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Viewpoint A continent stressed to the breaking point
By PETER WALSHE
Recently the CBS program 60
Minutes did a piece on basketball star Dikembe Mutumbo of the Atlanta
Hawks, accompanying him to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mutumbo, who had just signed a four-year contract with the Hawks for $14
million a year, was donating a multimillion-dollar hospital to his hometown.
For four decades, the Congo (formerly known as Zaire) was the key U.S. client
state in sub-Saharan Africa. When Mobutu Sese Sekos post-colonial
dictatorship finally imploded in 1997, he left the country wracked by civil
war, ravaged by AIDS, its infrastructure ruined and its natural resources
pillaged by transnational corporations in collusion with local thugs, military
and civilian.
Ed Bradley and the 60 Minutes crew presented an
unsparing picture of Kinshasas medical facilities. A few overworked,
unsalaried doctors and nurses struggled to provide a minimum of care for the
injured, diseased and dying -- only when the sick could afford a modest
payment. Medication often had to be obtained on the black market. In one moving
scene we saw Mutumbo weeping beside his mothers grave. She had recently
died for want of elementary medical care.
What 60 Minutes did not report was that one quarter of
the youngest children, those who followed their seven-foot hero through
Kinshasas decaying streets, will die of measles or other preventable
diseases well before they reach adolescence. Of the survivors at least
one-third will succumb to AIDS by their late 20s. Few of those who live will
find employment.
The viewer was left wondering what Mutumbos gift could
accomplish where medical services, the electricity grid, transport,
telecommunications, the civil service, schools, courts and police were in a
state of collapse.
These conditions and their underlying causes are not confined to
the Congo; they can be found throughout tropical Africa. In the aftermath of
independence in the 1960s, per capita income declined. There was an increase in
malnutrition and environmental deterioration. Rural flight and rapid
urbanization led to expanding slums and the erosion of traditional cultures.
Towns and cities more than doubled in size each decade. Constitutions,
bequeathed by departing European colonial powers to the artificial states they
had created, were soon swept away and replaced by one-party systems or military
regimes. A population explosion, reaching the highest growth rates in human
history, stressed to breaking point state services and the organizations of
civil society. An unreformed agriculture sector, where 75 percent of the
population worked, could not produce sufficient food for millions of young
mouths.
Funding for schools, clinics, court systems, the police and civil
service dried up. All of this fueled ethnic and class tensions. In the process
of repressing the resulting discontent, the military were politicized and coups
proliferated. All too often, army officers joined civilian elites in using
state offices for private gain.
No money for modernization
The population explosion ran well ahead of any capacity to develop
an economic surplus for modernization -- that is, internal sources of savings
for investment. Widespread poverty limited private savings; so did the
consumerism of elites who were also stashing loot in foreign banks. Foreign
corporations leveraged highly favorable tax deals but focused narrowly on raw
material exports, refusing to reinvest their profits to diversify local
economies. African states also failed to raise funds for development. They were
either unable to generate sufficient tax revenue to sustain existing government
services, or corrupt civilian and military elites diverted funds to personal
accounts. Such was the case in oil-rich Nigeria and Mobutus mineral-rich
Zaire.
Without an adequate flow of tax revenue, governments turned to
deficit financing that fueled inflation, often at rates exceeding 100 percent.
This eroded civil service salaries. Teachers, magistrates, nurses and doctors
could not survive on their incomes. Soon most state employees succumbed to some
degree of bribery. These trends were exacerbated by an acute shortage of
foreign exchange as tropical Africas terms of trade deteriorated. Ghana,
for example, saw the price of cocoa, its major export, collapse. In the wake of
this continuing inability to earn sufficient foreign exchange, and OPECs
oil price hikes in the 1970s, country after country borrowed heavily to sustain
imports.
By the 1980s the regions debt service problem dwarfed that
of Latin America, often chewing up 40 percent of a countrys meager
foreign exchange earnings. The result was an inability to import essentials --
from fertilizer to medicines, electric generators, spare parts for vehicles and
schoolbooks. This crisis was deepened by the failure to reform agriculture,
which by the 1980s led to the use of precious foreign exchange to import staple
foods. Cash crops for export had been given attention, but not food production
for rapidly expanding populations. By the 1990s Zambias predicament was
typical. It was spending five times as much on repaying foreign debt as on
education and medical services combined.
If these problems were not enough, the horror of the AIDS pandemic
now threatens large regions. From the core areas of infection in East and
Central Africa, the virus traveled south, moving rapidly via the transport
system, military conflict and migratory labor. Where malnutrition, malaria and
tuberculosis were already endemic, at least 25 million Africans are now
infected with AIDS. Approximately 25 percent of the population in Zambia,
Botswana and Zimbabwe is HIV positive; working populations are being decimated
and orphans are counted in the millions. While the ready supply of low cost
generic drugs to combat this calamity has yet to be pried from the
transnational pharmaceutical corporations, Africans themselves must bear
responsibility too. For far to long the virus has been given free range by
widespread male promiscuity and a gross failure of political leadership to
challenge the machismo cultures of denial.
