Source: Carnegie
Much of the world sees Africa as one of two extremes. Either it is a continent beset by genocidal warfare, corrupt leaders, and rampant poverty or it is a region that is about to enter a renaissance. But Africa is neither on the verge of widespread anarchy nor at the dawn of democratic and economic renewal. These misperceptions are shaped by a mixture of old red herrings, new myths, and hasty conclusions.
African Instability Is the Legacy of Artificial Colonial Borders
No. It is true that colonial powers established African boundaries. Some of these borders cut across old African states or separate people anthropologists classify as members of the same tribe, regardless of whether or not these individuals ever considered themselves as such in precolonial days. But what else is new? All borders, except perhaps those of small island states, are artificial. Many borders separate members of distinct ethnic groups, and in countries with long histories, the modern state is superimposed on a veritable graveyard of obsolete political entities.
What makes Africa unstable is not the artificiality of its borders but the artificiality of its states. African states attained independence through agreements with the former colonial powers, not through the emergence of strong leaders and governments that could establish effective control over territory and extract the resources necessary to sustain an independent state. During the Cold War, the rival power blocs imposed an artificial, tenuous stability on the continent by propping up the corrupt leaders of client states. Had these African nations been forced to defend themselves against powerful neighbors and establish their political and economic viability, as states have had to do historically, few would have survived.
In recent years, economic decline and the decay of administrative structures have further weakened the capacity of most African states to govern effectively. The authoritarianism of many African governments, coupled with their incapacity to project power throughout their countries, has provided a fertile breeding ground for armed opposition movements. This situation has given way to a paradox wherein governments can easily arrest political opposition leaders in their capital cities but have little capacity to curb even minor armed insurgencies in rural areas. Civil wars further undermine economic conditions and weaken the governments already tenuous hold on power. War becomes a means of livelihood for young men without prospects.
A New Generation of African Leaders Is Committed to Economic Reform and Democracy
Sadly, no. A new generation of leaders is beginning to emerge, but its members are not committed to democracy. They are intent on building government apparatuses that can discharge the basic task of maintaining security and stability over their entire territories. They are determined to promote economic development and to reconstruct the state administrative capacity. But they remain extremely suspicious of popular participation and even more so of party politics. Among the so-called new leaders are Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi, and Rwandan vice president Paul Kagame.
These men represent a new generation in terms of their ideas, not their ages. All have come to power by winning a civil war and, consequently, they believe in the importance of force, strong organization, and good strategy. Contrary to most African leaders of the "old generation," Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, or, even today, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who were largely economic illiterates, they have a good grasp of the imperatives of the market. In so far as they have a model of economic and political development, it is neither the "African socialism" of the early days of African independence nor the Marxism-Leninism that guided them when they started their own wars. It is not even the democracy-and-free-market model that multilateral and bilateral donors preach. This new generation believes in a mixture of strong political control, limited popular participation, and economic liberalization that allows for a strong state role in regulating the market - South Korea, Taiwan, and even Singapore are viewed as models to be emulated.
The African Renaissance Has Come and Gone
Think again. The idea of an African renaissance, a term given currency by South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki, caught hold for a while as an apt metaphor for a series of positive events occurring on the continent, a corrective to the horrors of Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Apartheid ended in South Africa, economic growth showed signs of renewal even in countries long-considered basket cases such as Mozambique, and stability returned to Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda after decades of civil unrest. This perception of a renaissance prompted President Bill Clinton to visit Africa and, amidst much fanfare, call for a partnership with the "new leaders" who seemed to personify this change.
Then, three months after President Clinton left Africa, Ethiopia and Eritrea almost went to war over a seemingly trivial border issue. President Laurent Kabila revealed his mediocre abilities as a leader when he failed to consolidate power in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country slipped into crisis with Uganda and Rwanda backing antigovernment rebels, and Angola, Chad, Namibia, and Zimbabwe coming to Kabila's rescue. It was, as one American official observed, Africa's first world war. Suddenly, the renaissance was out, anarchy was back in.
