, a local Itsekiri activist, told me of a recent attack.
“They wore red bandannas,” he said, “and they arrived in speedboats, with mounted machine-guns. They opened fire indiscriminately, at men, women, and children. Then they burned the village down. More than a hundred bodies were found, and there must be more lost in the bush.”
Why was this happening?
Igban told me that the Ijaws and the Itsekiris used to live in peace. But when the new democratic regime promised the people of the delta a greater share of oil revenues, top jobs in local government suddenly became more lucrative and worth fighting for.
Ijaw leaders realized that they would win more governorships, and more seats in state parliaments and local councils, if electoral boundaries were re-drawn in such a way that there were more constituencies where Ijaws were in a majority. Before long, Ijaw youth militias were conducting a terror campaign to force the government to re-draw the electoral map in their favor.
“They think that with guns they can get anything they want,” said Igban. “They want to control all the wealth of the Niger delta. And they want to wipe us out.”
An Ijaw leader gave me a different perspective. He did not want to be named as he was a local government official and did not want to be quoted expressing support for the Ijaw militias. “The Ijawman is peaceful,” he said, “but it is better to be dead than to live with injustice.”
The injustice that upset him most was that Ijaws were 63 percent of the population of the Warri electoral district but were a majority in only four out of ten wards. Ijaw youths, he said, were determined to prevent any elections taking place until this anomaly was corrected. “The person in power controls the economy of the area,” he said, “and we just want our fair share.” He then told me that the best thing would be “separate local government areas for each ethnic group – homogenous districts with no minorities.”
As I left Warri, I noticed, near the burnt-out husks of Itsekiri shops, a campaign poster urging voters to re-elect the governor, one James Ibori. Beneath a smiling picture were the words: “Ibori’s healing hands have brought peace to Delta state.”
The call of Islam
In northern Nigeria, meanwhile, relations between Christians and Muslims have been fraught. After the Christian Obasanjo became president, a dozen northern states asserted their independence by adopting sharia (Islamic law) for criminal cases. In other words, a third of the country’s state legislatures decided to start whipping those who drank alcohol, cutting off thieves’ hands, and stoning adulterers. Some of the governors who introduced these laws may have done so for reasons other than simple piety. Some were on bad terms with the new president and may have figured that if they posed as the champions of Islam, no Christian president could attack them without appearing to attack the faith.
Whatever the truth of this, sharia was initially very popular among Nigerian Muslims. Nigeria’s courts are slow and corrupt, and many Muslims hoped that sharia courts would be swift and fair. But Christians who lived in the north were not so happy; many feared that the new religious laws would be used to persecute them. Since sharia was introduced, northern states have seen a wave of street battles between Christians and Muslims in which thousands have been killed.
President Obasanjo has used considerable tact to try to defuse the situation. He has quietly tried to persuade northern governors not to let sharia be used to persecute Christians, and he has resisted southern calls to seek a court ruling as to whether sharia is constitutional (which it probably is not), reasoning that any decision is likely to spark more riots. (His hand may be forced on this issue, however, as lawyers for one woman who was condemned to be stoned to death are seeking to have the sentence overturned on constitutional grounds.)
Some observers predict that Nigeria will break up. It is hardly reassuring that, at a presidential election in 2003, more than four decades after independence, the three main candidates were all retired generals. Two were former military heads of state (Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari), and one was the officer who led Biafra’s catastrophic attempt at secession, Emeka Ojukwu. Lurking behind the scenes was yet another former military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida, reputedly the richest man in Nigeria, whose support was keenly courted by almost everyone. A general election, indeed.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a leader of the Ogoni tribe who was hanged by the old military government in 1995, once warned that “you must not think that there is this thing called Nigeria and it’s untouchable, no matter what happens. The Soviet Union was set up about the same time [as] Nigeria. It’s gone. Yugoslavia is gone. Therefore, you have to be very careful.”18
But most Nigerians trust that the country will somehow muddle through. A story I chanced upon in Kaduna augurs well. In the early 1990s, two religious terrorists, Muhammad Ashafa and James Wuye, tried to have each other killed. It was during a burst of religious rioting for which Ashafa blamed the Christian paramilitary group led by Wuye, and Wuye blamed Ashafa’s Muslim youth organization. Christian assassins knocked on Ashafa’s door and killed the man who answered it. Their victim, as it happened, was Muhammed Ashafa’s uncle. But they did not realize this. Meanwhile, Muslim assassins attacked James Wuye, hacked his arm off, and left him for dead.
