Nicholas Shaxson
22 June 2009
(Page 3 of 3)
From the French firms, Foccart harvested a bounty of intelligence; at the ports, airports, and finance ministries of the CFA Zone, nothing important escaped his notice.
Even in 1997, when Mr Autogue was presenting me to Gabon's captains of industry, some had white Frenchmen at their shoulders, politely massaging the interviews.
Gabon also served French exporters a bonanza -- for decades after independence, typically two-thirds of Gabon's imports have flowed from France, compared to just a hundredth from its African neighbours. In a big supermarket in the oil town of Port-Gentil, I found no African produce at all.
Instead, the shelves creaked with French milk from Choisy-le-Roi, French quail terrine, French duck confit, French televisions and videos, and racks of French wine. Even a frozen chicken that had grown up in Brazil found its way to this supermarket via Paris.
Monopolistic practices boosted the profits of French companies in Gabon.
The result, as the oil dollars also raised demand in the economy, was higher price levels, which encouraged more imports, while local producers suffered.
It is no coincidence that at the turn of the millennium Libreville was the world's fifth most expensive place to live after Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong and Zurich.
Bongo became a flamboyant big spender. At an Organisation of African Unity summit in Libreville in 1977, during the oil boom, half the national budget was spent on impressing visiting presidents, who got an honour guard with red velvet capes and gold swords.
The skeletons of their hotels and armoured Cadillacs litter Libreville today. Bongo also kicked off the Transgabonais rail project, to connect his home region in eastern Gabon with the coast.
Launching it on his birthday with dancing girls, French politicians, and champagne, he promised a zone of prosperity one hundred kilometres wide along the railway's axis.
"If one must strike a bargain with the devil to build the railway," he said, "I am fully ready."
Today, a surprisingly punctual air-conditioned rail service runs through the forest, and conductors in French-style peaked caps clip your tickets, while waiters serve croissants.
Yet at a cost of almost three billion dollars, it was a sinkhole for the oil money; in a privatisation tender in 1999, Gabon sold a 20-year concession on the railway, along with the rolling stock, to French timber interests who paid less than a hundredth of what Gabon had originally spent to build it.
If you take interest into account, its final cost is greater than today's national debt, most of which is owed to France. Debt repayments today take up almost half of the budget.
The late François-Xavier Verschave entitled one of his books La Francafrique, referring to what he calls the "submerged face of the Franco-African iceberg." Francafrique is a play on the French words for France-Africa, but it also sounds like France a fric, which means France on the take.
We should not forget, however, that this system has also helped preserve Gabon for decades as an island of stability in a turbulent region. Some argue that this alone is enough to justify all the predation.
Indeed, French scholars talked about a "pax franca" all across francophone Africa.
A confidential French military study in 1991 tried to appraise how the French, British, and other postcolonial systems had fared during the Cold War, producing results for the "grand experiment" that the Ivorian president Houphouet-Boigny had posed more than three decades earlier.
It concluded that military spending had been proportionally lower in the former French colonies than in the British, Portuguese, or Belgians ones, but only 40,000 people had died in francophone wars, compared with 2 million in the former British colonies, 2 million in the Belgian ones, and 1.2 million in the Portuguese ex-colonies.
The study was certainly biased: it ignored a million deaths in Biafra -- many, if not most of which resulted directly from French interference. Even so, it gave the French grounds for feeling smug.
The Franco-Gabonese Clan prospered through the turbulence of the end of the Cold War, and a little way beyond. But in 1994, as a new world order began to emerge, a decades-long political consensus in France about Africa suddenly began to break down.
Change was in the air. Soon, Houphouet-Boigny's "grand experiment" to judge the relative strengths of the French and the other European models of decolonisation would require a different appraisal, rather less kind to France.
Reproduced with permission from Poisoned Wells: The dirty politics of African oil by Nicholas Shaxson, published in 2007 by Palgrave Macmillan.
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These devils that claimed to be Angels are the root of problems that we are facing in Africa and the world at large. They are the greedy and egocentric big brothers that are stealing African resources for their own benefits while the owners are left surfering, still they will say we are surfering without reference to their contributions to it. They are interfering with other country's affairs to satisfy their selfish interests, causing killings and bloodshed. They have democracy but only showing DEMONSTRATION OF CRAZYSurely, the days of reckoning had started already for all these companies, our bad leaders and countries that join hands with these corrupt and egocentric leaders to steal our natural resources, destroy the environments and making life difficult for the people in Niger Delta, Nigeria and Africa as a whole.
Only Africans...mostly sub saharan Africans have themselves to blame for every misstreatment or injustice or exploitation meted on them by the west. That's exactly what you get when you put your trust, knowledge and intelligence, welfare and security in the hands of a devil. Africans should learn from Asians how to patriotic.