Charles Cobb Jr
22 July 2002
(Page 3 of 3)
Not a cent! The Carter Administration pledged 70 million dollars a year for ten years. Not one penny ever got there. There was certainly no participation in a land use plan such as there had been in Kenya. By the time 1990 came around there was nobody in Britain or America who was interested.
We were rightly, I think, focused on the liberation of South Africa. Mugabe was also being told by Nyerere and others: 'You can't raise these issues because we must deal with our brothers in South Africa.' So to blame Mugabe for raising the question 20 years late and not doing anything all along, I think is unfair.
It is true that he didn't push it but he was involved in the liberation of South Africa. He was involved in Namibia. He was involved even more in trying to beat back Renamo in Mozambique. Those were the Selous Scouts from Rhodesia that fought with Ian Smith that went to South Africa who didn't want them and sent them over to Mozambique where Renamo was continuing to try to overthrow the Mozambican government. They were also trying to undermine the Zimbabwe government.
Still, if there is any place in Africa where capitalism and democracy can work easily, it's Zimbabwe. But instead of trying to make it work, England mainly ended up demonizing Mugabe and the U.S. went along. And Mugabe is easy to demonize. But when I read about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson feeling threatened by the British and French and promoting an Aliens and Sedition Act and actually putting the press in jail, I say or ask, 'Was Mugabe under more pressure from the British and the South Africans than Jefferson and Adams were?' And because of the geographic proximity of South Africa, as opposed to the French and British presence in the U.S. I'd have to say a young nation in Zimbabwe was under more serious and severe pressure than Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were. In fact. King George referred to Jefferson and Adams and George Washington as hoodlums and hooligans who were only fit for hanging.
I saw so much of that British arrogance being adopted by the United States in relationship to Mugabe. And even Mbeki. When Mbeki raised a legitimate question about Aids and whether there was a political solution or whether this was a medical issue, they jumped all over him and literally forced him to try to give these drugs which proved to be very toxic to Americans who are having 2 or 3 thousand calories a day...whether to give those same toxic drugs to Africans who get 2 or 3 thousand calories a week is a legitimate medical question. Mbeki said those kinds of questions ought to be left to physicians and he shouldn't make a political decisions about them. But they literally forced him to come to the political position where the government is giving drugs to people without fully knowing the impact of them.
Well, they do know that anti-retrovirals for pregnant women do save the lives of children.
Well they know that they don't die of Aids. But they don't feed them. Keeping children alive without mothers is a major political problem when you're talking about millions of children.
Yes, but their lives shouldn't be lost because of that political problem. You certainly cannot be making that argument.
No. But I am making the argument for good, solid nutrition for those children. I've been working with a group of Aids orphans in South Africa and the first five years I worked with them they were not taking the medicines. We were sending them money and they were getting a good diet, going to school and being cared for. In the meantime, the little boy who was being used as the poster boy [12-year-old Nkosi Johnson] to harass Thabo Mbeki, and who was getting the drugs, died [June 1, 2001]. I'm not saying that there is any cure for Aids, but I am saying that a loving, nutritious environment for children, even if they are HIV-positive, might be better than anti-retroviral drugs.
In our remaining minutes I would be interested in your take on what the unexpected energy and attention the Bush Administration seems to be directing toward Africa. And could you compare your own experience inside the Carter Administration with this?
I think that some of the same things that drove Carter drive Bush. Carter was a political conservative but he understood racism and he understood majority rule. He developed a passion for Africa as a result of his sensitivity to the problems of the South and of racism. Carter got elected opposing quotas. All of the standard liberal jargon of the time, Carter was opposed to. He compensated for that and won over liberals by emphasizing his understanding of Africa.
Something of the same thing is true with George W. Bush. Our experience with Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich was that they wanted to be conservatives without being racists. [Congressman] Bill Gray said, "All right, here's the perfect place to prove that you're not racist, support sanctions on South Africa." And they did. Africa investment, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) are, in some ways, an attempt to apply Republican Party development principles to the African continent. We resist privatization here but we push it in Africa.
It is interesting to me that someone like you, so closely associated with the Democratic Party, seems to be approving this effort to push Republican Party policies in Africa.
They are not Republican policies although Republicans feel that they are their policies. But I had enterprise zones in Atlanta before Jack Kemp brought them to Congress simply because I needed to get money into downtown Atlanta. And I created a tax break and all of the downtown housing that we have now, which is considerable, goes back to our eliminating real estate taxes on downtown development for 20 years. We created industrial parks where we didn't give people tax breaks but we laid out the infrastructure for them. We made free enterprise work for poor people in Atlanta.
There are areas, particularly in business development, especially in agriculture, where free enterprise is more relevant. Obasanjo didn't have any luck with agriculture in his first term. It bugged him so that when he got out of government he started a farm and he developed a very successful agribusiness operation. I went to see him on his farm and he had been up all night delivering pigs. I asked him, standing there in the pig sty: 'How come you're so much more successful as a farmer out of government than you were in government?' He said, "Look here, Andy. Nobody would stay up all night with the government's pig."
I'm struck that you haven't mentioned Clinton
Well I like Clinton. Clinton gave me an opportunity to serve Africa through the Southern Africa Development Fund. But only [Secretary of Commerce] Ron Brown in Clinton's first term had any real knowledge of Africa. With Ron Brown's death it took a while before [Transportation Secretary] Rodney Slater picked up the mantle and ran with it. He did a lot but we spent most of Clinton's term saving Clinton. It's interesting that they are just now realizing that there is stuff far worse than "Whitewater" in Bush and Cheney's past. But nobody has demanded a special prosecutor.
Clinton did wonderful things for the developing world but they were not for Africa. He bailed out Mexico. If there had been an African bailout comparable to the Mexican bailout,..well. And there could have been. The African debt question is really one that Americans have been willing to be reasonable about.
These banks loaned money to people who they knew were stealing. They consciously and willingly made bad loans because they had such a surplus of capital. And they made those loans to dictators. And they saw what they were doing with the money and now after those regimes have been gotten rid of, they want free governments to bear the burdens of these loans.
It's like the U.S.trying to make South Africa pay a fine for selling weapons to Israel. Mandela and them were in jail when that happened. And when [former South African Ambassador to the United States] Franklin Sonn talked to me about it,I said: "Look, you get you a Johnny Cochran and the [Congressional] Black Caucus and you make as big a political fuss about this as you can. Do it in Washington," I said. It was quietly settled when they started talking like that. It's almost like we're making poor Africans pay for our mistakes. And they've already paid back these loans. It's the interest that's killing them. But it's also killing the global economy.
If American wants to get out of recession and get its stock market pumped up again, and if the European Union wants to survive, and Asia wants its stagnation ended, the only answer is facilitating the development of Africa. Africa is the missing link of the global economy. And the global economy is not going to work until Africa is included as a full partner and participant. And that means wiping out the debt. That means developing a WTO kind of free market framework that allows people to invest freely and without protectionism so the goods and services of Africa can be sold on a world competitive market.
Africa can answer the world's economic needs right now if we only focus on African potential rather than African problems.
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