Both men believed they had killed the other. When they later discovered that they had not, they took it as a sign from God that they should make peace. So they set up a joint charity to promote dialogue between Muslims and Christians. Ashafa told me this story over hot tea in his small but elegantly carpeted flat. A tall and slightly overbearing man, he greeted me with a big hug and a long sermon on the need for people of faith to live in harmony. Wuye and he are now, he said, the best of friends.19
From apartheid to affirmative action
Under apartheid, there was only one black employee at the Koeberg nuclear power station. It was one of South Africa’s most secret sites, and since any black South African was considered a security risk, the management strained to avoid hiring any. But there was one job that could not be done by a white. Koeberg’s lone black worker was paid to run away from the guard dogs, to train them to bite blacks.20
For centuries, white settlers in South Africa burned black people’s houses and stole their land. From 1948 until 1994, the country was ruled by the National Party, an organization that sought to advance only the interests of South Africa’s “European” tribe. White “superiority” was codified in law. At the height of apartheid, blacks were not allowed to vote, hold desirable jobs, or own land in “white areas” (about 87 percent of the country). When an area inhabited by blacks was designated white, the inhabitants were sometimes forced onto trucks at gunpoint, driven away as bulldozers crushed their homes, and dumped on distant patches of waste land.
With such a history, no one would have been surprised if South Africa had disintegrated into civil war. In the 1980s, when black protesters were daily showered with tear gas and sometimes shot dead by white policemen, a bloodbath seemed inevitable. Several thousand people were killed, but South Africa somehow held back from the precipice.
There were several reasons for this. The collapse of the Soviet Union forced the leaders of the African National Congress to reconsider their socialist beliefs. This reassured whites, who were nervous that if they surrendered power, their country would become another Marxist basket case. The ANC, meanwhile, realized that it was never going to win power by force. After years of “armed struggle,” it had won no battles. But in the propaganda war, it had triumphed. The world ostracized the apartheid regime. Sanctions gnawed at South African business. South African sports teams were barred from international contests. White South Africans traveling abroad were met with hostility, and British satirists composed a catchy song with the refrain “I’ve never met a nice South African.” With the world spitting on their shadows, white South Africans, even leaders of the National Party, began to lose the courage of their apartheid convictions.
Both sides were drawn to talk to each other. After the first secret, tentative contacts in the mid-1980s, serious negotiations began in 1990. Slowly and fitfully, a political settlement was thrashed out that more or less satisfied both sides.21 Black-on-black political violence grew worse in the run-up to the first all-race election in 1994, as the two main parties, the ANC and the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party, fought for local dominance. But the election itself passed relatively smoothly. The ANC won easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote. The National Party accepted defeat. A rumored armed revolt by white hardliners never materialized, and black-on-black political killings dropped dramatically.
In 1996, South Africa adopted a new constitution, one of the world’s most liberal. Besides guaranteeing all sorts of freedoms, it forbids discrimination on the grounds of “race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexualorientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”
The surprisingly peaceful transition was the work of many South Africans, but one stands out. Having acquired titanic moral stature after twenty-seven years in jail, Nelson Mandela, the ANC leader, was able both to soothe white fears and to curb the violent inclinations of some of his followers. As the country’s first black president, he preached reconciliation. He spoke of a “rainbow nation” in which people of all colors might live together in harmony. By including the Inkatha leader, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in his cabinet, he helped bring peace to the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where the ANC and Inkatha had been fighting each other most fiercely with the tacit encouragement of the apartheid security forces.
In his gestures, Mandela showed generosity of spirit. He addressed Afrikaner audiences in Afrikaans. He took tea with Betsie Verwoerd, the frail widow of the architect of apartheid. He even donned the colors of the traditionally white national rugby team, the Springboks, during the world cup in 1995. When South Africa won the tournament, blacks and whites celebrated together. That day, the nation probably felt more united than ever before or since.
Mandela’s message was one of forgiveness but not of forgetting. Under his presidency, a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” recorded testimony from some 21,000 victims of apartheid-era crimes. The commission was criticized both for being too soft on the perpetrators – who were offered amnesty in return for confessions – and for an alleged pro-ANC bias. But whatever its faults it gave thousands of unhappy people their only chance of a day in court and made it impossible for white South Africans to pretend that apartheid was anything but vile.
