Moeletsi Mbeki
25 July 2007
guest column
Moeletsi Mbeki gave the keynote address at the Second Conference of the European Association of Centers of African Studies held at Leiden University in The Netherlands from July 11 to July 14. The text of the speech follows:
Promising start and near collapse
The world has done just about everything it could do to help Africa to develop but has very little positive results to show for its efforts. While most of the world, especially Asia, is forging ahead in the development stakes, Africa is marking time at best, and marching backwards in some instances.
The breakneck industrialisation of China and India has helped Africa by forcing up raw materials prices that comprise most of Africa’s exports. Experience shows however that for Africa, raw materials booms have proved to be more a curse than a blessing.
Africa has not always been about gloom and doom however. In the 1960s soon after their independence, African countries did reasonably well. Their economies grew quite significantly on their own steam. This was the age of massive creativity when Africa produced great works of literature and music. Africa won three Nobel Literature prizes for works produced during this period. Universities and high schools sprouted throughout the continent leading to vibrant debates about how to propel Africa forward.
No sooner had this flame started to become visible from a distance than it was extinguished. Starting with the murder of Patrice Lumumba; the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah by the army with a little help from the American government; the detention of Oginga Odinga, Africa soon descended into unimaginable low depths. Africa got into the grip of civil wars in Nigeria, Algeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola; the two Congos, to name but a few; culminating in genocide in Rwanda and in failed and failing states in Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Ivory Coast. These conflicts caused untold suffering and massive destruction to already underdeveloped infrastructure.
Age of dictators and donors
When a person is poor and one gives him or her money, then that erstwhile poor person becomes richer by the amount donated. The rich world took this sensible observation in connection with individuals and extended it to African countries.
If a well-wisher foreign government gave aid to an African country, the expectation was that people in the African country that received the foreign aid would thus become richer. The shock however was that the more aid was poured into Africa the poorer Africans seemed to get.
The flaw in the donors’ actions was not necessarily lack of good intentions. The flaw was to equate an individual to a country. Unlike an individual, a country develops and its people become richer primarily by pooling the collective strengths and energies of its citizens so that they cooperate to achieve their common objectives. For citizens to pool their energies and strengths two key factors must be present. These are institutions that facilitate cooperation and leadership that ensures institutions function and deliver on expectations.
For individuals or households to pool their energies and resources with other individuals or households, there must be a mechanism or instrument, known as an institution that makes it possible and desirable for them to want to cooperate. This means that the benefits of cooperating with others must outweigh the benefits of working in isolation. Similarly, the costs of working in cooperation with others must be below the costs of working alone. In short there must be incentives to cooperate. Of course one could be compelled to cooperate as happened during slavery or under regimes of forced labour but even under these circumstances institutions to compel cooperation were necessary but these will be different from institutions that promote voluntary cooperation.
Here we are concerned with voluntary cooperation however. Embedded in our simple formulation of incentives to cooperate and institutions and leadership to advance cooperation, is experience acquired over many centuries of human history. Fairness, justice, rewards, are just a few of the qualities that make individuals and household want to cooperate with other individuals and households. Besides delivering greater productivity at the quantitative level and therefore greater welfare for the households cooperating, institutions that make cooperation possible must thus also deliver on the qualities of equity and social justice.
This is where leadership comes in. Social institutions are created by many circumstances but for them to continuously deliver fairness and equity they must be constantly modified and adjusted to continue to deliver higher productivity, fairness and equity. And as circumstances change yet new ways of cooperating must be found. This is done through trial and error. The leaders who must search for these new ways of cooperating necessitated by changing environment, must thus take the risk of finding these new ways of cooperating. Inherent in all risk taking is the probability of failure and the cost, including the punishment, which goes with failure.
This is where post-colonial Africa has come unstuck. Post-colonial Africa has failed to both develop new institutions of cooperation amongst its citizens and to produce the leadership or the leaders required to lead society forward in an ever changing global environment.
The massive social, economic and political upheavals in Africa during the generation from the mid 1960s (overthrow of Nkrumah and crushing of the Convention Peoples Party) to the mid 1990s when elements of multi-party democracy started to appear in Africa, destroyed a key indigenous African institution – the African nationalist party. These upheavals also destroyed most of the leaders who had mobilised the African people to cooperate in the struggle against colonialism. The destruction of the African nationalist party left Africans atomised and therefore stranded without indigenous, legitimate institutions of cooperation to advance their interests.
The institutions that were left standing and that prospered during the era of dictatorship and one-party rule (in practice, one-man rule) were institutions created by colonialism – the state, the military and police, the private sector, etc. These were the institutions that were re-captured by the dictators and their Western backers from the African nationalists before they, the nationalists, could change them. The dictators once more used these colonial institutions to dissemble and to impose on the African people the interests of the West and those of the dictators and associated elites and cliques. The notion that Africa “works” because it is ruled by corrupt, nepotistic and unaccountable Big Men who are alleged to reflect Africa’s traditional cultural practices is thus a fantasy of its authors. Africa’s Big Men in reality were the creation of neo-colonialism and the Cold War.
Africa’s era of dictatorships and one man rule was simultaneously the heyday of Western donors’ interventions in Africa. The two worked in partnership and reinforced each other. Their central objective was to destroy indigenous, autonomous institutions and leaders that tried to promote cooperation amongst Africans that was not devoted to advancing Western interests but to advancing the interests of the African people.
Donor donated democracy
Africa’s challenge today is that while the era of dictatorship has apparently come to an end, African countries do not as yet have indigenous institutions and leaders that promote cooperation among the citizens. Developing such institutions is a difficult and costly business that takes a long time. It is made even more complex by the fact that firstly, the re-democratisation of African countries from the mid 1990s was brought about to a significant extent by interventions of Western donors rather than primarily by pro-democracy actions of African organisations or parties. The main exceptions which prove the rule being Uganda and Rwanda, and possibly Nigeria.
Secondly, during the three to four decades of dictatorship and neo-colonialism, Africa suffered a massive brain drain, capital flight and deterioration of infrastructure. Not surprisingly African countries now do not have the skilled and experienced people to make democratic Africa more productive. The civil service in Africa is notorious for its incompetence, not to mention its corruption. Most African countries also do not have the popular institutions with the clout to combat the slide back towards dictatorships and unconstitutional practices.
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