G-L,

For your consideration.

Sidi Sanneh,your postings regarding the African financial situation,
per the ADB,is appreciateddespite it contradicts that of the world
bank,which leaves me wondering if any relationship between the
two institutions. Kindly explain if you can.

Beran


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Subject:        [african2000] Africa Threatened From Within (Fwd)


Sunday, June 11, 2000
Philadelphia Inquirer

Africa is Threatened from Within
By Trudy Rubin

A three-week trip to South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Nigeria has left me
hung over with depression.

This was supposed to be a tour of Africa's best hopes. I was looking for good
news, because the statistics about Africa are so frightening. I didn't find it.
Everywhere I went,
people were talking about the wars in Sierra Leone or Eritrea, or the violence
in Zimbabwe. Or they were worrying about AIDS, or about corruption.

Or just struggling to survive.

Africa is the only continent that is steadily moving backward. According to a
new World Bank report, average income per capita in sub-Saharan Africa is lower
than at the
end of the 1960s. The region's total income is not much more than Belgium's.
Excluding South Africa, the region has fewer roads than Poland.

And a pandemic of HIV/AIDS is lowering life expectancy in many countries.
HIV-related deaths are decimating not only the poor but also the educated
sectors of the population.
Even Botswana, one of Africa's few economic success stories, has an HIV
infection rate among adults that exceeds 25 percent.

Not surprisingly the sub-Saharan part of the continent has virtually been
excluded from globalization. Africa accounts for barely 1 percent of global GDP
and only about 2 percent of world trade. Its share of global manufactured
exports is almost zero.

Any hopes that sub-Saharan Africa can leapfrog into the technological revolution
via the Internet are blocked by its abysmal infrastructure. Africa has only
about 10 million
telephones; at least half are in South Africa, and the other 5 million are so
dispersed that most Africans live two hours away from the nearest. Less than one
in five Africans has
access to electricity.

It is easy to blame this human tragedy on external factors: Africa's colonial
past, or Cold War rivalries, or foreign debt, or harsh demands for economic
reform by the international lending agencies. Such explanations would be too
simplistic.

Africa is being done in by predatory leaders willing to destroy their countries
to hold onto power. Once a predator is in place, he creates a vampire state. It
sucks out the
lifeblood of a country. Usually it feeds only him, his cronies and his tribe.

This pattern keeps repeating, despite a burst of hope in the mid-1990s, when
elections produced a new crop of "democratic" leaders. But Ethiopia's Meles
Zenawi embarked
on war with neighboring Eritrea, while Uganda's Yoweri Museveni is fighting
Rwanda - inside the Democratic Republic of Congo. Apparently it's easier to
fight than rebuild
economies shattered by years of misrule.

Meantime, old leaders of key countries whose prosperity used to fuel whole
regions are running their countries into the ground while clinging to power.
Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi - in office 22 years - has wrecked the jewel of
East Africa, a place where the roads and schools once worked and safari tourism
once drove a prosperous economy.

Equally tragic is Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe is seizing white-owned
farms without compensation and murdering opposition leaders who were set to win
June 24 elections. He's driving the second-largest economy in southern Africa
toward collapse.

In much of Africa, the state has become "a plum which all groups compete to
capture," in the graphic phrase of the noted Ghanaian scholar George Ayittey,
author of Africa in
Chaos. The winner sucks the plum dry, until he is ousted. In the meantime, he
heedlessly lets institutions and infrastructure run down.

Resources - oil, diamonds, minerals - are plundered to pay for wars (see Sierra
Leone and the Congo). Or they are stolen for personal profit.

"The richest people in Africa are not entrepreneurs like Bill Gates," Ayittey
recently told members of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
"They are heads
of state and government ministers, using the power of government to fleece the
people.

"That doesn't set up the conditions of economic growth. They ship that money out
of Africa. The amounts are huge."

Nowhere is this more evident than in Nigeria, the world's largest oil producer,
which should be the motor of sub- Saharan Africa. Swiss investigators have just
charged the
eldest son of late Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha with the looting of
billions from government coffers. A cache of $2.2 billion that the Abacha clan
allegedly stole from
Nigeria's central bank has already been traced to U.S., Asian, South American
and European banks. Billions more are missing.

The same leaders who loot the till often stir up ethnic violence as a political
weapon. Thugs play one ethnic or religious group against another to maintain
power - or
undercut rivals. This happened in Rwanda, and it's happening right now in the
Congo and in Nigeria.

Of course, there are exceptions. Despite its trouble, Nigeria is better off
today than it was under Abacha, even though its elected leader, former Gen.
Olusegun Obasanjo, is
pompous and inept. The most important exception is South Africa, where the
infrastructure is still strong and the government is generally responsible.

But the exceptions are too few, and South Africa cannot lead the continent
alone.

More disturbing, those African leaders who aren't predators are unwilling to
criticize the vampires.Black solidarity was understandable when Africa was
emerging from colonialism. But today, how can South African President Thabo
Mbeki continue to pretend, against all evidence, that quiet diplomacy will
moderate Mugabe's madness?

Zimbabwe's fall threatens a whole region. The continent's survival requires that
responsible African leaders ostracize the destroyers in their midst.

As for the West, debt forgiveness is well and good for the poorest nations, but
what happens when corrupt leaders want to borrow again? Kenya's Moi is now
appealing for $150 million in international aid because of "drought" and "AIDS"
and the International Monetary Fund seems amazingly willing.

If loans and aid are dispersed, however, to rulers who rob their own, invade
their neighbors or foment ethnic violence, the West becomes complicit. If
humanitarian aid is given, it should be channelled through nongovernmental
organizations outside the control of the state.

And more effort should be made to bolster African civil society, small
businesses and independent media. Radio is the most important media in Africa,
and warlords always try
to muzzle information. A U.S.-funded Radio Free Africa would be a lot more
valuable than a Radio Marti broadcasting to Cuba.

In the end, only the people of Africa can get rid of their despots. But it is
the people we should be helping - not the predators and their vampire states.




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