Walk through a South African city today, and you still do not see anything like as many mixed-race couples as you would in, say, London. But you do see a few. Given that romance across the color line was recently illegal, this is encouraging. Ugly incidents of racial violence are reported in South African newspapers with depressing frequency, but these headlines tell of exceptions, not the norm. For the most part, South Africans of all races tolerate each other. No one now finds it odd that black pupils study alongside whites at formerly whites-only schools or that white waiters grovel to black diners at restaurants that until recently excluded them.
Few black South Africans now cite racism as the greatest problem facing the country; unemployment, crime, housing, and water supplies worry them far more.22 But President Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, thinks they are wrong. In speech after wordy speech, he insists that South Africa is “a country of two nations,”23 that “wealth, income, opportunity, and skills continue to be distributed according to racial patterns,” and that there can be no rest until the ruling party has achieved the “fundamental transformation of our society.”24 President Mbeki has increasingly sought to divert attention from his government’s shortcomings by blaming whites for blocking this “transformation.” The ANC remains a multiracial party, but the trend is nonetheless worrying.
Before the mid-1970s, blacks, no matter how enterprising or intelligent, were barred from the best jobs. Whites, no matter how lazy or stupid, were all but guaranteed an adequate wage working on the railroads or at some other state-owned firm. The most offensive apartheid rules were gradually dismantled in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it was not until 1994 that white legal privileges were wholly abolished. Apartheid was not, however, replaced by a simple ban on racial discrimination. Instead, the ANC passed laws mandating preferential treatment for members of “previously disadvantaged” groups, in hiring, promotion, university admissions, and the award of government contracts. These preferences apply not only to blacks but also to women and the disabled. The system is inspired by America’s “affirmative action” programs, but there is a difference. Whereas in America the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action are a minority, in South Africa they are 95 percent of the population.
On the face of it, the case for corrective laws to make up for the injustices of the past is unanswerable. Because black education was neglected under apartheid, many blacks feel they cannot compete in the job market. Under the old regime, spending per white pupil was roughly seven times as much as was spent on blacks. Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister from 1958 until his assassination in 1966, argued that there was no point in educating blacks well, for this might create “people trained for professions not open to them.”25
ANC leaders believe, like the late Lyndon Johnson, American president in the 1960s, that you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race, and then say “You are free to compete with all the others.” Emotionally, this is persuasive. But the important question about corrective discrimination is not “Is it justified?” but “Does it work?”
A boost for the black middle class
For black professionals, the answer may be yes. Partly because the old anti-black laws were abolished, and partly because of the new pro-black laws, the black middle class expanded swiftly in the 1990s. Progress has been fastest in the civil service, where the proportion of managerial jobs filled by blacks has soared. In 1994, more than 95 percent of public-service managers were white; now more than 60 percent are black.26 Whites are rarely sacked. But when they retire or resign because their chances of promotion are slim, they are usually replaced by blacks.
In private business, figures are harder to come by, but the proportion of managers who are black appears to have risen rapidly from hardly any in 1994 to about half in 2003. The reason the transformation has not been faster, according to businessmen, is that the supply of appropriately skilled blacks has run dry. This is mainly the legacy of the apartheid government’s deliberate neglect of black education. In 2001, of the 884,000 South Africans of working age who had university degrees, 55 percent were white and only 31 percent were black.27 This imbalance is being reduced, but not in the most commercially useful disciplines. Although whites are only a tenth of the population, three times more whites than blacks gained degrees or diplomas in computer science in 1998. In engineering and business studies, the ratio was two to one. White high-school pupils were fifty times more likely to pass higher-grade science and math than black pupils.28
The education budget is quite generous, and some state schools achieve excellent results. But many are no better than they were under apartheid: awash with guns and drugs, lacking textbooks and discipline, and with teachers who show up to work drunk or not at all.
In 1999, I visited the Morris Isaacson high school, best known as the starting point of the Soweto uprising of 1976, when students protesting against apartheid education were cut down by the police. In those days, the school was a hotbed not only of radicalism but also of academic excellence. The headmaster, Elias Mashile, told me that its former pupils included many doctors and South Africa’s only black nuclear physicist. The pupils I saw, however, did not seem single-mindedly studious. Many were wandering aimlessly around the courtyard, when they should have been in class. Mashile admitted that three-quarters of his students failed to graduate and that only one in fifty made it to university.
