AFRICANEWS

AFRICA

The way to Africa's prosperity

Poverty, hunger and war continue to dog many parts of Africa while other continents prosper. When will the continent's leaders adopt people-friendly policies to lift Africa out of poverty?

It's an old game. Journalists from the West just love to describe the African despot. Here's a line from the Economist, an influential weekly published in Britain, describing Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi's visit to Kampala, Uganda, in 1986: "He (Muamar) emerged to a welcoming hug from President Yoweri Museveni. He then inspected the guard of honour in their plain gumboots."

"His advance party, in two Ilyushin transport aircraft, brought his helicopter and his splendiferous lime-green bullet-proof BMW. Two Boeing 707s and a 707 borrowed from Syrian Airlines, brought 600-odd security guards plus diplomats, secretaries, photographers and hangers-on."

Quite a good description of good living. The irony though is that this is a leader of a Third World country making the best out of life. Such stories about Africa abound in international news publications side by side with ones on wars and famine.

Even before the Kenyan Catholic Bishops termed the famine situation facing many parts of the country a national disaster, the news had reached much of Europe. Those who know I'm a Kenyan come to me with sorrowful faces. They live me with the impression that they liked the news.

Question: who is to blame for Africa's long list of problems?. The answer is obvious. The greed of African leaders has caused millions to perish. Take the case of the current crisis in Zaire, the huge central African nation with large copper and diamonds deposits.

While war rages on in the eastern part of the country pitting the government forces and the Banyamulenge rebels, ailing president Mobutu Sese Seko has been on-and-off to Europe for specialised cancer treatment - spending a good deal of his time there in a French luxury resort. Mobutu's family members have fled to Europe.

While millions in the West and parts of Asia enjoy high standards of living, much of Africa might seem like hell on earth: the civil war in eastern Zaire and Southern Sudan, the disintegration of Somalia and Liberia, the uneasy peace in Nigeria and the Central African Republic, the still-open wounds of the Rwandan genocide that threatens to spill over to neighbouring Burundi.

Freedom and opulence, for instance, now allow countries like the Netherlands to legalise use of drugs. So while the youth in the West and rich Asia enjoy the prime of their lives, their African counterparts wallow in poverty.

Africa's problems can be traced to the colonial era which did not lay the right foundation for an enlightened society. The British, in particular used the divide-and rule system which encouraged tribalism. Some tribes were favoured while others were scorned. The upshot of this is that when the British left, unity became almost impossible to achieve amongst the various tribes in the former colonies. Even educated intellectuals perceive themselves as members of their tribes first and then the country.

On their part, the French employed the system of assimilation whose objective was to make their colonies extensions of the mother-country. The elites in the colonies were even granted French citizenship and this effectively uprooted the feeling of nationhood from them.

Who would have dreamt that the French and the Belgians would one day fail to send soldiers to crush an uprising in Zaire as is happening now? The fact is that the two former colonial masters can not any more afford to intervene. With the help of the US, they did intervene in Haiti after the 1991 military coup. But the US is reluctant to return to Africa after the bloody lesson of Somalia when 60 of her soldiers were killed by a warlord's gunmen.

And in Europe, many countries are being forced to keep their expenditures low in order to meet the criteria for joining the single currency planned for 1999. Military adventures in Africa are an expensive intervention best left out all together.

A key problem with Africa is the high level of corruption in public life: some people just want to get rich too quickly without working hard. The state is often-times seen as a milk cow. Add on to this the habit of conspicuous consumption among those with the resources to save and invest and you have a culture that puts little premium in tomorrow.

The result is that resources are misdirected to luxury cars and white elephant projects while the infrastructure needed for long- term growth is decaying or non-existent.

Tribalism is another problem. Those in power ensure that only their tribesmen get to top positions. So while all tribes pay tax, members of one tribe are unduly rewarded for their affiliation to the leadership.

Tribalism was the reason behind coups in Nigeria and Ghana, the two countries that were supposed to set a good example to the rest of Africa, Nigeria for being the most populous on the continent, Ghana for being the continent's first to win independence in 1957.

Ghana now seems to have reformed and comes easily on the lips of the International Monetary Fund's barons as a case study of the successful implementation of the Structural Adjustment Programmes. Nigeria on the hand, is under military rule and hoping for free elections in 1998.

The lessons Africa must learn is that the rest of the world is tired. The cold war is over and dictators like Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko cannot play one power against the other. The remaining superpower - America is only interested in the welfare of its people and at satellites like Israel and Asian trading partners. The ball game has been changed drastically with the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and much attention is being directed to these countries by the rich Western European countries.

African leaders must take the initiative to end conflict on the continent - now. Recent developments like the economic embargo on Burundi's military regime and efforts to end the Zaire crisis indicate that African leaders have realised that peace is vital for development.

As the allies showed since 1945, development comes in step by step. African leaders -even though they don't have the advantage of a Marshal Plan - must begin to take the steps towards prosperity for the entire continent.

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