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.
In March 2002, President Bush announced the Millennium Challenge Account, a major new foreign-aid initiative that would provide a 50-percent increase in assistance to developing countries worldwide. If that additional $5-billion in annual aid is approved by Congress, the program would reverse the recent downward trend in American overseas development assistance. In this new method of aid distribution, funds would go to a small number of countries (estimated at 13 for 2004) that, in the words of President Bush, "govern justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom." While giving selected countries flexibility and ownership in their development plans, the initiative would require accountability and measurable results.
Since the first round of the program would be restricted to least developed nations, several African countries would be invited to participate. The large majority, however, would continue to depend on a share of development assistance administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Such a country-by-country approach, in which donors select recipients based on specific performance criteria, differs from the continentwide strategy espoused by African leaders. The Bush administration hopes that the new strategy will provide an incentive for policy reforms in countries that do not qualify for the Millennium Challenge Account. Unfortunately, the eroded state capacity, manipulated political structures, and insecurities that characterize many African countries render it unlikely that more than a few additional countries will qualify in subsequent rounds, assuming that the criteria are not weakened to the point of insignificance.
As a result, a dual approach to development assistance could emerge in the coming years: preferential assistance to countries that demonstrate responsible and effective governance, and limited humanitarian and other aid funneled to the rest through governments and nongovernmental groups. To deal preferentially with strong performers can improve the short-term efficiency of our aid dollars. For such assistance to foster long-term and sustainable development, however, it must overcome the inability of states to serve their peoples. Such an effort will depend not just on increased financial assistance but also on donors' reflecting a consistent strategy. Moreover, the rest of the African continent -- unable or unwilling to meet selection criteria -- cannot be ignored. Disregarding those countries will lead to further erosion and collapse of states. Nor should poor-performing, but important, emergent democracies like Nigeria and Kenya be overlooked.
In brief, the new initiatives do not as yet constitute a comprehensive and multinational approach that focuses on rebuilding state capacity and strengthening democracy.
2. Trade and Investment
After more than a decade of donor-led economic reforms and the adoption of market-oriented strategies, virtually all African countries currently seek to increase their engagement in the world economy and compete more effectively to attract foreign investment. The primary U.S. policy in this area, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, was a notable achievement of the Clinton administration. By allowing free access to U.S. markets for a specified range of countries and products, the act has contributed to a 61-percent increase in American imports from Africa in just the past two years. Last August, President Bush expanded the project by clarifying and easing rule-of-origin requirements, and adding Botswana and Namibia to the list of eligible participants. In addition, the United States is currently preparing to negotiate a free-trade agreement with the five-country Southern African Customs Union.
While those agreements will create new jobs and assist exports in certain sectors -- for example, textiles -- there is a steep and arduous road to be climbed. Africa generates only 1 percent of world economic activity and 1.5 percent of global trade. The continent possesses few industries that can compete internationally. In addition, the fact that trade barriers worldwide are slowly declining will eventually erode the temporary advantages provided by preferential arrangements for Africa.
Extractive industries and mineral resources generate the bulk of Africa's export income: Petroleum products, alone, account for two-thirds of U.S. imports from Africa. Most poor Africans are farmers, and expansion of agricultural production and exports could have the greatest impact on poverty levels. Yet agriculture remains highly protected by both developed and developing countries, and the global trade in agricultural products is distorted by the high subsidies paid to farmers in the developed nations. The recent enormous increase in subsidies for American farmers was rightly regarded in Africa as a great blow to the continent's economic aspirations.
Along with trade, foreign investment has a vital role to play in helping Africa overcome its marginal status in the global economy. Carefully conducted, it can produce rapid gains in employment, training, technology transfer, and infrastructure expansion. The 1990s witnessed a tripling of net direct foreign investment around the world, with significant increases in China and several post-Soviet countries that are integrating rapidly into the global economy. Not surprisingly, sub-Saharan Africa includes 37 countries classified as slow integrators. To increase Africa's paltry share of global trade, and widen its minuscule access to investments outside the energy sector, rapid progress must be made in strengthening the institutions of political and economic governance essential for expanding trade and investments.
3. Security
Security policy is the third major dimension of the new American-led world order. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, global security is increasingly defined as security from acts of terrorism. In the post-cold-war world, counterterrorism has replaced anti-Communism as the major preoccupation of American foreign policy. African oil producers figure centrally in this new strategy as industrialized countries seek to reduce their dependence on Middle East oil. Strategically located countries, like Ethiopia and Kenya, and former or potential havens for terrorist networks, like Sudan and Somalia, have also assumed strategic importance. Osama bin Laden, in his audiotape message just weeks ago, included Nigeria among the six countries considered "most eligible for liberation."
Once again, Washington is sending two distinct messages to Africa. On one hand, we strongly advocate democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and transparent and honest economic performance. On the other, we insist on active support for our security operations and access to African petroleum reserves, military bases, and overflight facilities. As in the cold-war era, our strategic allies in Africa will use their enhanced geopolitical leverage to resist demands for political and economic reform. Last December, for example, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held high-profile meetings with leaders of East African nations considered essential to counterterrorism and a war in Iraq, including sessions with Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, and Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea -- none paragons of democracy and human rights.