The school was not short of money: the buildings were sturdy and comfortable, and there were enough teachers. The problem was unruliness. Students in their twenties who had repeatedly failed their exams mixed with teenagers, sometimes impregnating them. School equipment was often stolen. The previous month an entire school in Port Elizabeth had been pinched, its prefabricated walls used to make houses in nearby squatter camps. During the struggle against apartheid, schoolchildren used to chant “Liberation before education.” Despite liberation, the rowdiness persists. “We are trying to revive the culture of learning,” said Mashile, “but it takes time.”
Nationwide, the number of students with good enough grades to qualify for university entrance actually fell after liberation, from 88,000 (18 percent of the total) in 1994 to 68,000 (15 percent) in 2001. Kader Asmal, an able ex-academic who was appointed education minister in 1999, has promised to sort out the mess. His efforts are starting to bear fruit, but the results will not be felt in the labor market for several years.
In the meantime, since blacks with commercially useful skills are scarce, they command high salaries. For instance, in 1999, Barloworld, a large industrial conglomerate, offered newly qualified black accountants about 20 percent more than their white colleagues plus an “entry-level BMW,” pension, health benefits, in-house training, and excellent prospects for promotion. Despite this, Tony Phillips, Barloworld’s chief executive, sighed to me: “After a few months, they are mercilessly head-hunted.”
More laws, more justice?
If firms are paying a premium for black skills, this suggests that the supply of these skills is not matching demand. In other words, firms are searching hard for black talent but not finding enough to reach their racial targets. But the South African government believes that black advancement is being blocked by racist white bosses. Its response has been to pass ever-tougher new racial laws.
The Employment Equity Act, which came into force in 1999, obliges firms above a certain size to submit annual reports on their efforts to make their workforces “demographically representative” from the factory floor to the boardroom. That is, roughly 75 percent black, 52 percent female, 5 percent disabled, and so on. Some allowance is made for the size of the pool of “suitably qualified” individuals. But employers must not refuse to hire a black applicant simply because she lacks the necessary qualifications. Rather, they must show that she could not have acquired the relevant skills in a reasonable time. If someone alleges racism, it is up to the employer to prove his innocence. The normal burden of proof, in other words, has been reversed, and employers face fat fines if found guilty.
In 2000, the government passed an even broader law. The Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act affects all firms, no matter how small, as well as individuals, private clubs, professional bodies, and so on. It forbids discrimination on grounds of race, sex, pregnancy, age, disability, belief, culture, or language. Discrimination is only allowed if it is intended to uplift the previously disadvantaged. That is, you can discriminate in favor of blacks and women but not in favor of white men.
A case from 1997 gives some idea how hard it is to be racially correct. Sarita van Coller, a white woman, applied for a job at Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider. She scored top marks on an aptitude test, but the job was given to a “colored” (the South African term for mixed-race) applicant. She protested to a labor arbitrator and won. The arbitrator ruled that there was nothing wrong with giving preference to blacks or coloreds but that the firm should not discriminate unfairly against whites. It is, of course, impossible to do both.
Mampuru Maseke, a black employee at the same firm, has observed that affirmative action makes white engineers reluctant to pass their skills on to inexperienced black colleagues, because a well-taught black colleague will soon be promoted over their heads. He goes on: “When an affirmative action appointee does not perform well, Eskom usually hires the white former incumbent of that post to act as a consultant to help the appointee. He has generally retired with a nice package and when recalled as a consultant – now earning an extra salary on top – has no incentive to help the black appointee become fully competent, for then his role will end.”29
White bosses are reluctant to complain about the new racial laws because of the utter certainty that they will be branded racist. On the record, they tend to sound like Chris Thompson, the head of Gold Fields, a big mining firm, who growled tersely to me that “it [affirmative action] is good for the country” and credited the government with showing a “spirit of pragmatism.” Other bosses, talking on condition that their names should never appear in print, have told me that the laws are a burden, and would be a crushing one if they were vigorously enforced, but that they hope they will not be.
Perhaps they are right. The ANC does not want to strangle business: it just wants private firms to do some of its social engineering for it. But government inspectors are not the only ones who may enforce affirmative action, nor are disgruntled present, former, and would-be employees the only ones who can sue for racial discrimination. Any party acting “in the public interest” can initiate an action against an allegedly discriminatory employer, and lawyers can accept cases on a no-win, no-fee basis.