But not so fast. Renaissance and war are not necessarily antithetical - the European renaissance was hardly a period of peace and stability. The most important precondition for a sustained revival in Africa entails restructuring its many failed states. While the idea of reviving failed states by embracing democracy and the free market is appealing, it is unrealistic. Elections and economic reform do not cause domestic armed movements to disappear, nor do they prevent conflicts in decaying neighboring states from spilling over borders.
The Age of Empire has truly ended in the 1990s. The political order imposed by the colonial powers and maintained until recently by U.S.-Soviet rivalry and French interventionism can no longer be taken for granted. States will survive only if they can establish domestic control and defend themselves against outside infringement. African nations must make up for lost time and establish a balance of power on the continent that they can maintain on their own. Diplomacy undoubtedly has a role to play here, and Africans are attempting to negotiate solutions in many conflicts, from Burundi to Sudan. But it is unlikely that a new balance of power, sustainable without outside intervention, can be established without conflicts. History suggests otherwise. Conflict is probably an intrinsic part of an African renaissance and not necessarily a sign of the so-called coming anarchy.
Africans Must Take More Responsibility for Solving Their Own Problems
Yes, and they are beginning to do so. But have African leaders been shouldered with the burden of implementing non-African solutions to their own problems? And is the rest of the world willing to live with African solutions that they do not necessarily favor?
Consider, for example, the U.S.-sponsored African Crisis Response Initiative, which mandates the training and equipping in some countries of military units that can be mobilized and deployed in peacemaking and peacekeeping operations. These units would enforce policies blessed by the international community, obviating the need for non-African troops in trouble spots such as Sierra Leone or Rwanda. Many African countries, including South Africa, have been leery of the initiative, suspecting that it is simply a means to get Africans to implement policies not of their own making.
When it comes to issues such as conflict resolution and economic development, genuine African solutions vary considerably. The international community has approved some of these initiatives, such as the attempts of the Inter-governmental Authority on Development, an East African agency that changed its focus from the threat of drought and locust infestation to that of conflict, to negotiate an agreement in Sudan. Others are more controversial, such as the interventions led by the Economic Community of West African States Ceasefire Monitoring Observer Group (ECOMOG) in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The world placed its stamp of approval on ECOMOG as a laudable African peacemaking effort, but in doing so glossed over an unsettling development. Successive Nigerian military governments provided the bulk of ECOMOG peacekeeping forces, raising the specter of a growing Nigerian hegemony over West Africa.
Other African solutions have been condemned outright by the international community as crude and unethical, even when the rest of the world has been unwilling to support the principled alternatives. The elimination of the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire by Rwandan troops and the forces of Kabila in 1996 is a prime example. The refugee camps were dominated by Hutu forces guilty of genocide. These forces were reorganizing and rearming even as they were being fed and housed by humanitarian agencies that did not have the means to separate bona fide refugees from members of murderous military groups. The international community was unwilling to send in a UN force capable of separating refugees from members of militias because of both the danger and expense involved. Rwanda could not afford to let the genocidaires rearm on its borders and broke up the camps by force. The international community condemned the action.
This story illustrates a perennial dilemma: Africans do not have the means to develop textbook solutions to difficult problems. Theoretically, the international community has the means to implement these solutions but is unwilling to do so. Africans intervene and provide solutions in line with their means and inclinations. The international community has the luxury to denounce the outcome.
Africa Is a Major Financial Burden on the International Community
Not at all. Africa is disproportionately aid dependent, but it does not receive a disproportionate amount of aid. This misperception confuses the actual amount of money African countries receive, which is relatively small, with the importance of that assistance relative to the countries' gross national products (GNPs).
Collectively, sub-Saharan Africa receives a little more than one-fourth of all official multilateral and bilateral assistance in the world. It receives approximately 7 percent of U.S. foreign aid. About one-tenth of official development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa consists of emergency funds to victims of natural and human-made catastrophes. On a per capita basis, the region receives slightly more on average than other low-income countries but only about one-fifteenth as much as Israel.