Protest grows in 80s,
90s
Moved in part by sheer desperation, political protest movements
began to form in the 1980s and 1990s. This has been called Africas second
liberation struggle, an attempt to claw back power from the continents
corrupt elites. In many countries, incompetent military or civilian cabals gave
way to national conventions, new constitutions and multi-party politics. The
World Bank and International Monetary Fund provided fresh loans to support the
new regimes, but insisted on harsh Structural Adjustment Programs. These
required the sharp devaluation of African currencies, the phasing out of
deficit financing, and increased taxes. They also mandated the privatizing of
state-owned enterprises -- for example, utilities -- and slashed social
services, including education and medical programs. Foreign capital, it was
assumed, would move into this new environment as more financially responsible
governments were charged with raising revenue and curtailing state services.
For a few years stagnant economies began to grow as the export of
raw materials (foods, fibers and minerals) increased. There was greater access
to foreign exchange. Tax revenues improved and inflation subsided. However,
positive trends soon tapered off. Given tropical Africas political
fragility and inadequate infrastructure, the anticipated private investment
from abroad failed to materialize. The continents chronic debt service
problem put a severe limit on further development loans from the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund.
Functioning political systems -- for example in Ghana, Nigeria,
Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and the Ivory Coast -- look increasingly fragile. Where
corrupt regimes remain entrenched, or weaker predatory states have imploded,
brutal conflicts continue -- as in the Sudan, Congo, the Horn of Africa,
Burundi, Angola, Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Rather than the short-term fix of Structural Adjustment Programs
that opened up an unprepared region to the gale-force winds of global
competition, sub-Saharan Africa needs comprehensive debt forgiveness. The
region also needs something like the Marshall Plan, under which for a decade
after World War II the United States bolstered the economic and political
recovery of Western Europe. In Africas case, however, the challenge is
more complex: to create a consortium of nations, international institutions and
non-governmental organizations ready to provide supportive development
financing, foreign exchange and technical assistance over the next 50
years.
Such an aid program could help to strengthen democratic processes,
restore state institutions, including the civil service and courts, and expand
basic services. It would not be an alternative to market economics. Its aim
would be to establish a context where community development programs,
Africas entrepreneurs and foreign investors would contribute their
energies to a sustained recovery. Despairing media images have obscured the
continents potential, its cultural riches, the resilience and ingenuity
of its peoples. With appropriate international assistance, Africa will be able
to regain control of its own destiny, use and conserve its treasure trove of
natural resources and participate successfully in the global economy.
U.S. response is laughable
The response of the United States to Africas intractable
problems has been laughable. While modest debt forgiveness is being negotiated
in the wake of initiatives taken by the European Union, the panacea offered by
the Clinton administration and Congress has been that of unrestrained market
forces. Legislation to assist Africa has in essence promoted free
trade and the interests of transnational corporations. The Bush administration
will be even less sympathetic, more closed-minded.
Looked at over half a century, U.S. long-term economic aid for the
destitute of our planet has shrunk dramatically. The Marshall Plan transferred
approximately 3.5 percent of the U.S. gross national product to assist Europe
in the late 1940s and 1950s. Later, in the early 1970s, the United States
supported a United Nations resolution that exhorted industrialized countries to
provide .7 percent of their GNP as economic aid for poor regions. During this
time, the United States was allocating approximately .5 percent of its GNP,
albeit skewing this in the Cold War toward strategically important client
states. Today, U.S. economic aid to all areas of global poverty stands at less
than .1 percent of GNP -- which leaves it at the bottom of the aid table (with
European countries contributing in the range of .3 to .8 percent of GNP).
Of this U.S. aid, sub-Saharan Africa receives under $1 billion a
year. (Israel receives over $3 billion.) Perhaps the ultimate abdication of
moral responsibility came in late 2000 with Washingtons belated response
to Africas AIDS pandemic: a $1 billion loan from the Export Import Bank
to purchase drugs from U.S. pharmaceutical companies. One is hard pressed to
imagine a more cynical example of usury -- the sin of lending surplus funds to
take advantage of anothers disadvantage.
A U.S. president working with a committed Congress and cooperating
with the United Nations, members of the European Union, Japan and other
industrialized nations, could make a big difference. While there is no
definitive blueprint, one scenario would be a reformed World Bank radically
changing its Structural Adjustment Programs. In this it would need to work in
cooperation with democratically elected African governments and a revived
Organization of African Unity. United Nations agencies -- including the World
Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and Childrens
Fund -- should be part of the emerging consortium. In addition,
non-governmental organizations like OXFAM and Catholic Relief Services could be
supported in their already impressive, although underfunded, projects.
To help finance such an initiative, the United States would have
to improve on its appalling .1 percent of GNP for aid and move towards .7
percent for the destitute regions of the world -- with sub-Saharan Africa at
the top of the list. It could make a modest start by diverting 1 percent of the
current military budget for the projected African aid program. This in itself
would more than triple Washingtons intended appropriation for African
development assistance in 2001.
Of course all of this will remain a pipe-dream while U.S. politics
are hostage to corporate funding and an ideology of free market economics dulls
the humane instincts of so many of its citizens. In the meantime, sub-Saharan
Africa faces its overwhelming problems without significant support from the
worlds superpower -- which for decades has loudly proclaimed a commitment
to human rights, international cooperation and the eradication of poverty
around the world.
Peter Walshe is professor of government and international
studies at the University of Notre Dame. His e-mail address is
a.p.walshe.1@nd.edu
National Catholic Reporter, April 20,
2001
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