The assumption behind all these laws is that white employers will never treat blacks fairly uncoerced. This is questionable. Doubtless, many white bosses are bigots. But discrimination has costs. A rational employer hires staff on merit: he employs those who will do the best job for the best price. An employer who discriminates on the basis of an unproductive quality such as skin color will be at a disadvantage relative to competitors who hire on merit.
How many businessmen care more about race than they do about money? In 2001, the Sunday Times, a South African newspaper, sent a team of twenty reporters to forty-eight restaurants to find out how racist they were. Black journalists and white journalists entered each restaurant separately and waited for staff to treat them differently. To their editors’ surprise, black reporters reported that they were treated well almost everywhere. The only ugly incident was when a black waiter told a black reporter that he probably wouldn’t be able to afford the wines on the wine list. Instead of a hard-hitting exposé of discrimination, the paper had to make do with publishing a collection of ordinary restaurant reviews.30
The only surprising thing about this is that everyone was so surprised. Businesses that insult their customers tend to go bust. South Africa’s former white rulers always assumed that capitalists would be slow to discriminate if it hurt profits, which is why they passed so many laws to force them. The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926, for instance, which barred blacks from most well-paid positions, was passed because white labor unions appealed to the government to stop firms hiring blacks. Entrepreneurs – even racist ones – objected to “job reservation” because it affected their bottom line. Racist laws forced them to overpay their white employees, to forgo the benefit of black skills, and to suffer volcanic labor relations.
Apartheid, and the sanctions that it provoked, made the South African economy stagnate. As Themba Sono, professor of business studies at the University of Pretoria, put it:
[V]ery few South Africans realise just how badly the [apartheid] government impoverished the entire nation. The per capita income of black Americans, for instance, is higher than that of white South Africans, and the descendants of the Dutch and French who settled in South Africa are much poorer on average than those who stayed behind in Europe. A measure of the damage [apartheid] did can be obtained from a comparison with Japan, which had approximately the same per capita GDP fifty years ago. Today, South Africa’s per capita GDP is only 20 per cent of Japan’s.31
As apartheid rules became progressively harder to enforce, black incomes began to catch up with white ones. Between 1975 and 1990, average real black earnings in manufacturing rose by almost 50 percent. For whites, the figure was only 1 percent. On the one hand, the government and white labor unions were struggling to preserve the gap between black and white wages. On the other hand, black labor unions and market forces were working to narrow them. White unions insisted that white workers should be paid much more than blacks, irrespective of how much they produced. But employers objected. When a job could be done equally well by a black employee, it made no sense to pay extra to have it done by a white one.
Winners and losers
Whites will probably cope in the new South Africa. They may be politically powerless, but they have money and skills. Those who are unsatisfied can emigrate, as many have, to Europe or Australia. For those who stay behind, legally mandated discrimination will provide an incentive to acquire marketable skills.
Under apartheid, many young whites studied politics or public administration at university and aspired to careers in government. In the new South Africa, they are more likely to study accounting or computing and to go into business or set themselves up as consultants. Unskilled whites will suffer. But most whites will succeed in making themselves commercially indispensable. In the long run, this will probably make them richer. Civil servants’ salaries are generally lower than those paid by software firms.
Something similar happened in India, when the reservation of a large proportion of government jobs for the formerly “untouchable” caste prompted other castes to quit the civil service, go into business, and end up wealthier than before. In several countries commercially astute minorities have prospered despite laws that discriminated against them. Jews in medieval Europe were barred from many trades and often confined to ghettos but still ended up banking for kings. Countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia still maintain laws that discriminate against ethnic Chinese citizens, but the Chinese are richer than the locals. The future for white South Africans may be similar: politically impotent, often unpopular, but rich.
Affirmative action is portrayed as a means of helping the poor. But the beneficiaries are mainly middle class, which is to say, those who have already largely overcome the legacy of past discrimination. It is the best-educated blacks who are accelerated into managerial jobs. The poor lose, in two ways. First, they receive worse public services than they otherwise would. Second, affirmative action retards economic growth and so makes it harder for the jobless to find work. This is hugely important: in 2001, South African unemployment stood at 31 percent or 43 percent, depending on whether you count those who have given up looking for non-existent jobs.32
As in other countries where corrective discrimination is allowed, it is implemented much more aggressively in the civil service than in private companies. This is because government has no competitors, so political objectives often outweigh practical ones. If a private firm offers shoddier or more expensive goods than its rivals, customers will flee. The civil service, by contrast, is only indirectly accountable. The public can vote once every five years for a change of government, but that is about it. So bureaucrats find it easier to recruit by race than do firms that have to make a profit to survive.