African countries, however, continue to depend so heavily on international aid because their economies are so small and so depressed that even modest amounts of funding represent a huge percentage of their GNPs and government budgets. Twenty-two of the thirty most aid-dependent countries in the world are in Africa.
Globalization Is Bypassing Africa
True. By any standard, African countries remain marginal to all global trends. The basic facts are discouraging. With just over 10 percent of the world population, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only about 1.5 percent of world trade. It receives less than .6 percent of foreign direct investment, while portfolio investment is essentially nonexistent, except for South Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa has only 15 telephone mainlines per every 1,000 people, compared with a worldwide average of 133 per every 1,000 people. A reliable estimate of how many personal computers, fax machines, and mobile telephones Africans own is not even available. Information is poorly distributed - access to newspapers, radio, and television is the lowest in the world. The continent is economically, socially, and culturally marginalized. Even South Africa, its most developed and globally integrated country, falls well below world averages on most indicators of global integration.
While current conditions are dismal, some trends look promising. Foreign direct investment more than doubled in the 1990s. Even more significantly, at least some of the new investment is going to countries such as Uganda that are not big oil or mineral producers, indicating that investors are beginning to look at new opportunities. And although investors, particularly American ones, remain shy of a continent where they have no experience and which they perceive as politically unstable, the number of corporations, particularly small ones, interested in exploring opportunities in Africa is growing steadily.
There is also a growing web of informal contacts linking Africa to Europe and the United States. As African immigrant communities grow in both regions, so does a flow of remittances and information that does not appear yet in official statistics. African diasporas support families at home and provide funds for investment. And they provide an unprecedented conduit for information: Few Africans have e-mail yet, but there are enough of them to link informal communications networks - the African radio trottoir (radio sidewalk), or "bush telegraph" - into a global network, with information about yesterday's events in an African city discussed in Washington today and vice versa.
France Is Africa's Worst Enemy
Get over it. It is time to stop obsessing about the French in Africa. Their influence is rapidly waning. With the passing from the political scene of the old generation of Gaullist Africanists, Paris is becoming more concerned about the cost-benefit ratio of its Africa policy. Military intervention is no longer an automatic response to African crises.
More fundamentally, no evidence exists to suggest that the political and economic problems of Francophone countries are different from those of the rest of the continent. None of the countries facing the most critical problems at present - Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, or Sudan - were French colonies.
South Africa Is the Engine That Will Modernize the Continent
Possibly, but not right away. South Africa must first restructure its own economy. With a GNP representing about 45 percent of the total for sub-Saharan Africa, a per capita GNP of $3,520 compared with a continental average of $490, good roads and railroads, numerous ports, an extended electricity grid, and adequate telecommunications networks, South Africa appears to be a "First World country in Africa," as white South Africans used to argue.
But look again. South Africa's economy is heavily dependent on the export of minerals, particularly gold, and gold prices have been low for years and will probably remain so. Its industry has been highly protected, its agriculture highly subsidized. Unless major reforms are undertaken, South Africa will be unable to compete easily in the world markets. The list of necessary changes is daunting: greater flexibility in the labor market, lower wages for unskilled entry-level workers, land reform, privatization, reform of the tariff structure, and massive investment in education and training - in other words, a complete overhaul.
Politically, these reforms are extremely difficult to implement. Apartheid has left a dismal social legacy of immense urban squatter camps and rural areas too crowded for agriculture, a population insufficiently educated for the needs of a modern economy, and a lasting desire to redress old grievances. The powerful labor unions, closely allied with the ruling African National Congress, are making economic restructuring more difficult. South Africa's estimated unemployment rate is over 30 percent, and its crime rate is among the highest in the world, not only for violent crime but also for white-collar crimes such as corruption, embezzlement, and, reflecting the country's greater technological sophistication, computer crime. Economic statistics reflect the situation. In 1998, the stock market fell by more than 30 percent (in U.S. dollar terms), and the rand was devalued by 20 percent. The country lost 100,000 formal-sector jobs because of international competition and domestic restructuring. After years of sluggish growth, GNP has started contracting, fueling fears of a prolonged recession. It will be a while before this engine can pull a continent.