No one should fault the U.S. government for vigorously pursuing its perceived national interests and trying to harmonize those with other major objectives. However, there will inevitably be trade-offs. Moreover, it should not be overlooked that Africa's own homeland security needs are multiplying while its capacity to address them declines. Since the arrival of an elected government in Nigeria in 1999, for example, more than three times as many individuals have died in communal conflicts, at the hands of ill-trained police and military forces, or as a result of catastrophic failures like the armory explosion in Lagos, as were lost in the 9/11 attacks in the United States. Well over two million people have died in Sudan since the civil war resumed there in 1983, and as many in Congo since the fall of Mobutu in 1997. Between 1998 and 2000, Ethiopia and Eritrea conducted perhaps the most absurd war of modern times, over a swatch of barren territory, with the loss of an estimated 80,000 lives. A tragicomedy ensued recently as those impoverished states, both led by former Marxists, tugged at U.S. military planners to base American installations on their side of the border.
With persistent warfare in the Mano River zone of West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea), the violent fissuring of Ivory Coast, and the massive threats to personal security posed by famine and AIDS, it is arguable that the security needs of the African people exceed those of any other on earth. Their profound problems risk being overshadowed as Africa becomes, once again, an arena of proxy global conflicts -- witness the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the anti-Israeli attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, late last year. Complicating this scenario is the resumption by the conservative government of Jacques Chirac in France -- following its defeat of Lionel Jospin and the Socialist Party in presidential and parliamentary elections last year -- of unrestrained coddling of African leaders, including Zimbabwe's Mugabe, regardless of their repressive rule.
The National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, recently released by the White House, urges all countries to crack down on terrorist networks and threatens to "compel" recalcitrant ones to do so. Such blunt directives can have adverse consequences on a continent with weak civil liberties and the rule of law, where autocrats are eager to slip behind the counterterrorism banner. Even Charles Taylor, one of Africa's most war-prone leaders, calls his elite regiment in Liberia the Anti-Terrorist Unit.
As in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Soviet occupiers, there has never been a comprehensive Western commitment to rebuild Africa in compensation for the travails inflicted by geopolitics. In the tragic case of Liberia, which has lost a 10th of its population and decades of development to warlordism and tyranny, American political leaders continue to disavow principal responsibility for rescuing a country that for many years was the site of American navigational tracking stations, important diplomatic and intelligence communication facilities, and airports readily available to support American military and other missions on the continent. When the country slid into anarchic warfare after 1989, which subsequently spread to Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, the United States persistently refused to extend its involvement beyond lending support to ineffective peacemakers from the region and overseas. The assistant secretary of state for Africa under the first Bush administration, Herman Cohen, has written an unusually candid account of the United States' cynical policy in Liberia in Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent (2000).
The current creation of a U.S. operational base in the small country of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and regular NATO patrols along the Somali coast are just the visible aspects of enhanced American security operations in Africa. There should be an urgent and careful review of such intensifying American intervention to ensure that it complements rather than overwhelms Africa's abundant human-security needs. Unless development, state-building, and democratization are kept uppermost, a grim harvest may be reaped when American priorities eventually shift, leaving behind fragmented, demoralized, and deeply corrupted societies. That was a side story of the cold war that has been well-documented -- from Monrovia to Mogadishu and from Khartoum to Kinshasa. The first chapter of the next volume may already have been written.
As I've argued, a positive outcome of enhanced U.S. engagement with Africa depends on the strengthening of democratic governance and the rebuilding, in a sustainable way, of social and economic infrastructures. In 1968, the sociologist Stanislav Andreski wrote a provocative book entitled The African Predicament: A Study in the Pathology of Modernisation. Andreski claimed that "the newly independent African states provide some of the closest approximations to pure kleptocracy that have been recorded." During the last three decades, African governments could have proved Andreski wrong. Instead, the use of the term "kleptocratic" to describe African governments has gone from verboten to commonplace. At a recent meeting in Washington at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Liberian opposition leader and business executive, dismissed the Liberian government as an "autocratic kleptocracy." In a room packed with Liberian and American policy analysts, no one objected.
Entrenched political corruption throughout Africa has become just one element of a broader phenomenon that I call "catastrophic governance." I define that as endemic practices that steadily undermine a country's capacity to increase the supply of public goods to serve the basic needs of its population, including the security of life itself. The drumroll of catastrophes in Africa, like the loss of 1,863 people in the September sinking of the Joola, a Senegalese ferry operated by the military, off the Gambian coast, are seldom "natural disasters." Today, international donors are committed to increasing development assistance to Africa. What has not sufficiently seized their attention is the imperative of enhancing institutional capacity within Africa to make productive use of those new funds, as well as of Africa's own resources.