In the new South Africa, most poor people, who are mainly black, receive much better public services than they did under apartheid. Whereas the old regime spent little money in black areas, the ANC has tried hard to bring piped water, roads, and electricity to the poor.33 But the government could have provided more of these good things if it had been color-blind.
All firms bidding for public works contracts are required to have black partners or managers. Firms deemed “blacker” than their rivals are allowed to charge up to about 10 percent more and still win the contract. This is wonderful for blacks who own construction companies. But since the government is paying more than it needs to, the poor receive fewer houses, water pumps, and village roads than they should. In effect, “affirmative procurement” is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the well-off.
It can also provide a convenient cover for corruption. ANC officials can award contracts to their friends and justify it by pointing out that these friends are black. Many seem wholly unembarrassed at such apparent conflicts of interest. Several retired ANC politicians have made fortunes by exploiting their contacts. Because most of the poor are black, the government treats blackness as a proxy for poverty and argues that anyone black is in need of a leg-up. But the beneficiaries of this largesse are often millionaires.
In the private sector, affirmative action is less enthusiastically pursued. But because firms have to be seen to comply with the law, it is still a hefty burden. Time and effort devoted to meeting racial quotas cannot be spent improving products. Hiring on grounds other than merit is unlikely to foster excellence. The rest of the world will not buy an inferior South African product simply to assist in “transformation.” Nor will many South Africans.
Economic growth in South Africa has been further hindered by delays in privatization. The ANC is torn. On the one hand, selling the state-owned power, telephone, and transport companies would bring much-needed foreign investment and skills. If more competition were allowed in these markets, power and bandwidth prices would fall, benefiting everyone and making South Africa an easier place to do business. This is why, in 1997, the government sold a 30 percent stake in Telkom, the telephone firm, to an American-Malaysian consortium and has promised gradual deregulation.34
But at the same time the ANC knows that if big companies remain publicly owned, they can more easily be used for political ends. State-owned firms take their orders from politicians and so work harder to promote blacks and to roll out services to poor and rural areas. The government hesitates to abandon such important levers of control.
Similar reasoning causes the government to give away licenses to use limited public resources. The supply of fish in South African waters, for example, is finite, so fishing boats are not allowed to catch more than their quota. These quotas could be auctioned, which would be easy to administer and raise large sums of money. But the government fears that black firms, which tend to have shallow pockets, would be outbid. So it apportions quotas to the firms it considers the most deserving. The process is slow, raises no money, and is open to corruption. It is applied to mobile telephone licenses, too. In 2001, after a long delay, the government gave away the country’s third such license to a partly black-owned firm of questionable competence. The license could probably have been auctioned to a world-class firm for about $200 million: enough to build 100,000 houses for the poor.
South Africa’s ethnic problems are nowhere near as grave as Rwanda’s, and affirmative action has not crippled or corrupted its civil service to anything like the same degree as it has Nigeria’s. The example of Malaysia shows that it is possible to combine laws that discriminate in favor of a racial majority (albeit less extreme laws than South Africa’s) with rapid economic growth. But South Africa’s neighbor, Zimbabwe, shows that such laws can become little more than a cloak for the award of contracts and licenses to cronies of the ruling party. And there is little evidence from anywhere that corrective discrimination improves the lives of more than a small minority. This improvement, moreover, usually comes at a heavy cost in lost growth and increased racial tension. It goes without saying that those who are discriminated against resent it.
I once asked President Mbeki how long he expected affirmative action laws to remain on the books. He predicted that they would eventually “fall into disuse” when they were no longer needed. Asked to name another country where this had occurred, he could not. This is not surprising. Affirmative action has been pushed back a pace or two in the United States but only after determined legal action by its opponents. In other countries with similar laws, such as India and Sri Lanka, these laws have tended to multiply and expand in scope.
Judge a man by the content of his character
Tribal passions are not, in themselves, a bad thing. Most people love not only their country but the town they grew up in and the people and the food and the songs they grew up with. Tribal loyalty is not so very different from family loyalty, from the admirable urges that impel so many Africans to feed and shelter orphaned nieces and cousins.
