Richard A. Joseph
11 March 2003
Washington, DC — In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush announced an ambitious plan to combat AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. The commitment was unexpected, but it represents just one facet of a significant increase in attention to African concerns. Before Iraq and North Korea consumed the administration's attention, Mr. Bush had scheduled a trip to Africa for January. Although that was postponed until later this year, the drumbeat of policy pronouncements that take aim at Africa's development needs includes new and expanded initiatives on aid, trade, and security.
While welcome, these initiatives still do not constitute a sufficiently comprehensive response to the impediments to growth and human security on the continent. As I have argued for many years, a major and sustained international effort is needed to reverse the profound erosion of public institutions and infrastructures in sub-Saharan Africa.
We are at a critical and challenging moment in African history. If I were to suggest one word to convey the difficulties facing African peoples, it would be "insecurity." The poor and the disadvantaged suffer most, but filaments of insecurity extend across ethnic, religious, and regional boundaries; they cross borders in the movement of refugees and smugglers of arms, drugs, and precious stones. And they are driving increasing numbers of Africans out of Africa. Bands of illegal immigrants, weary from perilous journeys over land and sea, are picked up by police forces on the southern shores of Europe almost every day.
I encounter many of those exiles in the cities of the United States, usually as taxi drivers. The tale they tell differs only in the details: Tired of living in pervasive uncertainty, distrustful of their governments' promises, and seeing little prospect of improving their lives, they accept jobs well below their qualifications for the sake of their children. A new generation of African professionals has emerged, educated at great expense by their countries, only to be ensnared in a wearing struggle over basic necessities. Many give up, taking their precious skills and talents elsewhere.
The great majority of emigrants are being driven out by economic decline and stagnation. According to the political scientist Pierre Englebert, in his book State Legitimacy and Development in Africa (2000), since 1960 the African continent has had "the worst development record and the highest concentration of countries with negative growth of all the regions of the world." At a conference late last year, U.S. Undersecretary of the Treasury John Taylor provided further evidence of continuing decline: Between 1991 and 1999, he said, labor productivity (a key indicator of economic growth) declined in Africa by an average of 0.5 percent annually, but grew in Latin America by 1.2 percent and in East Asia by 5.5 percent. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, in a recent comprehensive report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world in which average incomes have declined over the past three decades.
Democratic development and political stability have also proved elusive. Writing in the Journal of Democracy, in April 2002, the political scientist Larry Diamond classified more than half the 48 sub-Saharan states as being more authoritarian than democratic. Human rights, political participation, fair electoral contests, rule of law, property rights, transparency, and accountability all suffer as a result. During the 1990s, African leaders readily adopted the language and lineaments of democracy, but seldom permitted genuine transformations of their dysfunctional governing systems. The AID report summarized the consensus reached by many experts: "There are many reasons some countries have not made development progress. But common to almost all of them is bad governance." That is true in all regions of Africa.
Longtime autocratic leaders in Congo, Ivory Coast, Kenya, and Somalia, just to mention a few well-known cases, have left behind the rubble of economic decay and societies fragmented along kinship/kingship, regional, and religious lines. The people of Zimbabwe, a country with immense promise at independence in 1980, are today besieged by tyranny, political violence, AIDS, and famine. Outside the spotlight of the international news media, autocratic governance is sapping the strength of Cameroon, Guinea, the Congo Republic, Togo, and several other African states.
My first teacher of African politics, the British scholar Thomas Hodgkin, was a close associate of Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of postindependence Ghana (1957-66). Hodgkin ruefully recalled Nkrumah's efforts to bolster his own security by expanding intelligence services and introducing repressive legislation. With each step down that path, Nkrumah became less secure, and his government drifted further from its mission. Finally, his hardened regime was toppled in a military coup in 1966, initiating a quarter-century of alternating military and civilian governments.
Despite its immense cultural wealth, mineral and agricultural resources, and high levels of education, Ghana experienced a 16-percent decline in per-capita income between 1970 and the start of a new democratic era in the 1990s. The story is the same for similarly endowed countries in the region, like Nigeria. The evidence is staggering: The failure to establish coherent and democratic states focused on development has rendered it impossible to achieve political stability, social peace, and sustainable growth in Africa.
Africa's predicament is of such broad scale, with such wide implications, that it is now a global issue. The steady stream of crises, and the vast numbers of people affected, can sometimes have a numbing effect. The United Nation's World Food Programme issued an alert at the end of 2002 that almost 40 million Africans were at risk from starvation in southern Africa and the Horn of Africa. Nearly 30 million Africans are infected with HIV. As a result of the continent's many intractable conflicts, 6.3 million people are classified by the United Nations as refugees or internally displaced persons. Since a regional rebellion erupted in Ivory Coast, following a mutiny by a section of the armed forces in September, a million persons have been uprooted. Poverty-stricken Africans in all regions of the continent thus contend simultaneously with AIDS, famine, and politically engineered violent conflicts.
Urgent humanitarian concerns, coupled with the economic and security needs of the rest of the world, have elevated Africa's position on the international agenda. With the United States committed to the vigorous, and increasingly unilateral, pursuit of its own national interests, many African countries have become integral to the campaign to defeat terrorism. The presence of several oil-exporting countries in Africa, the need to secure the votes of African members of the United Nations Security Council, and the heightened geostrategic significance of northeast Africa as a consequence of Middle East hostilities -- all have induced mixed messages from Washington. The programs that have been unveiled, sometimes eerily reminiscent of cold-war politics, can be divided into three broad categories:
1. Aid
During 2001, under the leadership of Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, African nations designed a comprehensive program entitled the New Partnership for Africa's Development, known as Nepad. While the program calls for promoting major increases in foreign aid, investment, and debt relief, it also commits African governments, themselves, to the creation of growth-friendly environments by promoting transparency, democracy, and accountability.
There has been much vocal support for the omnibus program from international donors, especially for its commitments to good governance, sound macroeconomic policies, and the creation of a peer-review system by which African governments will collectively monitor compliance with those commitments. However, what was expected to be a crowning moment for the initiative, namely the meeting of the G-8 nations in Canada last June, fell well short of the hopes of African leaders.
The G-8's Africa Action Plan commits $6-billion in assistance to Africa. While that represents a laudable increase over past efforts, it pales in comparison to the $64-billion that African policy makers proposed. In view of the wide gap between the G-8's commitments and the reality of African poverty, and the failure of African leaders to curb the continuing abuses of power in Zimbabwe and other countries, confidence in Nepad's capacity to achieve its noble objectives has been dwindling. The African Union, created on the heels of Nepad's emergence as a replacement for the Organization of African Unity, was adorned with similar promises to advance democracy, peace, and development in the continent. Both Nepad and the African Union have missed opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to political and economic reform. The most recent request by the Nepad leaders Obasanjo and Mbeki that the Commonwealth readmit the ruthless Robert Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe after a one-year suspension will further erode the credibility of the continental initiatives.
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