Numerous studies detail the sad record of low returns from financial assistance to Africa -- for example, the award-winning book by the political scientist Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979-1999 (2001). Van de Walle contends that the failure to accelerate economic growth in Africa, despite two decades of "unprecedented aid flows," is largely attributable to governance and institutional deficiencies. Key institutions in every sector -- health, transportation, education, public utilities -- continue to be eroded from within. In Malawi, as the specter of drought appeared in 2002, it was discovered that the country's strategic maize reserves had been sold without authorization, and for personal benefit, by the very officials responsible for managing them. During a visit in March 2000 to the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, where I had taught two decades earlier, I looked across a barren area at what was once a thriving animal farm. It had been pilfered and mismanaged out of existence, a story that can be repeated ad nauseam across the continent.
How can a revolution in African governance be effected that would build complexes of institutions, from local to national levels, that operate efficiently and synergistically? That is the fundamental question we face today.
In answering that question, scholars have a major role to play. With the end of the cold war, African studies -- and area studies generally -- were increasingly dismissed as outmoded. In today's new "age of strife," a priority must be given to building multidisciplinary understanding of specific regions to improve policies. The traditional sphere of African studies must be expanded beyond the humanities and social sciences to permit us to tap critically needed expertise in law, business, medicine, public administration, public health, communications, journalism, engineering, computer science, and the natural sciences. That endeavor will require sharp increases in funding for policy-relevant research in many disciplines, and the training of a new generation of scholar-analysts in Africa and the United States.
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In 1994, I co-chaired one of the working groups of a White House Conference on Africa -- the first of its kind -- that brought together academic researchers, government officials, and policy analysts. There was, however, no follow-up to that important initiative. It is pertinent that there are no major partisan divisions in the United States today over Africa policy. The Bush administration has expanded important policies begun under the Clinton administration, just as the latter carried forward the essential African policy objectives of its predecessor. What we gravely lack is a systematic understanding of how Africa's poor development performance can be reversed. We know what has gone wrong. The design of effective solutions, however, will require the level of institutional collaboration that is traditionally mobilized to address issues of high public concern. The time has come to marshal the immense intellectual resources in our colleges and universities, at home and overseas, through partnerships with governments, nongovernmental organizations, and private businesses, to tackle Africa's predicament in all its ramifications and complexities.
Last spring, I proposed that "smart partnerships" be created for Africa to complement the elaborate frameworks for assistance being advocated. Central to smart partnerships would be one overriding commitment: building sustainable institutions that actually work as intended and expand the supply of public goods. Two hypothetical examples can be provided. In a climate of intensified global economic competition, African countries must rapidly acquire the capacity to respond flexibly to market opportunities. For African countries to make the leap to sustainable growth, their entrepreneurs, government executives, and university researchers must be able to draw on the resources of overseas coalitions, through mutually designed partnerships, to bolster their operational capacity quickly.
Another example concerns Africa's AIDS pandemic, which, it is universally recognized, can only be defeated by a global campaign. No major organization now tackling the profound crisis has, to my knowledge, looked to the academy for the multidisciplinary approach required to overcome a catastrophe that touches virtually every facet of public life: health, employment, gender relations, the care of orphans, property rights, social ethics, mass communication, and the responsible use of international aid funds.
As the recently appointed director of Northwestern University's Program of African Studies, I can now pursue the vision of smart partnerships in association with colleagues in the United States and other countries. Northwestern possesses the oldest center, established in 1948, devoted to the study of Africa in the United States. The university's renowned Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, created in 1954, is the largest library worldwide for research on Africa, and Northwestern's president, Henry S. Bienen, is a distinguished student of African politics. With an array of world-class professional schools, the university can take the lead internationally in establishing developmental partnerships with African institutions that I have advocated for many years.
The Bush administration should be commended for new policies that focus government attention on debilitating crises in Africa. However, we have to go further. The time is ripe to direct more of our scholarly resources to addressing those challenges, and to do so as genuine partners of African institutions. There is also a need to draw on the insights and energies of the many Africans who have now settled overseas and pursue successful careers in Western institutions. They and their associations have much to contribute to programs designed to turn the tide of catastrophic governance and widening insecurity in Africa.
In his commencement address at Northwestern University last June, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan emphasized the importance of tackling global poverty. He pointedly remarked that "issues that once seemed very far away are suddenly very close to home, as if they were in your backyard. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream." After September 11, 2001, most of us have become more aware that we do, indeed, live downstream from misrule, conflict, poverty, and institutional decay in other less-fortunate areas of the world. Our security, more than ever before, is interwoven with the security of peoples in very distant lands. While our vulnerabilities differ in character, they connect us nonetheless to African villagers worried about clean water, schools and infirmaries, the clear-cutting of their forests by logging companies, and the wildfire of AIDS. In the penumbra between war and peace in which we now conduct our professional and family lives, we in the academy must resolutely take up a challenge that unites rather than divides us: transforming governance, strengthening institutions, and reconstructing states and economies throughout Africa.
Richard A. Joseph is a professor of political science and director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. He was the fellow for African governance at the Carter Center from 1988 to 1994. His books include Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
This article first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 7, 2003.