Governments, however, are supposed to represent the entire population of the country they rule. To favor one tribe over another instantly violates that ideal. Since governments are so powerful, groups seek their favors avidly and grow angry if rebuffed. Few people care that the owner of the Chinese restaurant on the corner employs only his cousins. (And nor should they: family businesses are often wonderfully efficient.) But members of virtually every African tribe seethe that their neighbors have grabbed a bigger plateful of the public pie. Tribal politics lead to ethnic tension, inefficient government, and slower wealth creation, as in South Africa, or worse, as in Rwanda.
The only sensible solution is a separation of tribe and state, much as faith and state are formally separated in America. Governments should not discriminate on grounds of ethnicity, period. Civil servants should be recruited on merit alone. State contracts should be awarded to the bidders who offer the best value for money. Aid to the poor should go to the poor, not to rich members of ethnic groups that are, on average, poor. As for private companies, it is none of the state’s business whom they hire. Workers and employers enter into contracts if both parties think they will benefit. Such voluntary agreements tend to increase the sum of human happiness, and governments should not forbid them.
This may seem hopelessly idealistic. Many of the world’s most powerful interest groups passionately oppose the idea of equality before the law. But all the alternatives are worse.
In Africa, the country that has come closest to separating tribe and state is Tanzania, which is home to 120 ethnic groups, each with distinct and sometimes mutually incomprehensible cultures. Yet in the decades since independence the country has suffered almost no communal bloodshed. This achievement is marred somewhat by occasional spats in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous island off the Tanzanian coast. But only somewhat. The reason so many people like Nestor Nebigira, the Burundian refugee I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, find sanctuary in Tanzania is that the place is more peaceful than any of its neighbors.
The first president, Julius Nyerere, despite his woeful economic policies, showed unusual wisdom in tribal matters. He recognized that ethnic politics could tear the country apart. While other African leaders stirred tribal rivalries to keep themselves in power, Nyerere sought to soothe them instead. He imposed a single official language, kiSwahili, and urged every Tanzanian to learn it so that they could talk to each other. He banned ethnically divisive talk from politics.
It was a great success, with one caveat. Nyerere had the power to ban tribalism at least partly because his regime was thoroughly undemocratic. With only one party allowed, there was no incentive for politicians to try to win votes by appealing to voters’ tribal prejudices. Some argue that multiparty politics in Africa inevitably leads to ethnic politics. Yoweri Museveni, president of Uganda since 1986, has effectively banned political parties for precisely this reason, although he started to talk about lifting that ban in 2003.
Many African politicians find it hard to imagine a political contest based on class interests or ideas rather than tribal horse-trading. This is not always their fault. Often they behave this way because that is what their supporters demand.
Writing about Zambia, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, two European academics, argue that patron–client links, usually ethnically based, are the “fundamental” determinant of how people vote. “The populace expects to exchange political support for concrete help: that is the only way in which politics makes sense to them.… The understanding of the concept of citizenship and of the purpose of the individual vote remains indelibly linked to the anticipation of the direct communal (or even personal) benefit which elections offer.… This is also the view at the top. A Zambian minister was quoted as saying: ‘If I don’t appoint people from my own region, who else will?’ ”35
Such expectations can create a vicious circle. When voters assume that politics is a struggle between ethnic groups for the spoils of government, they tend to vote along ethnic lines and especially for candidates perceived to be good at grabbing and distributing those spoils. The more such candidates win power, the more tribal politics becomes, and the greater the incentive voters have to keep voting tribally. Breaking free of this cycle will be extremely hard.
That said, as African democracies mature it may grow easier for tribal disputes to be solved, if not amicably, at least according to laws that everyone respects. A recent worldwide study found that ethnic diversity reduced annual economic growth by a shocking 3 percent in undemocratic states but made no difference in democracies. One reason may be that people have fewer grievances in liberal democratic states than in tyrannous ones. If they do not feel oppressed, they are unlikely to blame the tribe next door for their oppression.36 Power should also be decentralized rather than concentrated in the hands of an overweening presidency, as is the case in most African countries today. If regions are self-governing and self-financing, they will have only themselves to blame if things do not go well.
There are no multi-ethnic African states where multiparty politics are wholly unsullied by tribalism. But there are reasons for hoping that ethnic hatred need not hold the continent back forever. Tanzania became a multiparty democracy in 1995, and inter-tribal relations remain largely cordial. So it can be done.
At his trial in 1964, Nelson Mandela gave a rousing speech from the dock. He declared: “During my lifetime, I have dedicated myself to [the] struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”37
Wise words, little heeded.