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Source: The Guardian Saturday June 12, 1999


How did we get into this mess?


by Larry Elliott


A cocktail of colonisation, Cold War, apartheid - and corruption - has plunged Africa into poverty

Imagine a family in the west having lower living standards now than it did in 1960 - before the Beatles, before compact discs, before mass ownership of fridges and dishwashers, before supermarkets stuffed full of ready-prepared Kenyan green beans. Unimaginable? In the west, certainly. Yet that is what has befallen 10 countries in Africa. Imagine, too, that over the past 25 years, since the end of the golden age in 1970, per capita incomes in Britain had fallen by 20%. Yet that is what the past quarter century has brought the average African household. In 1960, per capita incomes in Africa were three times those in east Asia, now they are less than half as high.

Africa's slow economic development has meant that the average life expectancy and infant mortality lags behind the rest of the world, and the gap is growing ever wider. Whereas in developing countries across the globe, life expectancy has risen from 46 to 62 since the early 1960s, for sub-Saharan Africa it is 50.

As the millennium approaches, the impression is of Africa as the continent that progress forgot. While east Asia has been a model of rapid economic development over the past four decades, and even Latin America has managed to discover the benefits of democracy, Africa has lagged further and further behind, caught in a cycle of war, poverty and misery.

Like all stereotypes, this can be misleading. Botswana has enjoyed a faster rate of growth since 1960 than Hong Kong or Singapore; other countries have enjoyed rapid if unsustained economic expansion at various times since independence. The 1990's have seen democracy sweep sub-Saharan Africa in what the United Nations describes as, "an event just as dramatic as the political changes in the Soviet Union, though it has received much less attention from the world community. Nearly all countries in the region have undertaken democratic reforms and legalized opposition parties, changes often championed by students, labour unions and other civil society movements."

In time, the reforms may bear fruit. But time is something that Africa does not have; in the new global economy, you do not get 150 years to catch up. The gap between rich and poor countries is accelerating; in 1960, 20% of the world's wealthiest had 30 times the income of the poorest 20%; by 1995, that figure had grown to 82 times. Democratic developments that took centuries to flower in the west are expected elsewhere to be successful overnight. The transition to market economies - long, irregular and often brutal in Britain, the US and Germany - must happen instantaneously. Africa has serious problems, and 10 big themes stand out:

1. The delicate balance of Africa's environment has been disrupted, with devastating consequences particularly in semi-arid areas - for example, the cycle of drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.

2. The legacy of colonialism has cast a long shadow. The nation states created by Western cartographers owed more to the wheelings and dealings of European diplomats in the late 19th century than to any understanding of existing borders along tribal or geographical lines. Post-colonial independence meant fragmented states that were often too small to be economically viable, and cut off from the rest of the world.

3. The ramshackle way in which the colonial powers withdrew in the 1950s and 1960s intensified the birthpangs of independence. They bequeathed political systems without the civil institutions necessary to support them, and after decades of undermining pre-existing social structures. The new nations were often unstable and many were caught in vicious civil wars.

4. Africa was an arena of the Cold War: the US and the Soviet Union propped up regimes favourable to them, and the US backed terrorist movements. So, for example, the strategic importance of the Horn of Africa saw the Soviet Union backing Somalia while the United States stood behind Ethiopia in the 60s. In the 1970s, following the Ethiopian revolution, Moscow changed sides and backed Ethiopia in the war against Somalia, which then became an important American strategic asset. In Angola, the civil war which followed independence in 1974 saw the South Africans, backed by Washington, supporting Unita, while the MPLA was provided with arms by the Soviet Union and "advised" by thousands of Cubans. Moreover, the impact of the cold war spilled over into neighbouring states. Zaire was used by the Americans as a base for operations in Angola, which meant billions of dollars were squandered propping up the Mobutu regime.

5. Apartheid was a major brake on development for the whole of southern Africa, affecting all the frontline states. Countries such as Mozambique and Angola were deliberately destabilised, and Namibia was illegally occupied.

6. The proxy cold war struggle of the 1970s coincided with the onset of a severe economic downturn in the west. Recession brought collapsing commodity prices and economic retrenchment.

7. There has been economic mismanagement on a colossal scale. The temptation to use the power of the state to cut across racial and cultural divides coincided with the belief that large-scale interventionism was the wave of the future, persuading the leaders of the new states and their western advisers into many hugely expensive investment projects.

8. Such projects were financed with loans which are, in part, the origins of the current debt crisis - sub-Saharan Africa owes the west a staggering £225bn. It takes two to party, and those western lenders who extended lines of credit when it was obvious that the poor nations were in no state ever to repay were complicit in the build-up of unpayable debts.

9. Widespread corruption has ensured that much aid intended for Africa lined the pockets of officials and governments, and was used to build mansions and private jets, or diverted to private bank accounts.

10. What has made life for many Africans even harder in the last two decades has been the "cruel to be kind strategy" of the International Monetary Fund. The structural adjustment programmes which it has forced on countries as a condition of loans or debt relief usually include draconian cuts in health, education and sanitation to meet western targets for fiscal prudence.

The result of the interplay of these 10 points has been profound. Sub-Saharan Africa has a rapidly rising population of just over 600m, but per capita incomes have been falling because growth has not been fast enough to match the forces of demography. The UN human development index, which looks at life expectancy, literacy and income, has only five African countries in the top 100 and 18 in the bottom 20. We cannot comfort ourselves that this gap will eventually narrow.

As David Landes sums it up in his book, the Wealth and Poverty of Nations:

"Is the gap still growing today?

"At the extremes, clearly yes_Some countries are not only not gaining; they are growing poorer. Our task [the rich countries], in our own interest as well as theirs, is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier. If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make; and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people."



Key
SILIC: Severely indebted low-income country
(or HIPC: Highly indebted poor country)
SIMIC: Severely indebted middle-income country
MILIC: Moderately indebted low-income country



Jubilee 2000

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